Reclaiming masculinity in an account of lived intersex experience: Language, desire, and embodied knowledge

This paper applies a queer lens to one person’s account of an intersex body and self in order to examine the ‘intersections’ of masculinity with constructions of biologically grounded innateness. The approach taken to the analysis of discourse is poststructuralist in orientation, drawing on data from media interviews and group discussion recordings. Its application reveals the limitations of the social category ‘man’ as a location for masculinity. Through narrative and talk in interaction the informant strategically mobilises normative discourses of masculinity, appropriating these dominant discourses and constructing a subject position as intersex while drawing upon binary terminology (both biological and social) in order to construct a non-binary body and self. The examination of masculinity in this person’s case cannot be separated from questions of the innate. This is because innate difference forms an important part of the informant’s experience with masculinity. To some extent, masculinity and femininity ‘float free’ of body parts or characteristics which have been consolidated as direct indexes of maleness and femaleness, yet this case study supports the idea that the freedom to float has limits. Therefore, to dismiss innateness from discussions of masculinity is to place limits upon our ability to hear and see, and thus to perpetuate the unintelligibility of intersex experience.