Gouverner les corps sexués

Abstract

This paper examines how different institutions (medicine, family, state) govern the bodies of children with variations in sex development. In the continuity of the work on governmentality and the government of bodies, sexualized bodies are apprehended as a site of the exercise of power through the regulation, surveillance and control to which they are subjected. Issues of consent and individualized self-constraint that have become central to the practice of governing bodies are absent from contemporary modes of governing variations in children’s sex development. The article shows how medicine exerts a strong external constraint on the bodies of children with variations in sex development, and how parents occupy an intermediary place at once dominated by the medical institution but dominant vis-à-vis their child whom they represent and in whose place they decide.

Keywords

• family; gender; medicine; body; consent