Cover: Cripping Intersex by Celeste E. Orr. Illustration: several pieces of paper in pink, blue, yellow, and white overlaid on one another. Each is creased.
332 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:15 Jun 2023
ISBN:9780774865548
Hardcover
Release Date:22 Oct 2022
ISBN:9780774865531
PDF
Release Date:22 Oct 2022
ISBN:9780774868549
EPUB
Release Date:22 Oct 2022
ISBN:9780774865654
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Cripping Intersex

UBC Press

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.

This interdisciplinary work will have broad appeal. Scholars and students of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, trans studies, medical sociology, bioethics, critical race theory, sport studies, medical and health rhetoric, and cultural studies will all find it very useful, as will activists and professionals working in intersex, disability, and human rights fields.

Celeste E. Orr is a research associate at the University of Ottawa. Their research has been featured in Feminist Theory; From Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine; Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Mothering, Mothers, and Sport: Experiences, Representations, Resistances; and Connecting, Rethinking and Embracing Difference. Orr was a finalist for the Pierre Laberge Prize for Achievement in the Humanities.

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