Envisioning African intersex : challenging colonial and racist legacies in South African medicine /
Amanda Lock Swarr.
- Durham : Duke University Press, 2023.
- 1 online resource (viii, 236 pages) : illustrations
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Pathologizing gender binaries : intersex images and citational chains -- Colonial observations and fallacies : "hermaphroditism" in histories of South Africa -- "Intersex in four South African racial groups in Durban" : visualizing scientific racism and gendered medicine -- Defying medical violence and social death : Sally Gross and the inception of South African intersex activism -- #HandsOffCaster: Caster Semenya's refusals and the decolonization of gender testing -- Toward an "African intersex reference of intelligence" : directions in intersex organizing -- Reframing visions of South African intersex.
"Since the early seventeenth century, travelers, scientists, and doctors have falsely claimed that "hermaphroditism" and intersex are disproportionately common among Black South Africans. Envisioning African Intersex debunks these claims and interrogates how contemporary intersex medicine is embedded in colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Amanda Lock Swarr centers the insights of activists such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. She also examines the case of Caster Semenya, whose 800m world championship in 2009 was followed by a decade-long public scrutiny of her gender and forced experimental medical interrogations. The volume celebrates African intersex activists' strategies for inciting policy and protocol changes. Visual representations are one of the primary ways ideas about raced intersex are manipulated by doctors and reclaimed by activists, so each chapter evaluates photographs, drawings, films, videos, medical imaging, and memes. Envisioning African Intersex exposes the citational chains of erroneous raced claimed that underpin medical premises about so-called "hermaphroditism," and unseats them with activists' challenges to medical violence and articulations of new decolonial visions of gender"--