Abstract
There has been increasing talk of intersex studies in the social sciences, in recent special issues devoted to the topic in Culture, Health and Sexuality, in Transgender Studies Quarterly and in Psychology of Sexualities Review, for example. Drawing on an earlier generation of scholarship and advocacy, intersex studies is engaged with an articulation of human rights and ethics. These rights are risked by ongoing routinized medical care that is described to those who experience it as patient-centred, performed by multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) and backed up by consensus statements. Sociology has had a stake in intersex studies and debates about the proper limits of medicalization since its inception in the late 1990s. While this statement could be made about any number of (de)medicalization controversies, intersex is special. Here, medical treatment has always been justified on the grounds that ‘society’ cannot tolerate intersex embodiment, often described as ‘variations in sex characteristics’ (VSC) in human rights documents, or ‘disorders’ or ‘differences of sex development’ (DSD) in medical classifications. Relatedly, intersex psychosocial subjects are often considered best off not knowing about, talking about or making social identities or movements out of their embodiment. As the form of embodiment here is about the development of sex characteristics, intersex studies also compel consideration of the relationships between bodies and society, and of those between public and private bodies. Four recent monographs on socio-legal studies, disability studies, clinical psychology and African studies show the diverse fields that intersex studies now touch. They call for sharper thinking about the forms of social construction being applied to natural variation in human sex characteristics, and the people who have them. Jointly these books illustrate how intersex is being put into dialogue with an increasing range of fields, demonstrating its wide-ranging, sociological relevance.