Congress Paper Abstract

Fracturing the masks: voices from the shards of language

Lee Anderson Brown, Doctoral Student, Dept of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia 

Email: leeb@student.unsw.edu.au

Statistics suggest that there are far more intersexual people than transsexual people in the general population. However transsexuals are more visible and vocal in the community. This paper looks at some of the reasons why this may be so. It pivots on two main points. First, that transsexuals have replaced intersexuals as the loci of hermaphroditic mythologies in the popular imagination. Second, that the silences imposed on intersexuals by the current regimes of treatment mean that there is no easily accessible conceptual language which can be used by an intersexual to give voice to their intersexuality outside of paradigms of ’incomplete’ male or female, or of transsexuality. I will conclude by showing how this situation is slowly changing and suggest what this might mean for the future of transgendered discourses.

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