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List of contents
Introduction
Following the Trail of Sex in the Medical and Health Humanities: An Introduction
Drs. Katelyn Dykstra, University of Manitoba and Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square, Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Part 1: Theoretical Approaches to Intersex in/and the Medical and Health Humanities
1.Quantum Bodies: Reading Intersectionality through the Superposition of States
Dr. Lisa DeTora (Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric, Hofstra
University, USA)
2.Introducing Mad Intersex Studies
Dr. Celeste Orr (Visiting Assistant Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies, St.
Lawrence University, USA) and Meg Peters (Doctoral Candidate, University of Ottawa, Canada)
3.“Ontological Homelessness,” Sexology, and Identity: Some initial thoughts on Intersex Studies as Critical Lens in Literary Studies
Dr. Katelyn Dykstra (Sessional Instructor, Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba; Director of Operations, enVision Community Living, USA)
Part 2: Intersex, Medicalization, and Disability
1.Did Bioethics Matter? A History of Autonomy, Consent, and Intersex Genital Surgery.
Dr. Elizabeth Reis (Professor, Macaulay Honours College, CUNY, USA)
2.“Intersex Community in India and the Rights of Persons with Disability (RPwD) Act”
Prashant Singh (Advocate, Supreme Court of India; Member of Srishti Madurai, an intersex advocacy group in India), Gopi Shankar (Intersex Asia), Meghna Sharma (Programme Officer-Research and Advocacy at National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People in India)
3.Current and Historical Medicalization of Intersex Athletes in Sport
Dr. Sarah Teezel (Associate Professor, University of Manitoba, Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management)
Part 3: Intersex, Life Narratives, and Imaginative Literature
1.Intersex: Magical Structures and Invisible Differences
Lesley Gallacher (Therapist)
2.Herculine Barbin, Panizza’s A Scandal at the Convent, and the Medico-Gothic Narrative of Intersex Transition
Nowell Marshall (Graduate Student, University of Navada, Reno)
3.Intersex, Empathy, and Embodiment: Inspiring Prosocial Change Through Imaginative Literature
Dr. Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square (Faculty, Department of English, Kwantlen Polytechnic University)
About the author
Dr. Katelyn Dykstra is a Sessional Instructor at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Katelyn recently completed a post-doctoral fellowship that explores critical community literacies in a queer context. In this work, she explores the way that queer people learn to tell their stories to service providers and other people in their circle of care. This project draws on her doctoral thesis, which focused on intersex representation, including a chapter on intersex life-writing. She is also collaborating on a research project with queer and trans youth in rural spaces. She has published her work in edited collections on Health Humanities, graphic narrative, and in Leisure Sciences. She is currently a sessional instructor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba and Director of Operations at a rural non-profit that provides supports to people living with intellectual disabilities.Dr. Bryn Jones Square is a faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2017, after which she held a Research Affiliateship with the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities while also working as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She is currently a faculty member in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. Her research project, “Books, Brains, and Benevolence: An Interdisciplinary Study of Empathy,” explores empathy from the perspectives of literature, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, engineering, economics, physics, mathematics, and more. Bryn’s articles, “The ‘victim of too much loving’: Perdita Verney’s Self-Destructive Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man” and “‘[A] mad excess of love’”: Hyper-Sympathy, Fidelity, and Suicidality in Mary Shelley’s Falkner” were recently published in Studies in the Literary Imagination and Essays in Romanticism respectively.
Summary
Recognizing the value of interdisciplinarity and drawing on literature, art, history, ethics and philosophy, this book brings together scholars and activists to inform medical practice and education related to bodies designated intersex. This volume celebrates interdisciplinarity and, crucially, illustrates how it can be harnessed to address the often-troubling co-opting and misunderstanding of intersex-specific concerns within existing humanities discourses. It provides an exciting cross-section of the interdisciplinary work that is emerging in the newly crystalizing study of intersex.
The contributors use vital humanities-based approaches that focus on how we can utilize language, storytelling, and history to change how intersex individuals are diagnosed and treated. It shows us how essential it is to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge offered by both medicine and the humanities when considering how we might improve the lives of those diagnosed intersex. Importantly, it challenges us to transform approaches to treating those diagnosed as intersex and to reform understandings of what it means to be intersex.
Foreword
This collection brings together scholars and activists from diverse disciplines to address the ongoing medicalization of bodies designated intersex through the lenses of the medical and health humanities.
