| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
No other deviation spurs such a reaction, but because intersexuality represents such a deviation from a set of culturally imbued gender expectations considered inviolable, we have, according to Preves, “developed institutional means of covering it up or erasing the violation” (Intersex and Identity 20).
We see then that sexual identity, Thomas Laquer writes, “is situated; it is explicable only within the context of the battle over gender and power” (11). Beliefs about gender are tied to the discourses that produced them. Therefore, discourse, as well as the rhetoric that works within it that propagates its rules and leads to the modification of them, contextualizes and produces our knowledge of Intersexuality.
Because of this, for Foucault, there is no true sex, no transcendent concept of gender. Gender derives its meaning, and we derive our knowledge of that meaning from “relations between institutions, economics and social processes, behavioral patterns, systems of norms” (Archaeology 45). In other words, what we think we know and believe about gender and sex is grounded in the discourses that produce them, and those discourses are, in turn, produced by the processes, patterns, theories, and conceptions derived from different disciplines, from historical and social formations, and from events.
Truth is shaped by discourses, which are shaped by the schools, the books, the media, the doctors, and the greater mass of people in general. That which is not the truth is in binary opposition and must be false, as long as the discourse’s “will to truth” supports and thus gives veracity to that object of knowledge considered to be true. Once the truth has been established, discourse functions constantly to reinforce it as the truth. It establishes norms and produces rhetoric to regulate and reinforce it so that the individual knows how to behave in ways defined as acceptable by knowledge or truth.