Guidotto, Nadia, PhD student

By Katherine Harrison on 21 May | 0 comments

GEXcel project: The XY-white man’s burden of re/building the gender empire: the colonization of intersex bodies

Historical and contemporary logics of Empire infuse many sites, including authoritative sites like law and medicine.  These logics, unfortunately, contain an often violent adherence to gender binaries as well as intersecting processes of racialization, classism and heteronormativity.  When we consider the case of intersexuality, for example, we can see how all of these structures support one another in maintaining a hierarchy of bodies to the exclusion of some bodies and to the benefit of others.  In my project, I will examine colonial notions of the border, mapping, processes of enlarging empire/penises, and the body as spectacle to draw connections between our imperial past and contemporary medical treatments of intersex people.  I will further draw on these logics and trace them through more contemporary legal and medical discourses to, first, shed light on how gender in the context of intersexuality has been, and continues to be, constructed and regulated; and second, help explain why bodies that exist outside the binary gender system create anxiety and elicit violence as a result.

Biographical notes:

Nadia Guidotto, MA, LLM, is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her PhD work examines the role that medical and legal frameworks play in the regulation of intersexuality, both in historical and contemporary contexts. She has published various articles and presented at a number of conferences on sexuality and gender-related issues.  Last year, she held internships at the United Nations, Division for the Advancement of Women and at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission in New York. This year, she has been selected to participate at the Canadian Institute for Health Research Inaugural Summer Institute on Gender and Health, the University of Bologna’s Interfacing the Sciences and Humanities program, as well as the Summer Program on Human Rights in the Netherlands (The Hague) and Belgium (Leuven).    Nadia is the recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarship at both master and doctoral levels.