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Cheryl Chase, founder of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), has long been a voice for change. As an intersexed person, she has spoken from a position of credibility, arguing forcefully against stigmatizing methods of medicalizing intersexuality that were once commonplace (1999, 2003).
It is this rhetoric, along with the intersex activism it has helped to propel, that Preves examined in an influential essay, “Out of the O.R. and into the Streets: Exploring the Impact of Intersex Media Activism,” that appears in the book, Politics of Change: Sexuality, Gender, and Aging (2004). Preves argues that the “intersex movement’s use of mass media as a tool to reframe medical and lay conceptions” of Intersexuality has enabled not only intersexed persons to reconsider what it means to be intersexed, but it has also motivated the medical establishment to question as well as modify their positions and the ways they treat intersexuality (180).
Preves’ analysis of mass media’s role in intersex activism does not place much focus on the Internet. However, she suggests that the “use of the Internet as a primary means of contact, education, and support has afforded the development of a geographically diverse advocacy movement” (188). Virtual communities dedicated to intersex issues have “given former patients and family members an opportunity to discuss intersex beyond the clinic” (188). So there is a need, she argues, for studying these communities further, to understand how such online media “clarify the processes through which categories of normalcy, deviance, health, and pathology are socially and politically constructed” (217).
But to date no such study of this kind has been carried out. This book remedies this by offering a focused, indepth rhetorical analysis of the significant role virtual intersex communities have played in contributing to intersex activism.