About the author | About the book | Author's notes
"If anything, I hope readers, namely those who are unfamiliar with intersex studies and the Intersex Rights Movement become motivated to (1) learn more about intersex studies, activism, and the Intersex Rights Movement as well as (2) take action against interphobia in whatever way they can."
About the author
Dr. Celeste E. Orr is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the Wendy J. Robbins Professor in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of New Brunswick. Orr’s interdisciplinary research focuses on intersex studies, disability studies, and queer studies, among other broad areas. Orr’s work interrogates and opposes culturally mandated or compulsory modes of being. Orr’s book, Cripping Intersex (UBC Press 2022), argues for a crip approach to intersex studies via exploring the undertheorized connection between intersex and disability as well as interphobia and ableism.
About the book
Intersex and/as/is/with disability. The political, discursive, and embodied connections between intersex and disability deserve nuanced attention if we are to strengthen intersex human rights claims and reflect the experiences of intersex people living with the disabling consequences of medical intervention.
Cripping Intersex examines three key themes: the medical management of people with intersex characteristics; the mainstream, academic, and medical fascination with sport sex-testing policies and procedures; and the eugenic implications of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a reproductive screening technology that can accompany in vitro fertilization. Celeste E. Orr investigates how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and activism to propose a new field – crip intersex studies – and argues for a crip approach to intersex activism. In integrating feminist disability studies with intersex studies, they also provide tools to break down both the traditional sex dyad and the entrenched cultural mandate against intersex traits.
Cripping Intersex advances a critique of the ways in which attempts to exorcise intersex variations are a form of medical violence to offer a radical new understanding of intersex-with-disability. In the process, this necessary work pushes analyses of intersex histories, experience, and embodiment further than feminist or queer theory can do alone.
There is a concerted eugenic project aimed to eradicate intersex people and intersex variations. This eugenic project is not only interphobic, but also queerphobic, racist, and ableist. That said, currently, we see interphobic eugenics be explicitly justified by ableist discourses; intersex variations are conflated with or represented as diseases, disorders, or disabilities that, according to ableist logics, must be “cured” or exterminated. In the book I illustrate this by exploring three key themes: the medical management of intersex people; sport sex testing policies; and the deployment of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a reproductive screening technology. However, interphobic eugenic projects extend beyond the examples explored in Cripping Intersex: Canada’s criminal code that outlaws female genital mutilation but not intersex genital mutilation; intensifying fascist policies and ideologies stoking gender and sex panics; transphobic policies that (1) deny trans people, particularly trans youth, of affirming health care and (2) deny intersex youth bodily autonomy by suggesting that nonconsensual medical procedures enacted on intersex children should continue; efforts to ban sex education, gender studies, and critical race theory in schools; book bans that target material that reveals the beautiful complexity of sex, gender, and sexuality. All of these kinds of things we see in this contemporary moment are a part of a eugenic project that is profoundly interphobic as well as queerphobic, racist, and ableist. If anything, I hope readers, namely those who are unfamiliar with intersex studies and the Intersex Rights Movement become motivated to (1) learn more about intersex studies, activism, and the Intersex Rights Movement as well as (2) take action against interphobia in whatever way they can. Recognizing and combating interphobia in all of its forms is a vital anti-eugenics project. To be clear, I am not unique in connecting these dots and being concerned about these things. My book emerged from being educated by intellectual giants in intersex, disability, queer, and feminist scholarship and activism. However, if I can add any small productive addition to these broader conversations and concerns, that’s really all I could hope for.