"Sexing the Body" and "The Five Sexes"

“The treatment of intersexuality in this century provides a clear example of what the French historian Michel Foucault called bipower. The knowledge developed in biochemistry, embryology, endocrinology , psychology and surgery has enabled physicians to control the very sex of the human body.” (The Five Sexes, 170.)

This quotation caught my interest, because it brings up an interesting question related to both of our readings this week: if humans have reached a point where we have the technology to redesign and alter biological sex, how does this change the way in which we define “sex” and how does it alter the apparent duality between sex and gender? Obviously, sex and gender have never been mutually exclusive ideas, but the working definition that I had for the two was that sex described your biological characteristics (i.e. chromosomes, gonads, genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics) while gender was the way in which you acted or were taught to act in relation to your biological sex. But this article has me questioning the way I think about “biological” sex.

Fausto-Sterling claims that this power we know have to alter human biology will become yet another way of “disciplining” gender norms, by eliminating the confusing and “unruly” intersex population, even though this power may present itself with the power to help people. But I have to disagree. Yes, it would be unfortunate if this ability to alter human biology were used to make people who fall outside the gender binary conform, but I don’t think we have to be so pessimistic. This power we have over biology, in this case, is an opportunity to induce a cultural shift in the way we look at sex and gender. Because when we make it relatively simple to alter the biological makeup of human bodies (be it through surgery, hormone use, or other methods) we show how arbitrary and constructed the concept of biological sex really is. In presenting society with a way to change that which we define as essential to determining biological sex, we open up a conversation about what we define as a “normal” or “natural” biological sex. I don’t see the power we have to alter the body as a means of trying to hide or assimilate intersex people, but rather as a way to begin a societal conversation about why someone might want to alter their sex, or not, as the case may be. With the power to make sex alteration a reality comes the responsibility to educate the world about why it is important that this option exist.

On a side note, the one problem I had with “The Five Sexes” was that by defining and describing three distinct “subsets” of hermaphroditism or intersexuality, it seemed as though Fausto-Sterling was acting against her own argument that the distinctions between the sexes is not clearly defined. I applaud her for creating a model that doesn’t lump anyone who falls outside of the male/female binary under and “intersex” umbrella, and for acknowledging the different variations that can be found in human sex, but it seems that creating another system in which people can be categorized by their biological sex is just a continuation of the old, flawed, system. What about the people who are not herms, merms, or ferms? Won’t this just further isolate them? I realize she acknowledges that her model cannot encompass the wide variety of biological sexes, but designing a model still based on discreet box-like categories seems counterintuitive to her argument. For someone who would so like to radically change the way in which we view human sex and gender, I would have expected a more radically different gender paradigm.