Intersex and the Rhetorics of Disability and Disorder: Multiple and Provisional Significance in Sexed, Gender, and Disabled Bodies

Abstract

The impulse to make accounts of human sex, gender, and embodiment “mean” monolithically is inadequate. Engaging with David Kelsey's theological anthropology, I suggest that a more appropriate means of figuring “marginal” bodies theologically is as multiply and provisionally significant. Such bodies may include disabled, intersex, and otherwise variantly sexed and gendered bodies. Although Kelsey does not engage in depth with questions of sex and gender, his assertion that human identity is grounded eccentrically nonetheless yield fruitfully for developing accounts of intersex, gender, ableness, and personhood. Further, I build on John Zizioulas’ claim that humans’ relationships with the world need not be determined by the laws of biology, and Hans Reinders’ reminder that human being-in-relation is grounded in divine self-giving. Christian overinvestment in binary sex-gender norms occurs because the Church has forgotten that personhood-in-God is primary, and that the bodily forms in which humans live are secondary to primary identity in God.

KEYWORDS:

• intersex
• disorder of sex development
• disability
• theological anthropology

Notes

¹Laurent's remarks were made at Genital Cutting in a Globalized Age: A Forum for Interdisciplinary Debate at the Royal Society of Medicine in London on July 4, July 2008. As well as Laurent (speaking as Cheryl Chase), speakers on intersex included Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii (one of the most outspoken critics of John Money, whose theories on psycho-sexual development underlay the early corrective surgery paradigm for intersex), and Philip Ransley (a consultant pediatric urologist who had formerly worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London).