Since the 1600s, travelers, scientists, and doctors have claimed that “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans. In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda Lock Swarr debunks this claim by interrogating contemporary intersex medicine and demonstrating its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism. Tracing the history of racialized research that underpins medical and scientific premises of gendered bodies, Swarr analyzes decolonial actions by intersex South Africans from the 1990s to the present, centering the work of organizers such as Sally Gross, the first openly intersex activist in Africa and a global pioneer of intersex legislation. Swarr also explores African social media activism that advocates for intersex justice and challenges the mistreatment of South African Olympian Caster Semenya. Throughout, Swarr shows how activists displace doctors’ impositions to fashion self-representation. By unseating colonial visions of gender, intersex South Africans are actively disrupting medical violence, decolonizing gender binaries, and inciting policy changes.

All author royalties from Envisioning African Intersex will be donated to Intersex South Africa.

Amanda Lock Swarr is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, author of Sex in Transition: Remaking Gender and Race in South Africa, and coeditor of Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis.

-- Elizabeth Reis Journal of Medical Humanities

Introduction. Pathologizing Gender Binaries: Intersex Images and Citational Chains  1
Part I. Uncovering: Colonial and Apartheid Legacies
1. Colonial Observations and Fallacies: “Hermaphroditism” in Histories of South Africa  23
2. “Intersex in Four South African Racial Groups in Durban”: Visualizing Scientific Racism and Gendered Medicine  49
Part II. Recovering: Decolonial Intersex Interventions
3. Defying Medical Violence and Social Death: Sally Gross and the Inception of South African Intersex Activism  73
4. #HandsOffCaster: Caster Semenya’s Refusals and the Decolonization of Gender Testing  102
5. Toward an “African Intersex Reference of Intelligence”: Directions in Intersex Organizing  132
Epilogue. Reframing Visions of South African Intersex  156
Acknowledgments  161
Appendix One: Compilation of Works by and Featuring Sally Gross  165
Appendix Two: Cited Twitter Posts Referencing Caster Semenya  167
Appendix Three: African Intersex Movement Priorities (2017, 2019, 2020)  169
Notes  171
References  207
Index  231