Intersex and/as/is/with disability. The connections between intersex and disability deserve nuanced attention if we are to strengthen intersex human rights claims and understand the experiences of intersex people living with the disabling consequences of medical intervention. Cripping Intersex explores three key themes: the medical management of people with intersex characteristics; the mainstream fascination with sport sex-testing policies; and the eugenic implications of preimplantation genetic diagnosis. This necessary work offers radical new understandings of intersex-with-disability by investigating how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and ableism, and pushes analyses of intersex experience further than feminist or queer theory can do alone.

Covid and . . . How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory. Arguing that the circulation of any virus must be understood in tandem with the public communication accompanying it, this collection converses with interdisciplinary stakeholders also committed to the project of social wellness during pandemic times. With inventive ways of thinking about structural inequities in health, these essays showcase the forces that pandemic rhetoric exerts across health conditions, politics, and histories of social injustice.

This edited collection interrogates how social and cultural representations of individuals with intersex variations impact how they are understood and treated from legal and medical perspectives across the world. Contributors consider how novelists, filmmakers, artists, and medical professionals have represented people with intersex variations, and highlight the importance of ethical representation and autonomy to encourage wider cultural and medical knowledge of intersex variations as a naturally occurring phenomenon. The text also examines the ways in which individuals with intersex variations are represented and viewed in India, Italy, Pakistan and Israel, as well as how this impacts decision making for the individuals, families and medical providers. This book argues that reactions to intersex variations will not change unless they are no longer presented as treatable disorders. It positions representation at the forefront, shifting the emphasis away from a concern for maintaining gender norms to upholding the human rights of intersex people. This volume will be of interest to researchers and scholars in intersex studies as well as policymakers and activists.

Catherine Frazee wants her readers to know that there is far more to disability than most people think or assume. There is much not to like about disability, such as the ways it diminishes status and opportunity, and the ways it requires medical intrusions which, even if lifesaving, are nobody’s idea of a good time. As becomes apparent in this powerful collection of writing, there is much more to the story of disabled life. There is adaptation and activism. There is art, philosophy, and history. There is solidarity, identity, collective struggle, and shared culture. Frazee offers a glimpse into a rich and delicate ecology of disability that warrants not fear and pity, but recognition and respect.

Into the twenty-first century, millions of disabled people and people experiencing mental distress were segregated from the rest of society and confined to residential institutions. Deinstitutionalization – the closure of these sites and integration of former residents into the community – has become increasingly commonplace. But this project is unfinished. Sites of Conscience explores use of the concept of sites of conscience, which involves place-based memory activities such as walking tours, survivor-authored social histories, and performances and artistic works in or generated from sites of systemic suffering and injustice. These activities offer new ways to move forward from the unfinished deinstitutionalization project and its failures. Covering diverse national contexts, this volume proposes that acknowledging the memories and lived experiences of former residents – and keeping histories and social heritage of institutions alive rather than simply closing sites – holds the greatest potential for recognition, accountability, and action.

This interdisciplinary anthology contributes to the contemporary dialogues about motherhood/mothering drawing attention to the experiences of motherhood/mothering both within medical practice as physicians as well as highlighting motherhood/mothering experiences of medicine, examining both mothers as patients themselves and with their children as patients. As medical schools steadily increase the number of women studying medicine, research on mothers in medical practice would add to a better understanding on the different values, expectations, institutions, and events that shape and define the identities within medicine. How does the increase of women as mothers practicing medicine affect the outcomes of mothers as patients? Does birthing your own child impact your practice? Does knowing your physician or your child's physician is a mother affect your experience as a patient or that of your child's? The edited volume will explore how relationships between motherhood/mothering experiences in/of medicine are presently being theorized, re-examined, negotiated, and most importantly, debated. This is an interdisciplinary volume which unites essays as well as creative submissions that engage with the issue of motherhood experiences in/of medicine, including works of fiction and creative non-fiction in addition to traditional academic writing, allowing an open and innovative space for critical discussion.

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Medical Entanglements uses intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theory to move beyond "for or against" approaches to medicine. Drawing on case studies, the book argues that most medical interventions will simultaneously reinforce inequality and alleviate individual suffering. Thus, the book argues that feminists should allow individuals choice in regards to medical intervention, while working to dismantle systems of oppression.

Sex is complex. Humans are simultaneously more similar in their sex development, and more diverse, than is commonly appreciated or understood. Females and males are not made of wildly different ingredients. The potential to have intersex variations-to be born with atypical sex characteristics-exists for all humans in the first few weeks of their prenatal development. 1.7% of people actually go on to be born intersex. However, most of us know little about intersex variations. This is only partly due to their occasional invisibility. Intersex people have historically faced deep social stigma-the assumption that they were simply bizarre aberrations from the human norm. Furthermore, intersex infants have been widely subjected to systematic institutional mistreatment, particularly within medical settings. Finally, some people with intersex variations have simply tried to integrate themselves unnoticed into the socially accepted categories of male and female. Drawing on stories and statistics from the first national study of intersex the book argues for a distinct 'Intersex Studies' framework to address intersex issues and identity-foregrounding people with intersex variations' own goals, perspectives and experiences. Collected in 2015 and arranged in thematic chapters, the data presented here on 272 individuals gives a penetrating account of historically and socially obscured experience. This book is an important and long-overdue contribution to our understanding of human sexuality and a must-read for people with intersex variations, health practitioners, psychologists, advocacy groups, students, and anybody interested in knowing more about our diverse human make-up.

In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.