Black bodies and people of color’s bodies in general have long been portrayed as having dangerous sexualities. This comes across in many forms. The first is the stereotype of black people as sexually corrupting. This goes hand in hand with the belief that black people are sexual aggressors or seductresses, out to sleep with innocent white people. And non-white cultures were commonly treated as monstrous, barbaric, or inhuman. So when discussing the history of intersex people in America we should definitely try to consider the ways in which race might have factored into that history.
Elizabeth Reis’ Bodies In Doubt discusses the history of Intersex people in American culture, and as such should be a fairly good resource for the subject. However, there appears to be a startling gap in the text when it comes to race. There is one very small section on the subject. But instead of covering the way intersex people of color were treated, most of Reis’ text focuses on the ways in which white mothers were considered corrupted or were questioned if their babies were born as intersex and non-white. There are some mentions, however, and they’re valuable insights into possible themes that I had anticipated. At one point Reis quotes a document which calls an 18 year old slave a “monster” for being intersex. On the first level I think that this is reminiscent of ways in which colonial people characterized Native Americans and their culture. I’ve read and heard about images of Native Americans as cannibals and monstrous. Because they weren’t a part of the “cultured” society of imperialism, they were not fully human. And because their spirituality did not align with the colonialists they were cannibals and human sacrificers. This line of thought, however, seems like it might not work out beyond a surface association. Another thing I was reminded of when reading this line was the way in which intersex and other babies were labelled as “monstrous.” Earlier in the book, this phrase was used to describe children who were claimed to have inhuman features like horns and tails. It seems like an interesting coincidence to me that this phrase choice would be repeated when describing an intersex person of color. If their body was “monstrous” we’re meant to assume as readers that they are so inhuman as to be compared to babies meant to look like demons and other forms of creatures. Is this really just about the genitalia of the child at this point, or is there perhaps some hidden racism showing through? I really can’t make any claims with certainty because of how short the mention was of the “monstrous” nature of Ned’s body.
I can point out another moment of the racialized intersex politics. Earlier in this section, Reis refers to a common belief that people of color had a higher rate of intersex births. This struck me as a good connection to the belief that people of color (particularly black people and native americans at this point in history) were connected to monstrous behaviours. If black people are producing more intersex children and intersex children are somehow monstrous, the logical next step is to claim that black people are more monstrous and inhuman than the white colonials.
I think the most important thing I realized when reading Bodies in Doubt was that the extent of her information on intersex people of color was really limited. There were five pages in the whole book with any substantial reference to race while in conjunction to intersex. And as I said, it seems as though there was a large chunk of that reading which was devoted to discussing the perceived “contamination” of white people’s children by dark skin tones. When I noted this large gap in the reading I thought it might have been a facet of the racist history of America. Black people were very rarely taught how to read and write during slavery era. As such they could likely not record their lives and experiences. Reis works largely from primary documents and midwives’ stories, and as such can only really have access to a finite amount of texts. White people almost definitely did not concern themselves with recording the births of black children without special cases such as Ned’s. But I thought this disregard would be merely an issue of the past. However, when I started to research the topic, I found effectively nothing on the subject. A quick Google search turned up articles on intersex people and articles on racism and articles on racism in the LGBTQIAP+ community. But there was nothing on the culture of intersex people of color. Nothing on the way in which racism can influence the belief of their validity as people. Nothing on the ways in which their consent was ignored or requested by doctors when they were born. And nothing on how their very humanity was questioned on many levels. It just seems so strange to me! The best I could do was to find articles which discussed racism and intersex-based oppressive remarks. And that just seems suspect to me. Somebody out there has to care about this in some depth, right? Intersectionality is critical to the way we study and criticize the worth of human lives. The continued devaluation of intersex people’s consent is certainly something relevant to modern America. And the ways in which people of color have had their consent and agency stripped away must resonate on some level with that issue. So why can I not find anything substantive on the subject? You tell me, readers.
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