Bodily Integrity and the Surgical Management of Intersex

Abstract

Surgeries inevitably raise questions of bodily integrity: how the post-surgical body reframes (or does not reframe) its experiences of functionality to incorporate new features. Nevertheless, when we try to define or delimit the concept of bodily integrity, it becomes increasingly important to think about how the physical and social unease caused by some forms of surgeries sits alongside the more transformative potential of surgical bodily modification. This article focuses on aesthetic genital surgeries on infants with disorders of sex development (DSD, previously termed 'intersex' conditions). Using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Elizabeth Freeman on time, bodies and 'chrononormativity', this article excavates not only the temporalities that produce what I would term 'chrono-abnormalities' of sex development, but also the temporalized medical responses, including surgeries, which retrieve 'abnormal' bodies into more normative time-lines. My conclusion is that when DSD-affected individuals experience aesthetic genital surgeries as painful and full of social unease this is not necessarily because the pre-surgical body was the 'natural', 'whole' or 'intact' body prior to surgery. Instead, it is because these surgeries interrupt what Bourdieu would term a sense of corporeal 'immersion into the forthcoming'; an immersion which, in his theory of time as social action, is intimately linked with social power and possibilities.

Bodily Integrity, Embodiment, and the Regulation of Parental Choice

“…A propertied or sovereigntist understanding of embodiment as the subject's ownership and determination of the soma is often usefully surpassed, or augmented, by other theoretical imaginings of embodied selfhood, such as ideas of bio-social entanglements between cultural, social and technical processes. 110 These nuanced and relational`theoretical imaginings' not only complicate conventional legal accounts, but are consistent with a theoretical shift in contemporary health law from the body to embodiment as a focus of concern. 111 Embodiment scholarship has been attentive to the importance of integrating physical and mental dimensions of bodies and health, 112 in order to avoid replicating the mind/body split which, as we have seen, contributes to problematic readings of the legal subject 113 and continues to structure dominant legal understandings of bodily integrity.…”

Talking cervixes: How times materialise during the first stage of labour

“…Our analysis mobilises insights from a growing field of social science scholarship that explores times as the uncertain and ongoing outcome of socio‐material relations (e.g. Bastian et al., 2020; Beynon‐Jones, 2017; Davies, 1994; Grabham, 2012, 2016; McCoy, 2009; Mulla, 2014; Sharma, 2014). We deliberately make use of the plural— times— in order to emphasise their ‘multiplicity, simultaneity and mutual implication’ (Adam, 1995, p. 6).…”

Embodied Integrity, Shaping Surgeries and the Profoundly Disabled Child

“…In contesting such interventions, recourse to the value of bodily integrity has become increasingly prevalent (e.g. Savell 2003-4), including in legal studies (Ludbrook 1995-6, Miller 2007, Brazier 2009, Grabham 2012, Ammaturo 2016, Fox and Thomson 2017, Herring and Wall 2017. Bodily integrity has also generated an extensive ethics literature (Fabre 2006, Viens 2017, Mazor 2019.…”