Fixing sex
Subtitle: intersex, medical authority, and lived experience
By: Katrina Karkazis.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Durham, N.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 365
ISBN-13: 9780822343028; 9780822343189
Subjects: Intersexuality; Gender identity; Intersexuality -- Social aspects; Intersex children; Hermaphroditism -- psychology; Gender Identity; Hermaphroditism -- surgery
Description: What happens when a baby is born with "ambiguous" genitalia or a combination of "male" and "female" body parts? Clinicians and parents in these situations are confronted with complicated questions such as whether a girl can have XY chromosomes, or whether some penises are "too small" for a male sex assignment. Since the 1950s, standard treatment has involved determining a sex for these infants and performing surgery to normalize the infant's genitalia. Over the past decade intersex advocates have mounted unprecedented challenges to treatment, offering alternative perspectives about the meaning and appropriate medical response to intersexuality and driving the field of those who treat intersex conditions into a deep crisis.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Taxonomies of intersexuality to the 1950s; title: Complicating sex, routinizing intervention: the development of the traditional treatment paradigm; title: From socialization to hardwire: challenges to the traditional treatment paradigm; title: Boy or girl? bodies of mixed evidence and gender assignment; title: Fixing sex: surgery and the production of normative sexuality; title: Wanting and deciding what is best: parents' experiences; title: Growing up under the medical gaze; title: The intersex body in the world: activism and social and medical change.