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Title: Intersexuality Rating: 3.3 out of 4 Reference: SexTV segment producer, Michelle Melles.
Library of Congress subjects: Hermaphroditism--Social aspects Hermaphroditism--Treatment--Moral and ethical aspects Generative organs--Abnormalities--Surgery--Moral and ethical aspects Gender identity disorders Medical ethics
Reviews and Numerical Ratings 3 Participants in the graduate workshop thought that this video raised an interesting debate about the ethicality of showing intimate subjects and about the tensions between the academic project of creating knowledge & the possibility that students will be disturbed by what we show. (The students we should be concerned about here needn’t be only intersex students, but also, for example, those who are very naive about sexuality. Some participants recommended showing this only to advanced classes; others proposed that to not show such material was to equate intersexuality (and other “sensitive” topics) with incredible abnormalcy. The video was considered promising to show in lectures on sexuality & medicalisation, as well as in Introduction to Sociology, where it would trouble the binaries that are so “last year” and would raise numerous questions about citizenship, violence, who counts, etc. Graduate Workshop 1.5 This is an important topic & if this is the only audiovisual option available it’s worth showing so that students see the overwhelming nature of medical discourses around sex. However, it would need to be previewed & appropriately framed for an undergraduate audience so that it doesn’t deteriorate into sensationalistic voyeurism - a stance that is encouraged by the SexTV format. Andie Noack 4 An excellent source for courses dealing with the subjects of gender & sexuality. Using the narratives of the intersexed, their families, activists, and doctors, this video reveals how medical discourse, tied to society’s gender bias, conflicts with how the intersexed person may identify their sexuality. Moreover, the video deconstructs the ideology of gender-as-biological and exposes how sexual identity is not pre-determined by one’s physical sex. It also shows the impact that sex change has on the intersexed when they determine their own sexual identity as adults, the ethics that doctors must consider, and how gender socialization by the family of the intersexed child is not in the child’s best interests. In addition to social science courses, this video should be viewed in medical science courses relating to human biology, to show how sex change at birth of intersex children may have a detrimental effect on these children in the future. For 3rd & 4th year students. Kisrene McKenzie (undergraduate) 3.5 Good video, good teaching tool on gender & sex, though weak on sexuality. Conveys some of the contingency of sex (male-female binary) as natural categories & the work of gender socialization to make surgical intervention work. Beth Jackson & Lachlan Story 4 Excellent to show the damage caused by the categorization & medicalization of sex and links of sex to gender. Shows how our anxieties about sex & gender are played out in violent ways on children’s bodies. Riley Olstead 4 An excellent video that provides information about
a rarely-discussed issue. The fact that over 65,000 children are born
categorized as intersex is reason enough to show this in a course. Much
needed and required information. Access to this information could help
parents make informed life decisions for their children, so the video
could have listed resource/information centres apart from The Hospital
for Sick Kids and the organization which one participant heads. It’s
also interesting that a similar act done in Africa would be categorized
as mutilation, yet in North America this act is viewed as correcting
a social error. For 3rd or 4th year students, or possibly for 2nd year
if identity and sexual issues are dealt with/facilitated by professor/TA.
Jennifer Lewis-Phillips (undergraduate)
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