Friday, September 27, 2013

Intersex, teratology, zoology

I am currently working on other projects, so, just a short post.

Hilary Malatino gave a talk entitled "Intersex 101, or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Intersex But Were Afraid To Ask". It is clearly geared for being accessible to a beginning audience or undergraduate audience, however, it is still really interesting. Particularly, she engages within the history of how we come to understand intersex today. Here is the video:


Now, that is all interesting, and she explains the connection between the history of intersex and teratology, the academic study of monsters (and therefore this is connected to what Jeffery Cohen has called Monster Theory). I want to add something a short bit. Hil brings up the person who coined terms like teratology and ethology, namely Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Now, over at A Monster Observatory, we have a rather old but interesting post that is "an excerpt from a British Review Article on M. Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's General and particular History of Anomalies of Organization in Man and Animals which appeared in The British And Foreign Medical Review (Vol 8, No. 15) July, 1839." What this excerpt makes clear is that teratology is stapled to zoology. I am sure there is more to say, but I have to run.