Intersex and Image

With the article Impossible Hermaphrodites: Intersex in America 1620-1960, Elizabeth Ries outlines the historical treatment of intersex births and aims to call into question why these births are so, in her words, “perplexing.” Accompanying her essay are pictures from historical archives that portray intersex bodies, and their usage creates a dilemma for the reader: does the use of these images, with their depersonalized depiction of genitalia, further medicalize intersex bodies and undermine Reis’ goals in writing this piece? Or do they call out a larger problem with the way that sexuality is discussed as a whole—that the physical body is perceived as the absolute answer to the question?

What makes the images of Reis’ article particularly problematic is the removal of personhood from them. None of the depictions of human bodies have a head or face—the part of the body associated with the brain and thus with knowledge and sentience, or, what makes humans human. Without the visual marker of sentience, these bodies can be depersonalized and examined in the ways they have historically. This is emphasized by the “medical” literature that Reis pairs with the images. The descriptions of these bodes are grossly exaggerated, small deviances from the norm turned into monstrosities. For example, in the description of the body of James Casey, dating back to 1839, the artist James Akin describes Casey’s genitalia as “his strange malconformation…exhibiting features of a grotesque melancholy aspect…not unlike the lesser Ouran Outang” (424-425). Akin genders Casey (although according to the account Casey lived his life as a man) with the use of the pronoun “his,” and pushes his perception of Casey as sad and subhuman. The language of Akin’s report indicates a desire to distance Casey from the perception of human sexuality that he is accustomed to.

            The descriptions that accompany these images grasp for way to classify these bodies as male or female in a strained effort to assure the comfort of those that fall into the gender binary. On the need for this classification, Ries writes “On the one hand, doctors' avowals of a two-sex model may have gendered their patients, rendering them more human in the eyes of medicine and the law, and thus less monstrous. On the other hand, doctors' insistence on a bipolar system, sometimes surgically supplied, also made them far less likely to recognize the potential complexities of genital and sex presentation.” (440). The need to sort bodies that fall outside of binary expectation back where the “two-sex model” would like them is what ultimately justifies the exploitation on display to the people that commit it. Classifying these bodies as monstrous implies that they are an error that requires fixing, regardless of the identity of the examined individual.

            An individual’s identity is not visible, but their external body is. As a result of the strongly held male/female dichotomy, a person’s sexual identity, which may fall outside of the dichotomy, rest somewhere in the middle, or outright deny it, takes a backseat to what is more easy to digest—visual representation. Because of this mode of thinking, the use of the images in Reis’ piece becomes essential—if sexuality is perceived foremost as a physical trait, then illustration of bodies that are not strictly male or female is important to the process of learning about sexuality as a spectrum. However, if physical sexual characteristics were considered to be part of a system—that gender, sexuality, and physical sex were all considered to be a part of a person’s makeup, instead of the visible dominating the temporal—the need for classification along a binary would no longer be necessary. Without this binary, the images in Reis’ article could possibly be no longer necessary.

          However, the classification of the body remains entrenched in the physical. The attention paid to intersex bodies, in the past and present, causes a host of physical and emotional trauma. Reis writes that although b the 1950s medical knowledge did not support binary classification, physicians “elevated external genital morphology as the single most important criterion in deciding how to treat hermaphrodites, firmly believing that, in spite of confounding indicators, social gender could be created to match genital morphology.” (440). Beyond the genital mutilation of gender assignment surgery, intersex individuals that are assigned at birth are denied the right to discover their own identity and sexuality. By continuing to conform to the gender binary, today’s physicians continue the trend of medicalizing individuals that do not fit their comfortable definition of “human.” Movement away from the traditional idea of the body is to allow for a less exploitive discussion of human sexuality.