Disciplining Sex: Economies Etched in Intersexed Flesh
http://wildlyparenthetical.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/disciplining-sex/5/2/09
To begin, I want to tell you a story of a medical emergency.
Zippora, a 41-year-old Israeli, has given birth to an intersexed child. Sociologist Meira Weiss happens to be in the delivery room; she is researching parental reactions to diseased and deformed babies. When the nurse shows Zippora her baby, Weiss reports that the new mother turns pale, trembles, and bursts into tears: "What will I do? What will I tell people on the street when they ask me what I had, a girl or a boy? What will I tell them? [crying]... Can you operate? Maybe you can do an operation or ... several operations, and then everything will be O.K. ... and then people will know whether it is a boy or a girl... Oh, how disgusting" (Morland 2001, 527).
