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Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience is a thoughtful study of the medical treatment of intersex, or what is sometimes called disorders of sex development (DSD). Intersex is an umbrella term that covers a variety of ways in which a child’s genitals to do not match typical male or female appearance. The author Katrina Karkazis, a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford, writes that “I hope to show how the lens of gender literally shapes the body, and what this means for individuals who undergo treatment procedures and interventions for intersexuality,” (14); and she does exactly that. The book approaches what has been a thoroughly medicalized condition—and thus somehow seen to transcend politics—from a feminist perspective, revealing, yet again, that gender is always political.
The book does several things: including describing the history of the treatment of intersexuality, exploring the perspectives of those affected (those born with the condition, their parents, and clinicians treating them), and chronicling the rise of activism around the issue of the last fifteen years or so. This important empirical work is done within an explicit context that insists on maintaining the complex relationship between nature and culture and sex and gender—refusing simple binaries those terms often imply. Neither term of these false dichotomies can be understood as simple opposites. As she writes, “The distinction between nature and culture relies on a model of nature that is eminently cultural—that is, on a specific concept of the natural that can stand for itself as a domain of immutable and fixed properties” (11). This interrogation of the oppositions that uphold our common sense notions of what it means to be a man or a woman is at the heart of the analysis that illuminates the cultural meanings expressed, exposed and made by the very question of ‘what we should do with’ intersexuality.
The complex relationship between sex and gender is basic to her study and Karkazis spends a good deal of time working through that knot. The feminist insight that separated sex from gender via the “sex/gender system,” coined by Gayle Rubin in 1975 has been refined within feminist studies to denaturalize both sex and gender so that “What was thought to be the base or root of gender is actually an effect of gender” (13). But, as she says, this idea has not really taken hold. As a society we are still attached to a binary gender system, and certainly to a naturalized idea of sex as the baseline for gender. One of the important assumptions of the book is that so much at issue surrounding ‘what we should do’ is centered around the privileging of the penis. Echoing insights of some classic second wave theorists like Anne Koedt in “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” one of the guiding underlying ideas here is the question of what qualifies as a penis and what qualifies as a proper receptacle for a penis, pointing yet again to the inextricable link between heteronormativity and male dominance.
The feminist insights here are not connected explicitly to transgender or queer identities or politics, but are certainly informed by those ideas, and in turn will offer important empirical support for the queer supposition that binary gender structured around heterosexual relating is not natural, and in fact, ‘nature’ produces all kinds of variety that we seem to need to reject.
Intersexuality, and more to the point, our reaction to it, is the canary in our gendered coal mine. Karzakis has written a definitive treatment on a topic for which there is no decisive answer. And she does not try to provide one. What she does is productively unsettle the assumptions that much of the medical approach works from by respectfully positing gender as a mystery not reducible to the simple construct we operate under currently.
You know, even some Americans *cough* have reacted with amusement at the shoe throwing incident. Bush turned the shoe incident into a serious of puns, saying that he’d “seen the man’s sole” for example, and lauded the incident as a moment in democracy, in effect, that people in a democracy are able to politically express themselves in anger and that’s something that, in light of war, can be celebrated. The president trusts Iraq leadership so much, in fact, that they are leaving the punishment of the reporter who threw the shoes up to the Iraqi government.
A White House spokeswoman said Tuesday that Iraqi leaders are the ones to decide whether punishment is appropriate for the Iraqi journalist who stunned observers by hurling two shoes at President George W. Bush from close range.
“The president believes that Iraq is a sovereign country, a democratic country, and they will have a process that they follow on this,” White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters. “The president harbors no hard feelings about the incident.”
I actually thought Bush handled this thing quite well. He was literally quick on his feet and didn’t take it too seriously. (I thought the “I saw into his sole” thing was particularly good.) He could do a great thing right now by making a public appeal to the Iraqis to pardon this man. It would be magnanimous and do his personal reputation a world of good — and it would be good for both countries.
If you’re so inclined, you can contact the White House and politely ask them to support clemency for al-Zaidi.
For pure WTF factor, these unfortunately-named children are being written about because a ShopRite refused to make a birthday cake inscribed to Adolph Hitler. So the Campbells will be getting young Adolph a birthday cake from Wal-Mart instead.
And the family is upset, saying “It’s sad” that ShopRite can’t inscribe a birthday cake for a three-year-old. It is sad — but probably not as sad as naming your kid Hitler.
Because I work for one of those annoying companies that is always trying to push bundled services, I was really amused that anti-choice bloggers are trying to push the “bundling” sales phenomenon when it comes to Planned Parenthood’s numbers, like counting health services is comparable to your phone and cable provider’s stats.
The 3 percent pie slice in the 2005-06 financial report, representing 264,943 abortion customers served, can only be described as deliberately misleading.
