Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience - Rilegato

Malatino, Hilary

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0803295936 ISBN 13: 9780803295933

Casa editrice: Univ of Nebraska Pr, 2019

Riassunto

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Queer Embodiment provides insight into what it means to have a legible body in the West. Hil Malatino explores how intersexuality became an anomalous embodiment assumed to require correction and how contesting this pathologization can promote medical reform and human rights for intersex and trans people.

Malatino traces both institutional and interpersonal failures to dignify non&;sexually dimorphic bodies and examines how the ontology of gender difference developed by modern sexologists conflicts with embodied experience. Malatino comprehensively shows how gender-normalizing practices begin at the clinic but are amplified thereafter through mechanisms of institutional exclusion and through Eurocentric cultures&; cis-centric and bio-normative notions of sexuality, reproductive capacity, romantic partnership, and kinship.

Combining personal accounts with archival evidence, Queer Embodiment presents intersexuality as the conceptual center of queerness, the figure through which nonnormative genders and desires are and have been historically understood. We must reconsider the medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on intersexuality underlying contemporary understandings of sexed selfhood in order to understand gender anew as a process of becoming that exceeds restrictive binary logic.
 

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Hil Malatino is an assistant professor of women&;s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University and core faculty in the Rock Ethics Institute.


 
 
 

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Queer Embodiment

Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience

By Hilary Malatino

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-9593-3

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Prologue: Neither/Nor (Notes on Theory and Livability), 
1. Queer Monsters: Michel Foucault and Herculine Barbin, 
2. Impossible Existences: Intersex and "Disorders of Sex Development", 
3. Gone, Missing: Queering and Racializing Absence in Trans and Intersex Archives, 
4. Black Bar, Queer Gaze: Medical Photography and the Re-visioning of Queer Corporealities, 
5. State Science: Biopolitics and the Medicalization of Gender Nonconformance, 
6. Toward Coalition: Becoming, Monstrosity, and Sexed Embodiment, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Queer Monsters

Michel Foucault and Herculine Barbin

Not a living creature was to share in the immense sorrow that seized me when I left my childhood, at that age when everything is young and bright with the future.

That age did not exist for me. As soon as I reached that age, I instinctively drew apart from the world, as if I had already come to understand that I was to live in it as a stranger.

— Herculine Barbin

Herculine Barbin became famous among academics long after her death, following French philosopher Michel Foucault's publication of her memoir. His interest — as well as his lengthy introduction to her memoir — authenticated the text for contemporary readers, marked it of interest, somehow integral to unraveling modern Western methods of pathologizing nonnormative bodies and pleasures. Her words have been deployed repeatedly since, by scholars as distinct (and distinguished) as Judith Butler, Ladelle McWhorter, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, on a diversity of topics — subalterity, gender performativity, disciplinary power, the medicalization of gender, and identity politics. The memoir has become a touchstone in contemporary queer, trans, and intersex scholarship. Because there are few autobiographical documents tracing the contours of intersex existence, particularly documents predating the emergence of intersex activism in the 1990s, Barbin's memoir is a work of great intellectual and historical import. My goal in this chapter is to map the way this memoir has been used in order to sketch a rough intellectual history of intersexuality. I center Michel Foucault's account of Barbin's work as it sets the terms of intellectual engagement, with later scholars elaborating upon, problematizing, and critiquing his analysis. I seek answers to the following questions: what have we collectively learned from Barbin? What promise does her text hold? Why have so many folks — myself included — been so intensely interested in her life story?

But first the facts: in 1838 Alexina Herculine Barbin was born into poverty in Saint-Jean-d'Angély, France. Upon birth, she was designated as female. She received an Ursuline convent school education thanks to a charitable scholarship. In 1856 she left the convent to begin training to become a teacher. Upon completion of this training in 1857, she received a post as an assistant teacher at a girl's school. It was at this post that she fell in love with Sara, a fellow teacher. She began experiencing sharp abdominal pains. A doctor was sent to the school to examine Barbin, and upon this examination it was discovered that she possessed a sex-atypical — that is, intersex — body. The visiting doctor argued that Barbin should, on account of this atypicality, be forced to leave the all-female realm of the school. She did not do so. In 1860, however, Barbin confessed the details of her situation to the Catholic bishop of the La Rochelle diocese, where the school was located. After hearing Barbin's account, he advised her to flee the school and begin a nun's life. He also ordered another medical examination, this time performed by one Dr. Chesnet. This medical examination heralded a decisive verdict: Barbin was not a woman but a malformed man, replete with partially descended testicles in a divided (thus, labial-appearing) scrotum and supposedly possessed of the capacity to produce sperm. Upon receipt of Chesnet's report, the bishop rescinded his initial advice and set about creating the circumstances that would enable a gender transition for Barbin, allowing the newly ordained male Barbin to assume a properly male station in life. This transition was also geographical — Barbin moved to Paris, embarking upon a life of poverty due to his poor training in the prototypically male professions, unable to fruitfully utilize his training as a teacher. In 1868 he was found dead in his rooms in the rue de l'École-de-Medécine. He had committed suicide by inhaling gas from his stove. His memoir was left near his bed. This memoir was published in a French medical journal in 1874 under the title "La question médico-légale de l'identité dans les rapports avec las vices de conformation des organes sexuels" ("The Medical/Legal Issue of Identity in Relation to Irregular Formation of the Sexual Organs"), enframed by and published at the behest of French medical doctor and forensic scientist Auguste Ambrose Tardieu. This journal was unearthed by Foucault in the mid-1970s, presumably while he was doing research for the proposed multivolume History of Sexuality. The first volume of The History of Sexuality appeared in 1976. Foucault's edition of Barbin's memoir appeared in 1978, with a preface by Foucault himself and a dossier including a timeline, newspaper reports on Barbin's case, the medical reports filed by both Dr. Chesnet and one E. Goujon, the doctor who performed Barbin's autopsy, as well as a short story inspired by Barbin's life entitled "Scandal at the Convent," written by German psychiatrist and author Oskar Panizza in 1893. All of this was collected under the title Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite.

