Critical intersex

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Katrina Karkazis

What happens when a baby is born with "ambiguous" genitalia or a combination of "male" and "female" body parts? Clinicians and parents in these situations are confronted with complicated questions such as whether a girl can have XY chromosomes, or whether some penises are "too small" for a male sex assignment. Since the 1950s, standard treatment has involved determining a sex for these infants and performing surgery to normalize the infant's genitalia. Over the past decade intersex advocates have mounted unprecedented challenges to treatment, offering alternative perspectives about the meaning and appropriate medical response to intersexuality and driving the field of those who treat intersex conditions into a deep crisis.

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Leo Bersani

The title essay in this collection is one of the foundations of queer theory. This is a retrospective, charting Bersani's contributions to debates connecting sexuality, psychoanalysis & aesthetics, & his reactions to a range of leading thinkers, among them Plato, Descartes, Foucault, Genet & Proust.

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Sharyn Graham Davies

Indonesia provides particularly interesting examples of gender diversity. Same-sex relations, transvestism and cross-gender behaviour have long been noted amongst a wide range of Indonesian peoples. This book explores the nature of gender diversity in Indonesia, and with the world’s largest Muslim population, it examines Islam in this context. Based on extensive ethnographic research, it discusses in particular calalai – female-born individuals who identify as neither woman nor man; calabai – male-born individuals who also identify as neither man nor woman; and bissu – an order of shamans who embody female and male elements. The book examines the lives and roles of these variously gendered subjectivities in everyday life, including in low-status and high-status ritual such as wedding ceremonies, fashion parades, cultural festivals, Islamic recitations and shamanistic rituals. The book analyses the place of such subjectivities in relation to theories of gender, gender diversity and sexuality.

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Roger Horrocks

This book studies some of the important myths of masculinity in popular culture, including the western, the horror film, rock music and pornography. The book begins with an assessment of some of the key theoretical issues in gender studies and cultural studies, including identification between subject and text, and the debate over the male subject position and female object position in patriarchal culture. The author also makes use of an unusually wide-ranging theoretical background, derived from feminism, anthropology, psychology, Marxism and sociology. The book argues that popular culture does not simply present tales of male heroism and conquest, but also gives us highly complex and ambivalent images of men. The hero turns into the anti-hero; feminine and homoerotic material leak in; the male is often shown as the victim. Thus popular culture does not simply express male hegemony, but also reveals many images of male defeat, damage and confusion.