Spectacles and Scholarship: Caster Semenya, Intersex Studies, and the Problem of Race in Feminist Theory

In this essay I use the case of Caster Semenya, a South African sprinter forced to undergo gender verification testing in 2008, as a point of entry for looking at the role that race and nation have historically played in the production and reproduction of the concept of intersex. I examine feminist scholars’ previous work on Semenya in order to highlight how their inattention to issues of race and nation made them unable to see the ways in which intersex—as a classificatory schema, an object of knowledge, and a technology of subject formation—contains within it a racially exclusive impulse. The essay examines the production and reproduction of the idea of intersex in two locations—the United States and South Africa—during three different time periods in order to show how ideas about race were written into the subject from its earliest conception. A number of other scholars have argued that intersex has played a key role in the production of ontological gender. I take this work a step further by showing how the issues of race and nation have factored into both the historical production and reproduction of intersex and, through that, have come to exert a powerful but hidden effect on gender as an object of analysis and conceptual tool.