One way Planned Parenthood massages the numbers to make its abortion business look trivial is to unbundle its services for purposes of counting. Those 10.1 million different medical procedures in the last fiscal year, for instance, were administered to only 3 million clients. An abortion is invariably preceded by a pregnancy test–a separate service in Planned Parenthood’s reckoning–and is almost always followed at the organization’s clinics by a “going home” packet of contraceptives, which counts as another separate service. Throw in a pelvic exam and a lab test for STDs–you get the picture. In terms of absolute numbers of clients, one in three visited Planned Parenthood for a pregnancy test, and of those, a little under one in three had a Planned Parenthood abortion.
The argument, essentially, is that when PP figures its stats it separates the sluts women who need pelvic exams or other services from the sluts women who need pelvic exams and an abortion. Say Sally goes in every year for her annual checkup so she can continue getting her birth control prescription filled at PP at a reduced cost. Sally gets a pelvic exam and an STI test, fills her scrip and goes on her way. Every month for the next year Sally returns to refill her birth control prescription and pick up some free cherry-scented condoms (way better than grape). Mary, on the other hand, thinks she might be pregnant, goes in for a pregnancy test, finds out she’s pregnant, and has a pelvic exam and STI test and a counseling session to find out where she goes from here. In the end, Mary chooses to have an abortion, and leaves afterward with a scrip for birth control. Mary doesn’t come back to PP for any further services.* So,
__________________
* Is it convenient in my math that Mary doesn’t return to fill her BC prescription? Maybe. But many pregnant teenagers who opt for abortion use PP intermittently for crisis control and not for ongoing services (your humble blogger did the same) and none are less deserving of the services than the others.
And I would pay serious money just to hear him make up an insult for Pat Boone, who is perhaps the walking definition of a person with only the most flickering of intelligence. You have to marvel at the sheer magnitude of stupidity possessed by a man who writes things like this:
What troubles me so deeply, and should trouble all thinking Americans, is that there is a real, unbroken line between the jihadist savagery in Mumbai and the hedonistic, irresponsible, blindly selfish goals and tactics of our homegrown sexual jihadists.
Need a feel-good story for your Monday? Here you go:
(For some reason, the video doesn’t want to work in Firefox for me, but works fine in Internet Explorer. I’m sorry, but it seems to be a CNN issue.)
Winifred Jennings is graduating from college at the age of 85. As a student, she earned all As and Bs, and majored in behavioral science. She went to college for one year in 1941, but then like so many women at the time left to get married and raise her children. When her husband died, the grandmother of 16 decided to go back. And those children and grandchildren seem rightfully very proud of her.
What this reminds us all, is that it is never too late to follow your dreams. If this grandmother of 16 can pursue and complete her education we all can. This story was also important to me because it is about education.
Education is the key to success in this life. In a world where many women live in poverty, education can literally change lives. Please join me in congratulating Winifred, may she stand as an example to us all of the results of determination and sheer will.
Sometimes, the Feministe moderation queue makes me want to scratch my own eyes out. That’s pretty much how it’s been for the past month — something about the aftermath of the election has made the assholes and idiots come out in full force. So I’ve been deleting a lot of comments lately. I deleted one yesterday on this post about the University of Michigan student who was arrested for prostitution after she reported that she had been assaulted — the deleted comment basically called her a WHORE several times (yes, in all caps!) and said she deserved to go to jail because she’s not a nice girl (nice girls have sex in exchange for diamond rings, remember, not cash). But commenter “Johnny” left another gem today that I can’t help but re-post, only because I just got compared to China.
Glad that censorship is a big part of being allowed to comment on this website. The moderator should be ashamed for taking down my earlier comment, maybe next week this will be China and they’ll tell you feminists how many kids you can or can’t have. Real classy. I stand by the statement that this girl was whoring herself out for tuition and deserves to be punished (as does the professor). If I’m selling crack on a corner and a customer punches me, he deserves to go to jail but so do I for selling the crack.
No, Johnny, “classy” is showing up on a feminist blog to call someone a WHORE, and then getting angry when your comments aren’t posted. So I’ll continue to delete them from the mod queue. Enjoy reading while our commenters mock you.
The Iraqi journalist, Muntader al-Zaidi, 28, a correspondent for Al Baghdadia, an independent Iraqi television station, stood up about 12 feet from Mr. Bush and shouted in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” He then threw a shoe at Mr. Bush, who ducked and narrowly avoided it.
As stunned security agents and guards, officials and journalists watched, Mr. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” That shoe also narrowly missed Mr. Bush as Prime Minister Maliki stuck a hand in front of the president’s face to help shield him.
