Article: "Queer Cut Bodies" By Morgan Holmes.
Intersexuality can be understood as people who were born with both male and female organs. "Queer Cut Bodies" explains that intersexed bodies are actually "clear cut bodies", because these medico cultures have literally "cut" these bodies in order to make them "fit" in the society of Western culture. Holmes" main argument is that hermaphrodites should not be considered as "abnormal beings". "bodies [that] are neither male nor female make them clearly intersexed rather than confused or incomprehensible." However, throughout the article, (s)he repetitively shows us that this is exactly how society perceives them to be. .
His/her first argument was that the discovery of hormones created the assumption of intersexed bodies as "irregular". "Hormones produce a phenotype which indicates, if it is an inappropriate phenotype, that an individual is intersexual." Upon discovering these "Queer Cut Bodies", it was very difficult sexually to understand the desires of a hermaphrodite. So physicians then developed a goal: to only view these desires from a male or female perspective. So they came up with a way of controlling this "deformity", which was to surgically control their sex. Although they claim it was to comfort the parents of these children, I really don't think it would be, as they explained, the "best cosmetic effect". .
The second argument is that "the treatments to which intersexed children are subjected constitute a violent imposition of cultural norms and restrictions on their bodies and behaviours". Culture views these intersexual bodies as "sick" or "diseased". They did not care that it deprived them of sexual abilities but instead saw it as something that needed to be repaired or corrected. Their mentality of this indicates to me that it is not the individual that is "diseased" but the culture that surrounds that is. .
His/her final point was that surgery creates a sexual abnormality in a dominant heterosexual society.
Yes, real hermaphrodites do exist. ... From the obvious female and male, the term intersex (by the medical community) is used for the three major subgroups of hermaphrodites. One kind is called, true hermaphrodites, posses one testis and one ovary, producing sperm and egg. ... Why don't we hear or know of hermaphrodites? ... Being a hermaphrodite is not a choice. ...
A Formal Analysis of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite The artist and date of the famous work entitled Sleeping Hermaphrodite are both unknown. ... The Sleeping Hermaphrodite is a direct example of these Hellenistic ideas. ... Yet she was the mother of Hermaphrodite with her notorious lover Hermes as the father, he! ... The composition of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite is perhaps one of the most important aspects. ... This would have provoked the discovery by the spectator of its hermaphrodite sexuality. ...
The term hermaphrodites, comes from the Greek name Hermes, known as the messenger of the gods, the patron of music, the controller of dreams, and the protector of livestock. ... These two gods parented Hermaphrodites, whom at the age of fifteen became half-male and half-female. A hermaphrodite is an individual which has the attributes of both male and female, or which unites in itself the two sexes. 55% of hermaphrodites are more masculine then feminine. ... If society doesn't accept Hermaphrodites, how are drag queen, transvestites and sex changes legal? ... The fact that early biblic...
(Eugenides, Jeffrey pg.3) Eugenides came up with the idea to write a story about a hermaphrodite after he read a memoire of a hermaphrodite, and it did not tell him what he wanted to know. ... I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence." ... Eugenides said, "I did want to use a hermaphrodite as the narrator. It seemed to me that a novelist has to have a hermaphroditic imagination, since you should be able to go into the heads of me...
One gender is the hermaphrodite, which is relatively large and heart-shaped, and produces both eggs and a small amount of sperm. ... The hermaphroditic gametophytes have eggs, just as animals do. When fertilized by sperm from itself, sperm from another hermaphrodite, or sperm from a male, the fertilized egg egg divides to become an embryo, which grows out of the heart-shaped gametophyte. ... First, when the hermaphroditic gametophytes are fertilized, they can receive sperm from themselves, from other hermaphrodites, or from the male gametophytes. ...
The terms intersexual or middlesex are often times either mistaken or synonymous with the term hermaphrodite. ... A hermaphrodite is mistakenly assumed to be an individual who has both male and female genitalia and is capable of reproducing by themselves. There are no known cases of this and the term hermaphrodite has been modified into true hermaphrodite. ... The definition of true hermaphrodite is "individuals who have both ovarian and testicular tissue in their bodies and their external genitals are often a mixture of male and female structures" according to (Crooks and Baur, 1999. p.50)...
Sex refers to the biological and the anatomical difference between females and males. Gender refers to the culturally and socially constructed differences between females and males found in the meanings, beliefs, and practices associated with male and female. "Femininity" and masculinity" it is im...
An Autobiographical Study (4214) Freud uses the occurrence of hermaphrodites in nature as an illustration to rationalize his bisexual theory, "The importance of these abnormalities lies in the unexpected fact that they facilitate our understanding of normal development. For it appears that a certain degree of anatomical hermaphrodites occurs normally. ...
