Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine
Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine
by Amanda Lock Swarr
Duke University Press, 2023
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-1697-7
Paper: 978-1-4780-1961-9
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9376-3 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-2424-8 (standard)
About the Book
Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda Lock Swarr debunks this claim by interrogating contemporary intersex medicine and demonstrating its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Tracing the history of racialized research that underpins medical and scientific premises of gendered bodies, Swarr analyzes decolonial actions by intersex South Africans from the 1990s to the present, centering the work of organizers such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. Swarr also explores African social media activism that advocates for intersex justice and challenges the mistreatment of South African Olympian Caster Semenya. Throughout, Swarr shows how activists displace doctors’ impositions to fashion self-representation. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes.
All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.
All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.
About the Author
Amanda Lock Swarr is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, author of Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa, and coeditor of Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis.
Reviews
-- Elizabeth Reis Journal of Medical Humanities
"Envisioning African Intersex is a compelling and provocative analysis of how medical and scientific authorities have imagined intersex (atypical sex development) in Africa and, just as important, how contemporary South African intersex activists have resisted these racist interpretations."
-- Elizabeth Reis Journal of Medical Humanities
"Envisioning African Intersex is a groundbreaking contribution not only to intersex studies, but to scholarship on the history of sex, race, and medicine. . . . While Envisioning African Intersex promises to be a foundational text in critical
intersex studies, it is also a methodological tour de force that seamlessly blends historical inquiry, ethnography, visual analysis, and decolonial, feminist, and queer theory."
-- Ryan Thoreson African Studies Review
intersex studies, it is also a methodological tour de force that seamlessly blends historical inquiry, ethnography, visual analysis, and decolonial, feminist, and queer theory."
-- Ryan Thoreson African Studies Review
"This volume should be required reading for academics and laypersons alike who care about humanity. As a result of this study, intersex people are no longer invisible."
-- Mueni wa Muiu Journal of Global South Studies
-- Mueni wa Muiu Journal of Global South Studies
"The ability of Swarr to trace the perceptions, misperceptions, and origins of ideas of intersex to the colonial era highlights the supreme importance of understanding the indelible longevity of imperial influence on science and societal construction. Many chapters would serve well as introductory points of discussion for any university course. . . . This longue durée of the story of intersex is much needed, not only to correct the wrongs of the past, but also to give us a language to confront our present."
-- Jacob Ivey Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
-- Jacob Ivey Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
"Envisioning African Intersex is an excellent text that helps provide a much-needed corrective in contemporary intersex scholarship, by addressing how intersex discrimination is directly tied to colonial racism, and that the dominant focus on white intersex activism denies the lived experiences and issues affecting intersex people of color. . . . This text, overall, is a worthwhile addition to the reference library of any biological anthropologist interested in intersex, the effects of colonial, scientific, and medical racism, and intersex activist efforts, and would be excellent for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses."
-- Claudia M. Astorino American Journal of Biological Anthropology
-- Claudia M. Astorino American Journal of Biological Anthropology
"Envisioning African Intersex is a foundational, groundbreaking, and thought-provoking book that delves into the complex and multifaceted colonial realities for intersex South Africans and the continent at large."
-- Tushabe wa Tushabe Feminist Formations
-- Tushabe wa Tushabe Feminist Formations
"[A] powerful and vital book. . . . As a scholar of critical intersex studies and queer feminist science and technology studies, I find Swarr’s Envisioning African Intersex to be indispensable. . . ."
-- David A. Rubin Feminist Formations
-- David A. Rubin Feminist Formations
"A contribution to African studies, Envisioning African Intersex is also a playbook for the decolonization of western social and medical science understandings of intersex from several locations in the Global South. . . . [It] will be of great use to sociologists keen to work in this area, as well as to those who have been doing so for a long time."
-- Peter Hegas, David A Griffith, Marta Prandelli, and Annette Smithrty Sociology
-- Peter Hegas, David A Griffith, Marta Prandelli, and Annette Smithrty Sociology
Tags
1991-, Racism in medicine, Scientific racism, Intersex people, 1953-2014, Discrimination against intersex people, Gross Sally, South Africa, Black Studies (Global), South, Political activity, LGBTQ+ Studies, Africa, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
Label: Amanda Lock Swarr
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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