As Judith Butler clarified after accusations of reducing trans* lives to the level of the symbolic, and as trans* theorists such as Ki Namaste have argued, those who fall outside gender norms are not just ciphers for wider theories, they have lives that matter. The people in my research into ...
(Show more)As Judith Butler clarified after accusations of reducing trans* lives to the level of the symbolic, and as trans* theorists such as Ki Namaste have argued, those who fall outside gender norms are not just ciphers for wider theories, they have lives that matter. The people in my research into understandings of ‘sex change’ in 1930s Britain do not neatly fall under the rubric of trans* but the issue remains of their lives acting as conduits for wider medical claims. The medical case studies, published by their surgeon, Lennox Broster, in his co-edited book, The Adrenal Cortex and Intersexuality (1938), with their accompanying photographs, portray patients, people whose lives are mediated by a medical gaze. The case studies are examples of medical narrativisation – the medics present these life histories as knowable narratives that revolve around, and are resolved by, medical diagnosis. How can the historian approach this medicalisation of biography, whereby individuals’ lives become communicated through medical discourses? How can lives, glimpsed in moments of vulnerability, as Creighton et al and Dreger have discussed in relation to the medical photography, be told as more than symptoms and a diagnosis or as figures of fascination to be mined for their queer historical significance? What biographical accounts can be forged from subjects who become understood through medical treatment that may or may not be desired? The activist group Intersex Initiative stress the importance of intersex people’s lives and experiences beyond the confines of their being intersex. How can these important activist concerns be honoured when the lives in question defy current labels, and the subjects’ broader life experiences are absent?
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