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  • Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir by Michaela Koch
  • Megan Walker (bio)
Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir Michaela Koch Transcript Verlag, 2017, 290 pp. ISBN 978-3837637052, $45.00 paperback.

Discursive Intersexions: Daring Bodies between Myth, Medicine, and Memoir offers an innovative analysis of the representation of intersex experiences in life writing and fictional texts from the nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The purpose of Michaela Koch's book is to consider a topic that has not yet been broached in critical works: the analysis of literary and cultural representations of individuals with intersex variations, with the aim of encouraging debate and pluralizing normative understandings of intersex (14–15). The book is ordered chronologically and is separated into two parts, "Part I: Hermaphrodite Narratives" and "Part II: Intersex Narratives." Part I engages with materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth century (before the use of the term intersex), and Part II considers materials from the mid-twentieth to the early twenty-first century (after the coining of the term intersex in 1916). These two parts are used as markers of a contextual shift in discourse outside the literary texts in order to appreciate each text's position within the discursive history. Koch's complex but impressive methodology draws on the works of multiple theorists, such as (post)structuralist Michel Foucault, trauma theorist Kali Tal, narratology scholar Mieke Bal, and gender theorist Judith Butler, to name a few, with the aim of providing an overview of the historical and theoretical backdrop of each literary text.

Discursive Intersexions opens with the chapter "Hermaphrodite Histories," which offers a broad and comprehensive history of medical and legal reactions to hermaphrodites from antiquity to the twentieth century. Koch highlights how early discussions about "hermaphrodites" were positioned alongside discussions about homosexuality in attempts to understand "the sciences of the sexes" (38). Throughout the book, a detailed history of sexology is provided, and these findings are examined alongside events presented in the selected autobiographical texts to map out the medical responses to the individuals at specific times in history. Part I of the [End Page 900] book closes with a study of memoirs from individuals considered retrospectively to be "hermaphrodites": Herculine Barbin and N. O. Body.

Koch explores the use of autobiographical writing as a confessional mode, and how these texts employ medical sources as a method of reflecting and validating the "truth" about the body of the subject. In the case of Barbin's memoirs, first published posthumously in a medical textbook in the late nineteenth century and republished by Foucault in 1980, Koch argues that the mixing of genres—through the inclusion of memoirs in the medical textbook and the inclusion of the medical reports in Foucault's republication of the memoirs—reveals the ambiguity of Barbin's being. Thus, the memoir "challenges the medical discourse about 'true' sex" (22). In contrast, Koch likens N. O. Body's Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years (1907) to medical case histories, given the use of a pseudonym and the fact that the text was published by and contains an epilogue written by Magnus Hirschfeld, who provided a medical report to support N. O. Body's legal transition from female to male (22). Koch argues that Hirschfeld's validation of the text and the use of a pseudonym strengthen the "reliability, authenticity, and decency of the account" (84).

Part I of the book broaches the study of historical intersex life writing in an entirely unique and much-needed way. To my knowledge, there are no other critical texts in the field that provide a literary and critical analysis of these memoirs. The consideration of the memoir as a confessional mode of writing through the lens of theorists such as Foucault and Butler allows Koch, by conducting a close reading of the texts, to question the "truth claims" about the subjects' bodies, therefore revealing the dominant social, medical, and legal discourses surrounding the topic of intersex variations in the specific contexts of the memoirs.

Part II begins with an overview of the development of what Koch calls "inter-sex discourses" from medical writings in the 1950s...

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