It was a deceptively straightforward story. As is the case with all simple narratives, a significant amount of excision and reduction — of emotion, of ideological complexity, of historicity, of subjective specificity — has taken place in order to render this series of intellectually digestible, ostensibly factic pronouncements. In presenting this tight narrative, I am deliberately mimicking the logic enacted by the disciplinary agents — doctors, priests, judges — whose diagnoses and pronouncements forcibly shaped and constrained Herculine's life; I engage this mimicry in order to accentuate the difference between these official logics — those that decree everyone must have a true sex and that this sex must be either male or female — from those alternative, minoritarian logics at work in the autobiographical record left by Herculine, who consistently disidentified with binary schemes of gender, and the medical and juridical systems that supported and enforced such notions. Disidentification refers to the practice of utilizing the codes of dominant culture as "raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture," and thus fashioning a self that is situated both within and against those normative cultural discourses and modes of belonging. It is a tactic Barbin deploys repeatedly, in relation to maleness and femaleness, and the dyad of hetero- and homosexuality built on those limited conceptions of embodiment.

What can we make of the pronounced narrative differences between the medical accounts of Barbin's case and her own account? Why is this narrative disjunct of note — historiographically, conceptually, and politically? On what grounds and for what reasons did Foucault grant such importance to this memoir and, more broadly, to the phenomenon, both discursive and material, of hermaphroditism? How do we engage in a reparative reading practice that situates this interest in hermaphroditism in relationship to the rest of Foucault's oeuvre, specifically as pertaining to his figuration of governmentality, biopower, ascesis and technologies of the self?

The practice of reparative reading, as theorized by Eve Sedgwick, is motivated by a fear that the culture surrounding the object of analysis is "inadequate or inimical to its nature" but also by a desire to "assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self." I read Foucault's interest in Barbin's memoir as motivated, in large part, by a reparative impulse. The text is useful not only insofar as it illustrates the disciplinary powers that install and regulate binary, univocal understandings of sex difference but also because it offers a glimmer of a possible world wherein embodied pleasure isn't entirely caught up in the stranglehold of heterocentric, dimorphic systems of sex, gender, and desire. It is this possibility that Foucault latches onto, this glint of a space wherein intersex and otherwise queer bodies might experience pleasures beyond the forms of embodied desire currently legible, beyond the categorical forms of gender and sexual identity currently on offer.

I, too, read this memoir reparatively. I have learned from Herculine what intersex resistance to the biopolitical regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality might look like; I have learned, devastatingly, that it sometimes takes the form of suicide. Her struggles with the various legal and medical apparatuses that regulate sexed and sexual identity resonate with my own, as does her trenchant critique of these apparatuses.

Two Foucaults? Disciplinary Power, Governmentality, and Technologies of the Self

There is a distinct discursive polyphony contained between the covers of Herculine Barbin, characterized by a fundamental tension between the minoritarian and resistant narrative voice of Barbin, who repeatedly and complexly disidentifies with the proclamations made on and about her person, and the discourse utilized by institutions fully invested in reducing and taming the affront to the logic of sex, gender, and social organization precipitated by Barbin.

