Intersex literature
List of written works
Intersex people and themes appear in numerous books, comics and magazines. Intersex, in humans and other animals, describes variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies". Morgan Holmes describes common representations of intersex people as monsters or ciphers for discussions about sex and gender, while Phoebe Hart contrasts a small number of examples of well-rounded characters with the creation of "objects of ridicule".
Fiction
Intersex representations in fiction
Intersex people have been portrayed in literature as monsters, murderers and medical dilemmas. Characters in award-winning literature include Cal Stephanides in the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and Max Walker in the novel Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin.
Morgan Holmes, Canadian sociologist and a former activist with the (now defunct) Intersex Society of North America, comments on constructions of intersex people as monsters or ciphers for discussions about sex and gender. Holmes describes her weariness "of writers who had contacted me for a number of years during my intersex-activist days, trying to determine if their proposed ‘hermaphrodites’ could do things like impregnate or have sex with themselves", and how depictions of intersex people are "stalled", reifying "the proper place of traditional visions and modes of masculinity in opposition to femininity" or "beyond and outside the realm of gender altogether"; the character of Annabel/Wayne, in the Canadian novel Annabel by Kathleen Winter, provides an example of monstrous auto-impregnation, while science fiction representations of intersex may also reflect monstrous interpretations of a hermaphrodite.
Phoebe Hart describes a range of media representations, from a small number of examples of well-rounded characters such as Cal Stephanides in the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides to the creation of "objects of ridicule".
List of works of intersex fiction
The list is organised by the author's surname.
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by an intersex character who discusses the societal experience of an intersex person.
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This entry incorporates text from “Intersex literature” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.