Since the late 1980s, intersex adults and activists have critiqued the clinical recommendations defined in the 1950s to treat children born with ‘ambiguous genitalia’ with normalising medicine. While their struggles continue, in particular to halt the practice of genital surgery in early infancy, some European surgeons travel to African countries to transfer standards of care that have become highly controversial in the North, including in the medical community. Simple disapproval of these tours as ‘surgical safaris’ forecloses the possibility of analysing (...) more complex situations in which the so-called transfer of competence involves surgeons who promote ‘less cutting and more talking’. Such is the case – and the interest – of the surgical missions in West Africa in which I conducted recent fieldwork, accompanying a team of paediatric surgeons from a European university hospital collaborating with a renowned international NGO. This article analyses the ways in which a variation of sex development called hypospadias is framed and managed in this context through what I call a surgical script for hypospadias. I examine the conditions of (im-)possibility for Northern surgeons to operationalise, and sometimes revise, this script at the missions (but also closer to home). I discuss what the surgeons do in practice to reflect critically on the normative work of the surgical script for hypospadias as a social script on morphological ideals of sex, gender and reproductive heterosexuality. I consider in what sense genital surgery can be said to (re-)construct ‘normal’-looking genitalia, but also, fundamentally, the very idea of genitalia. (shrink)

This paper seeks to inquire into the constructionist knowledge practices by further exploring the interchange outlined by philosopher Gaston Bachelard between the naive realist's conjuration of reality as a precious good in her possession and the miser's complex of savings the pennies. In fact, this elective affinity holds true not just for naive realism, but also for its very critiques, most of which remaining passionately attached to a little something that is prior to any socio-historical process. This realistic little something (...) is better understood as a double negation, namely as a not-nothing, in that it precisely survives the critique of a pre-existing reality out there as is the case for the discourse of social construction. I will suggest here that this not-nothing proceeds from knowledge practices that enact "epistemic covetousness" as their critical gesture. (shrink)

The NeuroGenderings project is reminiscent of an interdisciplinary program called Critical Neuroscience. But the steps towards a feminist/queer Critical Neuroscience are complicated by the problematic ways in which critical neuroscientists conceive of their critical practices. They suggest that we work and talk across disciplines as if neuroscientists were from Mars and social scientists from Venus, assigning the latter to the traditional feminine role of assuaging conflict. This article argues that brain science studies scholars need to clarify how we want to (...) frame our critical practices—a critique of what and for whom?—and promote interdisciplinarity. The challenge is to articulate a critical stance that could not be collapsed into the all-encompassing claims of neuroscience, Critical Neuroscience included. I suggest we shift focus: from enhanced communication to the study of controversies (but also non-controversies, failed controversies, etc.) and conflicts. I explore the productiveness of this shift through two examples: the non-controversial notion of brain plasticity, and the controversial question of whether gender identity formation in intersex people is a function of their brain or their genitals. Socializing neuroscience with insights from gender and science studies is good; highlighting the conflicting dimensions of social life in the same gesture is even better. (shrink)