To read Barbin's memoir as a document of resistance, however, entails relying on conceptual tools drawn from what has been called the "late" Foucault — the Foucault of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality — The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self — the Foucault who, in an unlikely extension of his thought around disciplinary power, biopolitics, and governmentality, turned toward Greco-Roman antiquity to investigate what he called technologies of the self. These techniques are thought by Foucault as ascetic practices of self-fashioning that entail putting knowledge to work in the active negotiation and transformation of the self. Technologies of the self entail a relation to truth, knowledge, and the act of knowing that is radically different from the all-too-familiar Enlightenment-era epistemology that hinges on a nonrelation between truth and subjectivity. Foucault, in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, refers to the formation of this modern episteme as the "Cartesian moment" — though he's careful to make clear that it does not begin with nor is it solely attributable to Descartes — and goes on to describe it as such: "I think the modern age of the history of truth begins when knowledge itself and knowledge alone gives access to the truth. That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through his activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being as subject." Within this epistemological formation, the task of knowledge is one of conquest, acquisition, possession, and accumulation, but these endeavors remain external to the constitution of the subject herself — they don't change her, they don't transform her, they are about uncovering truths external to the subject. There is a deep and unhealable rift between being and knowing here, a decisively modern, Western dyadic formulation of epistemology and ontology. Counterposed to this, for Foucault, is a set of practical knowledges that refuse the presupposition of a division between knowledge and subjectivity and are instead simultaneously ontological, epistemological, and ethical (or more succinctly, ethico-onto-epistemological). It is in his examination of Stoic, Epicurean, and Cynic knowledge-practices that Foucault finds a framework for thinking the profound interweaving of these registers so violently rent apart from the Cartesian moment forward.

For Foucault, ancient technologies of the self function as an ethics (understood as a deliberate style of life that one enacts in order to mold and mutate one's character) capable of "working as a very strong structure of existence, without any relation with the juridical per se, with an authoritarian system, with a disciplinary structure." In what is perhaps the most well-known Foucauldian definition of these technologies of the self, he construes them as "techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on." Insofar as these technologies of the self work in a manner nondetermined (or, at least, not fully determined) by the institutions and apparatuses of disciplinary power, they become the site wherein one may act out possibilities of freedom, autonomy, and becoming in a sociohistorical milieu always already forcibly shaped by normalizing biopolitical forces. This is not to say that technologies of the self are necessarily or always liberatory or resistant. It is important to remember that these technologies may also take the form of instances of internalized oppression wherein one intentionally fabricates a style of life fully compatible with normativizing demands, a phenomenon easily witnessed in instances as diverse as the valorization of marriage among gays and lesbians, the extreme dieting of women and girls, and the generalization of conspicuous consumption. The central point is that these technologies of the self illuminate the productive (rather than repressive) function of power through illustrating its capillary, micro-level operations.

It is perhaps easier to think of the disciplinary, normativizing functions of certain technologies of self, particularly given Foucault's assertion that they are inextricably interwoven with technologies of domination in the formation of a complex he terms "governmentality." Governmentality is conceptualized by Foucault as a contact point "where the technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to processes by which the individual acts upon himself. And conversely, he has to take into account the points where techniques of the self are integrated into structures of coercion or domination." The subject, in this formulation, is the site of an enfolding wherein forces of domination, conflict, normalization, and biopolitical regulation ferment unpredictably with autonomic processes through which we struggle to establish, as Gilles Deleuze writes in Foucault, "a relation of veracity with our being." Our selves are constituted, in other words, through a terse and unpredictable interaction of technologies of domination and technologies of the self, forces of oppression, and more or less successful attempts at transformation and metamorphosis wherein we realize an always present potential to become something other than what technologies of domination attempt to make of us. While there is, of course, no sovereign subject here, there is a certain kind of autonomy, a certain practice by which one can exercise a conditional and conditioned freedom. This is where, in a Foucauldian framework, the capacity for resistance is located — in the same intimate folds where the capillary operations of domination also dwell.

An exclusive focus on operations of domination and normalization when utilizing a Foucauldian framework often results in a firmly social constructivist account of a given phenomenon, wherein the subjects so affected are figured as determined, done over, and at least temporarily fixed in terms of corporeal meaning and subjective intelligibility. The widespread use of this method of analysis is, of course, the precipitating factor for reductive readings of the political effectiveness of Foucault's central concepts. To gloss this sort of reading: Foucault's work is posited as less than useful for thinking about resistance, agency, and intentionality in the service of social and political transformation on account of his treatment of the subject as solely an effect of power, lacking autonomy and unable, even when thinking or acting self-reflexively, to counter, contest, or move beyond this determination.

This mode of analysis overdetermines Foucault's consideration of subjective construction. It is not that the subject radically lacks autonomy but that the conditional and contingent ground of autonomy lies in a tense and constantly mutating field of power relations rather than with the subject herself. What this means is that the subject, while fully capable of engaging in the work of self-constitution, is simultaneously receiving, navigating, and being molded by subjective determinations that come from without. So the subject is not the sovereign author of herself — this much is true. Rather, she is both produced and producer. It is not that agential autonomy is impossible in this framework, only that, as Amy Allen writes in The Politics of Our Selves, Foucault's conception of "autonomy — both in the sense of the capacity for critical reflection and in the sense of the capacity for deliberate self-transformation — [is] always bound up with power."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Queer Embodiment by Hilary Malatino. Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Univ of Nebraska Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2019
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0803295936
• ISBN 13: 9780803295933
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 246
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile