Intersex's New Materialism

Abstract

Intersex thinkers and activists, queer-feminist science studies, and new materialist initiatives have argued that sex's complex materiality undermines the rigid binaries imposed by essentialist biology and exceeds the malleability of the body constructed as entirely open to intervention and control in biopower. Through a close reading of Lucia Puenzo's XXY, and the realist depiction of the impasses and rich potentialities surrounding intersex embodiment it puts forth, this article explores how intersex becomes the locus for expansive ontoepistemological schemas. Suffused with a rich visual language foregrounding the subject's plastic arts and the collective bodies of the ecosystem, XXY situates the expansive significance of intersex not only as an integral and intelligible form of bio-logical embodiment but also as a generative and even generalizable mode of more-than-binary corporeality.