Religion and Intersex: How Theology, Science, Law, and Liturgy Legitimize Medical Violence
book review
Indira Falk Gesink
extract
In five skillfully curated chapters, Stephanie A. Budwey’s monograph presents six intersex interviewees who discuss surgical, medical, and liturgical erasure of their physical complexities in an attempt to force their bodies to fit male or female sex. Budwey places her interview partners in dialogue with prominent gender theorists and published intersex authors such that the book provides a broad yet concise introduction to literature on intersex and Christianity (2–3). Throughout, Budwey models sexually polymorphic terminology. Her chief contribution is to present novel voices of intersex laypeople in order to counter what Miranda Fricker has called “testimonial epistemic injustice,” in which physicians and scholars are deemed more credible witnesses of intersex experience than intersex people themselves (7).