Abstract
Procedures and apparatuses of governmentality function by means of labelling certain people as 'normal' while rendering others of little value. This can be understood from the bio-political framework propounded by Foucault (1990, 2003). The rationale offered is often accorded not only to the idea of catering to the population' but also gearing towards creating a nation-state of healthy, non-disabled people capable of contributing effectively to the nations' worth. The paper looks at the manner in which inter-sex people who do not fit in within the linear logic of the sex binary, get signified within these normalisation processes and are constructed as 'abnormal' and in need of fixing through corrective surgeries and other alterations. People with disabilities are also similarly constructed as 'abnormal' and 'deviant' The paper juxtaposes discourses of inter-sexuality and disability to analyse ways in which inter-sex people are mistakenly constructed as disabled within international and national laws, and thus stereotyped as non-productive. The objective is to understand the state logic of categorisation into the 'normals' and 'abnormals'
Custom Citation
Arpita Das, 'A Bio-Political Perspective on Intersexuality and Disability in Discourses of Law' (2014) 10(2) Socio-Legal Review 21.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.55496/IXBO5921
