The use of discursive techniques as a means of objectification of marginalized groups
faceless people
by Curtis E. Hinkle
The purpose of this essay is to analyze the texts on the website of ISNA, the most visible organization in the field of intersex, in order to understand the different discursive techniques that the organization uses consciously or unconsciously that reduce very subjects of their discourse to silence.
Here is a summary of different techniques that I will address in this analysis:
1. There is no noun (name) used to (on) intersex (e).
2. Preponderance of blogs by people who are not intersex.
3. Almost exclusive concentration on the body
4. Total refusal to consider gender as an important issue for intersex (e) s.
5. Infantilization continual
6. Proliferation of medical discourse
After reading the articles on their site, I noticed that the total absence of a noun or name for people who are the object of their discourse is the most flagrant offense resulting from their way of controlling language to objectify and marginalize intersex (e) s. How is this possible? If you are talking about have no names, to name a noun, it gives the impression that the objects you are talking about have no substance, they are of no consequence. Otherwise, we create a name, a noun to categorize the subject of discussion. Instead of using a name like intersex (e), or the old term hermaphrodite, which is not biologically correct, but has great historical significance as name or category for us, we are constantly referred to as children or people with intersex, which requires us to disappear again in one of two categories of male / female that our bodies challenged first.
The refusal to use a name or create one that many intersex (s) agree dehumanizes the real subjects of their speeches because we must be willing to be seen through the prism of binary male or female before become the subject of discussion. It is an erasure and we disappear into a vacuum to become people without faces, the object that never dares to name.
However, if you analyze the text of the site you arrive at this conclusion, that is to say, there is no name for us on this site. That way, people who want to talk to us as objects have all the power discourse and the technique of objectification which supports all other result.
One other discursive techniques that represent the intersex (e) as an object without being able to do is to defer to others, especially women who do intersex is not talking to us. If you look at the site, almost all blogs on the site are controlled by women who speak for us but who are not intersex. In this way, the subject of their discourse is still a subject which we speak and never direct voice as narrator actual speech.
Thus, we can fix the attention of the reader to the body without ever talking to the person in the body in question. When it comes to us is almost always in our body, another form of objectification and to immobilize the object, it precludes any discussion of gender by stating it's a question that is not important to us. However, almost always (te) s and intersex (s) with whom I have spoken have told me that gender issues are very important for her / them. But if you start talking like that, we begin to humanize the subject and we must address the taboo subject of this site, the identity of people are talking about. If it gives identity to the subject, we risk losing control of speech and others could more easily ask you to explain why these are people who are not intersexed who speak for us all the time and why they exert so much control with words, definitions of topics without leaving their site about the subjects themselves of their identities, their experiences in a society that has no place for them.
Another technique is the discursive continuing infantilisation of intersex (e). By that I mean that most of all discussions on the site talks about us as children. This is important. But by focusing attention on a small child still, it gives the impression that we need others to speak as a child is not able to speak. If intersex (s) talked about their own lives as adults, we should make every issue of definitions, terms and all the talk about this site because it would be more obvious that the subjects in question here on their site are almost entirely absent.
And finally, the proliferation of medical discourse that fixes attention on the pathology of subjects undermines all the efforts of our emancipation from the institution which aims to erase us. The purpose of the medicalization of intersex (s) is to make us disappear. The normalization of our bodies and our gender are used to protect the status quo because our lives would destabilize the entire binary system.
These discursive techniques dehumanizes us and we returned (s) people without faces we have found in medical texts when we were young and we wept to see our own bodies exhibited as freaks. Voiceless, faceless, without a place. We hid (e) s and the shame continues.
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