This presentation will explore the critique of the pathologization of intersex put forth by intersex activists and advocacy organizations and feminist allies by situating specific practices and strategies in material and discursive contexts, using the differences and similarities between US and Swedish contexts as a case study. I will argue that processes of biomedicalisation (as described by medical sociologists Adele Clarke et al) have transformed biomedicine as a knowledge- and technology-producing domain in ways that have affected clinical practices as well as the conditions for organizing resistance towards clinical management. I will also argue that an orientation towards consensus sets boundaries for how feminist critique is formulated and enacted.
Erika Alm holds a Ph.D. in History of Ideas and is an assistant professor of Gender Studies at the department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research explores normative assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality in discourses on non-normative gender expressions. Her dissertation ”’A Container for Intestines and Emotions’: Conceptions of the Body in Swedish Government Official Reports from the 1960s and 1970s” (2006) reconstructs the discourses on sex, gender, and desire, individual autonomy and public interest generated in the Swedish legislation on gender reassignment, abortion and sterilization, set in the 1960's and 1970's. Since then she has studied contemporary discourses on intersex in Sweden and the U.S.; and strategies taken by transgender activists in organising activist work, with case-studies in Pakistan, the U.S. and Sweden. As a scholar she is particularly interested in the interactions and entanglements of space-specific strategies and transnational discourses, and influenced by actor-network theory, feminist theories of materiality and affect, and queer theory.
