Naturalisation and Coloniality

Discursive reproduction of sex/gender within legal, medico-scientific, literary, and popular narratives centred in or oriented on Europe which materialise in cultural norms and legal and medical protocols producing pathologized, racialised, and devalued bodies has been contested from a number of marginalised positions. Intersex advocacy, developing in Europe and elsewhere form the early 90’s onward, has exposed devastating effects pathologizing discourses produce in and on the body, it has set out to change the legal and medical treatment of intersex people, problematised the dominant binary understanding of sex/gender, and has since developed a myriad of discursive advocacy strategies positioned widely, and sometimes opposingly, on the political and ideological spectrum. This research aims to examine efficacy, potential, and limits of those discursive advocacy strategies which are grounded in the discourse of nature and/or aim to naturalise intersex. Taking as a theoretical basis that the conceptual domain of the natural within which the materiality of body is framed and formed is normative and formulated through colonial discourses on race, sex/gender, and class (Butler 1993; McClintock 1995; Lugones 2007), central questions that this research examines are: Do strategies based on scientific discourse and/or discursive naturalisation bear the potential to change the conditions which regulate lives and bodies of intersex people? How do they relate to colonial and hierarchical logic of the discourse of nature? And further: How do they affect possibilities for collaboration and solidarity across identitarian lines of division? For this purpose, critical discourse analysis of political and educational material published by European intersex advocacy organisations which follow one of the two competing discursive strands: sex/gender as absolute binary biological difference and sex/gender as natural spectrum, is conducted, and complemented with the analysis of legal recommendations and resolutions issued by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament.