Seeing is Believing

Image found at: http://www.isna.org/files/images/pornodoc-754.preview.gif

The drawing above is by Charles Rodrigues. Mr. Rodrigues is a creative artist whose cartoons have appeared many times in Playboy, Stereo Review, and the defunct National Lampoon. I found this cartoon image from The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) website. ISNA is “devoted to systemic change to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female” (ISNA). ISNA was founded in 1993 as an effort to support those patients and families who felt harmed by their experiences with the health care system. ISNA evolved into an important resource for these affected individuals, their families, and clinicians who are involved with disorders of sex development (DSDs), in order to improve the health care system and overall well-being for those who suffer with DSDs. Later, ISNA collaborated and supported a new organization, Accord Alliance, to promote a more comprehensive approach to care for those with DSDs. This new nonprofit organization established new ideas on appropriate care for DSD-related health and outcomes to be implemented across the nation. With this new organization in order, ISNA closed it doors, in knowing that its efforts and knowledge will be continued. The cartoon image above represents many of the challenges that ISNA has faced, along with, the arguments discussed in Thomas Laquer’s article “Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud”.

First, I would like to discuss what the term intersex means and its implications. Intersex is the general term used for a variety of conditions under which a person is born with something other than standard male or standard female anatomy. In 1998, the standard treatment for intersex was composed of three components, “First, textbooks and journal articles instructed practitioners to lie to their intersex patients and to withhold information from them about their conditions. Second, otherwise healthy children were being subjected to procedures that risked sexual sensation, fertility, continence, health, and life simply because those children didn’t fit social norms. The third problem was the total lack of evidence—indeed, the total lack of interest in evidence—that the system of treatment was producing the good results intended” (ISNA). This standard of care for intersex patients remains unchanged. Most health care centers still treat intersex patients with this concealment-centered model that recommends misrepresenting critical information and surgically altering healthy genitals. ISNA believes that intersex medicine has not changed because the treatment and the core components are a lot like other realms of modern medicine. It is seen as an issue to change otherwise healthy patients to fix social norms, which comes as hardly unusual in the realm of medicine. In this way, the patient can be pushed to become normalized and reconstructed. The same issues of intersex are presented in Laquer’s article on the body and gender.

The article by Thomas Laqeur claims that ancient representations, in the Renaissance period, characterized sexual differences unlike today’s scientists. The scientists of the Renaissance era continued to progress the field of anatomy, in which “the new anatomy displayed, at many levels and which unprecedented vigor, the ‘fact’ that the vagina really is a penis, and the uterus a scrotum” (Laquer, 79). Thus, the vagina was identified as penis and the uterus as testes. This new model states that, “Seeing is believing the one-sex body. Or conversely. Believing is seeing” (Laquer, 79). Laquer argues that the female sexual organs are homologous to male sexual organs, only inside out; “seeing the female genital anatomy as an interior version of the male’s” (Laquer, 86). In the drawings made during dissections, scientists from Aristotle to Galen identified female genitalia as male genitalia, in which “women’s organs are represented as versions of man’s” (Laquer, 81). This model creates the belief that women and men are represented as two different forms of one essential sex; that women have the same reproductive structure as men. Seeing really was believing for these scientists and they relied on their observations of the body to structure the language and order of the body. This new approach to anatomy and ideology of the body is depicted in the cartoon image above. The doctors rely on the normalization and perfection of the body that is produced by social and cultural constructs (or in this case, Playboy). The image further implies that “truth and progress lay not in texts, but in the opened and properly displayed body” (Laquer, 70). Perhaps the doctors in the image, who represent the modern realm of medicine, are adjusting the socially-challenging anomalies of an intersex patient to fix social norms and reconstruct the body.

Laquer does not think scientists from the Renaissance era were mistaken; however, they performed dissections and recorded what they saw, and believed what they saw. Their drawings, in this way, were correct. Since, at the time, their world view did not allow for a two-sex body, the parts of the body of a male versus a female were identified differently. Through time, it has become politically necessary to create a distinction between men and women. Laquer’s argument destabilizes our modern concept of the sexed body as a static, non-historical entity. Social, political, and cultural beliefs and values have influenced and constructed the ways in which we view our bodies, gender, and reproductive systems. Intersex and ideologies of one-sex bodies are constructed as socially-challenging anatomies in the realm of medicine. It is my hope that we can begin to actively recognize and confront the oppressive nature of social anatomical norms and question the use of medicine. This will help us to construct a conscious dialogue of the meaning of anatomy and the implications of these normalizing procedures.


Sources:

Thomas Laqueur, New Science, One Flesh. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Pp. 63-113.

http://www.isna.org/