ABSTRACT
The rights movement around intersexuality was initially spawned and began to gain recognition in 1993, when Cheryl Chase, an intersex individual living as a woman, founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). Intersexuality has been socially managed in a variety of ways in different cultures throughout history, but its treatment in the West has been primarily pathologizing. The discursive production of dimorphic versus aberrant sex begins with the use of the term hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece. The term hermaphrodite was used to describe humans and animals with nondimorphic body configurations in Western cultures up until the nineteenth century. During the Victorian Era, treatment of ambiguous bodies shifted from juridical or religious control and fell under the purview of medicine. Biosocial bodies, which constitute populations, become the loci of social knowledges and identity truths. Association takes on a new meaning in post-disciplinary society, and this has particular import for intersex/disorders of sex development (DSD) sociality and activism.
