Intersexualization

Reviews / Votes

In Intersexualization, Lena Eckert persuasively focuses our attention on the epistemic logic and discursive practices that have worked to define the "heterorelational sex-gender-sexuality system" and to deal with those whose bodies and identities fall outside of its norms. Deftly combining analysis of practices in the psycho-medical sciences (which she names The Clinic) with those of cross-cultural anthropology (or The Colony, as she calls it), and drawing on an impressive range of case studies, Eckert opens up space for a multiplicity of narratives, identities, and embodiments. As she writes, "sex is always complex," and this book illuminates what is at stake in how that complexity comes to matter for bodies rendered troubling and troublesome.
Ruth Holliday, Professor of Gender and Culture, Director of Research, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds, UK

Lena Eckert's book focuses on the cross-cultural construction of processes of intersexualization, exploring and combining knowledge production in medicine, psychology, sexology, anthropology and gender studies. Moreover, Intersexualization delves into the colonial archive to make sense of current practices which have far-reaching implications for the lives of people. A book that deserves a broad audience.
Gloria Wekker, Professor Doctor, Emeritus, Department of Gender Studies, Faculty of the Humanities, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for its scholarship and its importance to contemporary intersex rights activism around the globe. More than merely taking cues from Foucault, Eckert develops a genealogy of both clinical practice and colonialist domination of bodies cast-as she shows the intersexualized to be-as degenerate, and in need of containing, disciplining, and controlling in the service of creating the powerful careers of the famous psychologists, psychoanalysts, physiologists, and sexologists who had everything to gain from the biomedicalization of intersex in the twentieth century. The book furthers critical intersex studies to more effectively challenge the racist, classist, and heterosexist legacies of twentieth-century practices and the long shadow they cast over contemporary concerns with the sites wherever embodiment, human rights, and sexualities meet.
Morgan Holmes, Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada