Droit et Cultures (Mar 2021)
Présentation. Vers une reconnaissance des corps-identités. Excisées, amazones, intersexes, trans, et sourds
Abstract
Intersexuation, transsexuation, excision, breast reconstruction following breast cancer surgery are designed to cut through the bodies, so that they no longer have physical characteristics belonging to both sexes that would suggest the existence of a third sex, which, if it is recognized in some societies, belongs, in Western societies, to the unrepresentable. This impossibility to conceive a third sex, makes that the intersex and trans bodies are made monosexual in order to conform to the exclusive categories of man and woman, excluding personal bodies-identities. Similarly, breast reconstruction proposed to women who have undergone mastectomy following breast cancer, is supposed to repair their femininity, damaged by the loss of this feminine emblem, the breasts, but some women refuse this reconstruction, preferring to invent a new feminine identity, no longer mythical but real, the one of the Amazons. In another case, cochlear implant surgery, which is supposed to « repair » deafness, threatens deaf people’s bodily integrity and their original identity related to the language of signs. For deaf, intersex, trans people, excised women, or women who have coped with mastectomy, self-affirmation requires the recognition of their bodily specificities and their gender or/and cultural identities. They do not necessarily express the will to repair or shape their bodies according to established norms. The notions of bodily diversity, gender plurality and modes of « being in the world » invite to reconsider intersex, trans, deaf people, excised or Amazons women, as persons in their own right with their beauties, their cultures, and their specificities, and no longer as to be vowed to surgical repairs. Moreover, intersex and trans issues, far from being on the margins, invite us to rethink the existence of the socio-legal category of sex which, binary or tertiary, oblige individuals to determine themselves definitively on a basis of a characteristic that not only can vary over time, but is mainly a matter of strict intimacy.
