Prestige notions and production of the fearful body: Reflections about intersexual body’s normalization

Abstract

Activism and academic literature about intersexuality as a political subject seems to suggest a double task: On one hand, understanding of the intersexual body that is not defined by a biomedical knowledge based on the heterosexual norm. On the other hand, to report the way in which abusive technologies are settled in the intersexual body to normalize it through surgical mutilations and hormonal procedures, characterized by the obligatory adaptation to the sex binaries. Emphasizing these tasks, this article suggests, from an ethnographic work experience with an intersexual group of people in Colombia, ways to problematize the intersexual body’s normalization experience, and to recognize the role of desire and self agency of the diagnosed person in the reiteration of binary orders. Based on the shared experience of people labeled as intersexual, this article problematizes the statement that normalization is an action that doesn’t involve multiple agencies, even the one of the diagnosed person, and appeals to comprehend how other capture techniques are working, in a bigger context that, using fear, produces subjects who are able to be normalized. Those technologies are placed in the abstract field of the social prestige, a unifying force that strengthens the arbitrary functioning of some medical discourses over bodies, all under a heterosexual matrix.