Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine 
In 2009, South African track star Caster Semenya became the World Champion in the 800m, and her eligibility to compete in women’s sport was immediately questioned. Over the following decade she was forced to submit to experimental medical interrogations and public scrutiny of her gender that garnered global attention. But while Semenya’s treatment is significant—and her life continues to fuel debates about who counts as a woman today—it is not isolated. Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have falsely claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. Envisioning African Intersex debunks their claim to explicate how contemporary intersex medicine continues to be propelled by colonial ideologies and scientific racism. In this book, histories of racialized intersex are analyzed together with collective actions by intersex South Africans that span decades. This text explores the insights of activists such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. It reveals the science of sex testing in sport as inherently racist and challenges the spectacularization of Semenya and other athletes from the Global South. It also celebrates African intersex activists’ strategies for inciting policy and protocol changes. Visual representations are one of the primary ways ideas about raced intersex are promoted by doctors and reclaimed by activists, so chapters each evaluates medical photographs, scientific drawings, documentary films, and social media. While conversations about queer and transgender interventions in the sexual sciences have grown in important ways, intersex theories have been largely peripheral and transnational intersex considerations have been altogether absent. This is the first book-length consideration of intersex in Africa and fills that lacuna by analyzing the importance of intersex to understanding the gendered body through the work of a range of thinkers based in the Global South. Envisioning African Intersex exposes the lies that underpin scientific presumptions of so-called “hermaphroditism” and highlights activists’ challenges to their exploitation and articulations of new decolonial visions of gender.
Amanda Lock Swarr, PhD
Professor
Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies
University of Washington, Seattle
Amanda Lock Swarr is Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work is concerned with queer, transgender, and intersex studies, medical inequities, and feminist politics, and she has been collaborating with South African activists since 1997. She has been a MacArthur Scholar and Mellon Fellow and is the recipient of the Samuel E. Kelly Distinguished Faculty Award and the UW Distinguished Teaching Award. Swarr is the author of Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa, which was awarded the Sylvia Rivera Prize in Transgender Studies from CLAGS. She co-edited the anthology Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis with Richa Nagar and co-edited “The Intersex Issue” of Transgender Studies Quarterly with Michelle Wolff and David A. Rubin, and her work has appeared in journals including Feminist Formations, Signs, and Feminist Studies. Swarr’s latest book, Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine, explores how histories of colonial and racism shape intersex histories, focusing on African intersex activists’ challenges to dominant representations and violence. This book was awarded the DSREI Professional Book Award and is a finalist for the African Studies Association Best Book Prize; proceeds from print sales will be donated to Intersex South Africa, and the e-book can be accessed for free via Open Access and on the Duke University Press website.
Presented at the Awards Ceremony - Saturday, November 16th at 06:30 PM PST
Meet Dr. Swarr at their Presentation and book signing - California Ballroom B/C
Saturday, November 16th at 10:30 AM PST