10

The long history of the medical representations and definitions of hermaphroditism is essentially that of a quest for a natural foundation for sexual identity, a foundation that could not be found, applying a series of criteria one more fallible than the next: genitals, gonads, hormones, chromosomes.... Ultimately, only gender, i.e. only a social norm, paradoxically enough, came to be used to naturalize human bodies into two distinct types: male and female. By studying cases of medical treatment of intersexuality this article shows how a theoretical crisis, in this case that of the “sexing” of the body, can play a different function from the one commonly ascribed to it, that of theoretical destabilization. On the contrary, a state of crisis can prove a factor of relative stability. In this sense the crisis of sex determination reveals the historical dimension of gender relations: as a theoretical regime, crisis is the very expression of the historicity of a relation of domination that evolves, mutates and must constantly redefine its system of categorization to ensure the requisite conditions for its own reproduction.