On Making a Knowledge of Body

Abstract

This essay explores some of the ways relations between body and law shape intersex and trans experiences. It draws on the work of Dean Spade, Suzanne Kessler, and Audre Lorde to help show how intersex and trans experiences imply a certain link between justice and joy. The essay considers how this link consists in opening new epistemological horizons of body that compel us to account for how there exists a knowledge that is not reducible to an objective. To help develop these points, this essay focuses on medical and legal demands to make gender normal. It proceeds by interpreting how the word normal functions as a metaphor expressing a subjective body of knowledge that concerns everyone. Accounting for this knowledge helps demonstrate how intersex and trans experiences confront the impossible of the law in all of its severities with courage and patience.