2024 ASA section awards
2024 Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Book Award Winner
A01=Amanda Lock Swarr
American Sociological Association Section on Sexualities book award
Author_Amanda Lock Swarr
Category=JBSF3
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHH
Diverse Sexualities Research and Education Institute Book Award winner
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Book Awards
Product details
- ISBN 9781478019619
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Mar 2023
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda Lock Swarr debunks this claim by interrogating contemporary intersex medicine and demonstrating its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Tracing the history of racialized research that underpins medical and scientific premises of gendered bodies, Swarr analyzes decolonial actions by intersex South Africans from the 1990s to the present, centering the work of organizers such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. Swarr also explores African social media activism that advocates for intersex justice and challenges the mistreatment of South African Olympian Caster Semenya. Throughout, Swarr shows how activists displace doctors’ impositions to fashion self-representation. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes.
All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.
All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.
Amanda Lock Swarr is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, author of Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa, and coeditor of Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis.
