Defiant Bodies: Discourses on Intersex, 1573-2003

This 1614 book entitled “On the nature of the monstrous births of hermaphrodites” features an illustration called “Hermaphrodites Transporting the Injured,” which was reprinted from an earlier 1591 publication by Johann Theodor de Bry. The image, which depicts Native Americans carrying the injured on stretchers, demonstrates some of the early associations between race and intersex identity, namely how racialized bodies were stereotyped as having different physical sex characteristics than white colonizers. In the encounters of white, European colonizers with Native American and African peoples, genital difference was associated with primitiveness. Exaggerated descriptions of the bodies of colonized people, especially African women, were used to justify the violent oppression of colonialism and influenced later medical, scientific, and philosophical discussions of women and intersex people of color.