The Bell Scholar

Each year the student who produces the best research dissertation for the MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies will be awarded the title of Bell Scholar in recognition of outstanding scholarship. We are enormously grateful for the support and guidance of the people at the heart of the Centre's development, Lady Primrose and Sir David Bell.

The Bell Scholar 2023-24: Dr Sarah Knaus

We are delighted to announce that Dr Sarah Knaus has been awarded the title of Bell Scholar 2023-24 in recognition of her outstanding research dissertation, Intersex Guidelines in the UK and Germany: A Feminist Analysis, which received the highest Distinction mark on the MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies 2023-24.

Many congratulations to Sarah on this great achievement!

Abstract:

The medical care of infants born with atypical sex characteristics sits at a peculiar ideological intersection. While many practitioners hold biologically essentialist views on sex development, the history of intersex medical management also illustrates the ways in which the sexed body is socially constructed. In practice, this meant that children born with differences or disorders in sex development (DSD) were often subjected to non-consensual, invasive procedures in the name of sex assignment. The fields of pediatric endocrinology and surgery have since undergone reforms, centering open communication and family support while delaying surgical interventions. However, surgical corrective practices are still widespread, demonstrating that the underlying ideological conflict has not changed in a substantial way. Utilizing a critical discourse analysis methodology, my thesis explores current medical work on sex and gender by analysing the latest intersex guidelines from Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) through a poststructuralist and feminist lens. Comparing the two texts, I come to the conclusion that it is indeed possible for a medical guideline to trouble normative ideas on sex and gender. I demonstrate that the working group behind the German guidelines was evidently open to expanding discursive authority by including a multidisciplinary, diverse list of co-authors in their publication. In doing so, they showcase how medical writing can disrupt hegemonic ideologies by embracing both the contradictions and the textual heterogeneity that result from democratization of discourse. This analysis offers a unique contribution in its empirical findings on the importance of language, interdisciplinarity, and inclusion for processes of resignification and change. Studying medical intersex discourse has implications beyond patient management. It can reveal both the power and possibility inherent in guidelines as performative speech acts, as well as the ways in which sex and gender are constructed in medical discourse.