Don’t worry, though; Bush laughed it off. And because U.S.-occupied Iraq is such a free society, the man was beaten, dragged outside, and is currently jailed.
Mr. Maliki’s security agents jumped on the man, wrestled him to the floor and hustled him out of the room. They kicked him and beat him until “he was crying like a woman,” said Mohammed Taher, a reporter for Afaq, a television station owned by the Dawa Party, which is led by Mr. Maliki. Mr. Zaidi was then detained on unspecified charges.
Other Iraqi journalists in the front row apologized to Mr. Bush, who was uninjured and tried to brush off the incident by making a joke. “All I can report is it is a size 10,” he said, continuing to take questions and noting the apologies. He also called the incident a sign of democracy, saying, “That’s what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves,” as the man’s screaming could be heard outside.
“At an age at which I should be putting on a wedding dress, I am asking for someone’s eyes to be dripped with acid,” she said in a recent interview, as rain poured against the windows of her parents’ small apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Tehran. “I am doing that because I don’t want this to happen to any other women.”
I can’t blame her — I’m sure a lot of us would want the exact same thing, and revenge is a normal human emotion. I can understand her desire to use any mechanism possible to prevent this from happening to other women. I can understand the desire of the judges, and of her parents, and of her neighbors, to see this man pay for what he did.
But part of the point of a formal legal system is to temper individual desires for revenge. The point is to protect society and punish criminals in a fair and humane way; to deter crime while seeking just ends, not simply retributive ones; and to serve as a counter to vigilantism by concentrating power in the state (and by ensuring that citizens are confident in the state’s power to exact appropriate punishments). Dripping acid into someone’s eyes is not a “justice” system by any stretch. So while I’m glad this crime is being taken seriously and that the woman has had a chance to speak out against the man who attacked her, I am horrified that the punishment may be torture.
Women’s rights cannot be severed from human rights. Women’s rights at the expense of human rights are no rights at all.
Don’t blame Mormons or black voters - the California activists who tried to stop Prop 8 ran a lousy campaign.
But evidence of entrenched homophobia and religious intolerance obscure a more difficult truth. Prop 8 should have been defeated — two months before the election, it was down 17 points in the polls — but the gay-rights groups that tried to stop it ran a lousy campaign. According to veteran political observers, the No on Prop 8 effort was slow to raise money, ran weak and confusing ads, and failed to put together a grass-roots operation to get out the vote.
“This was political malpractice,” says a Democratic consultant who operates at the highest level of California politics. “They fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn’t be allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price.”
Did No on Prop 8 run a crappy campaign? From the looks of the article, yes. They could have done a lot better in terms of leadership, grassroots organizing, advertising, fundraising, and of course reaching out to minority populations. All of this is true.
The article also argues that Yes on 8 ran a campaign of Obamaesque magnitude. But apparently that doesn’t factor in to the ultimate conclusion.
I’m personally really sick of the idea that the “gay people just didn’t beg enough for their own rights” argument is a brilliant replacement for the racist one above. Guess what? If entrenched homophobia (across the board) and religious intolerance was not an issue, the fact that No on 8 ran a shitty campaign wouldn’t have been an issue either. And saying “well maybe if they’d just asked the nice straight people a bit more pleadingly” is just another example of the privilege and prejudice.
No one should have to beg for their rights. Period. And the oppressor is always to blame for the oppression they commit.
While I don’t know the author’s sexual orientation, I do have to emphasize that this is a particulary strong slap in the face coming from a supposedly liberal publication that is aimed directly at a white, straight male audience, has a lead political writer whose favorite insult is “cocksucker” (I’m looking at you, Matt Taibbi), and sure as hell didn’t say a word about Prop 8 to that left-leaning straight audience of theirs (many of whom voted Obama but against gay rights) until it was way too late. But apparently, like innumerable other commentators, they’re not above parading around with the claim that they could have done it so much better. If they were the ones oppressed.
The story goes like this: A University of Michigan Law School student went to police after being assaulted by Michigan Near Eastern Studies associate professor Yaron Eliav. The student had been advertising sexual services on Craig’s List in order to pay her tuition (which at Michigan is more than $40,000 a year). According to the article, she “reluctantly” consented to allowing him to spank her with a belt, but then he decided to slap her across the face twice, causing her temporary vision problems. So she went to the police to report the assault. You can guess how sympathetic they were:
The rarity of how the case began - with a law student showing up at the police department’s front desk to report she was assaulted while committing a crime herself - was not lost on investigators.
“Perhaps she should have cracked a legal textbook before coming in to the police station to talk about this,” Ann Arbor Detective Sgt. Richard Kinsey said.
The police charged both the student and Eliav with the misdemeanor charge of using a computer to commit a crime. Both have pled no contest. Eliav was not charged with assault, and retains his position at the university.
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