Intersex: A Perilous Difference

Long a figure of spectacular epic imagination appearing in the central cosmological and philosophical literatures extending as far back as the Hellenic texts, hermaphrodites have been made to bear the burden of cultural anxieties regarding sexual difference and the transgression of boundaries separating male from female, men from women, in a strained binary system. As threatening evidence that sex is not the natural basis upon which oppositional gender roles are built, the intersexed are made to disappear into normative categories, thus aligning once again the rightful place of male and female as opposites.