This session will explore the achievements, thinking, and style of the early intersex movement – which since its origins in the feminist challenges to clinical science in the early 1990s has transformed our understanding of those who live at the ‘fuzzy margins’ of sexual difference.
This lecture from Juliana and subsequent discussion (with a locally based intersex advocate) introduces archival material from the earliest intersex organising – from protest photographs to underground zines to a VHS tape titled “Hermaphrodite Speak!” This material from the 1990s will be compared with intersex advocacy as it continues today (for both commonality and contrasts).
Juliana’s recent history Hermaphrodite Logic (released last summer, with Verso Books) aims to capture both the abrasive and numbed quality of early intersex advocacy – which eschewed shock tactics in favour of a colder mode of reason, and worked through entangled coalitions (rather than firm appeals to fixed identity.) Instead of adopting straightforward appeals to sympathies from their audiences, intersex advocates instead sought to demonstrate their fluency in medical terminology, that had previously been used to dominate them (through their often bewildered families).
Why did intersex people come to argue in this dispassionate, yet trollish, style? What were the lasting consequences for the history of sex? This session aims to figure that out, and more!
Juliana Gleeson is a writer from West London, who now lives in East Berlin. After co-editing the pioneering anthology Transgender Marxism, her debut Hermaphrodite Logic provided a history of intersex liberation (from 1990-2025).
She is currently working on three books: a philosophy of the feminine with Listening Like A Girl (Pluto Press), a collection of dialogues offering glimpses of sex: Inner Secretions, and an anti-colonial exploration of lesbian uprisings: Dyke Dialectics (with Alex Adamson).
With her writing focusing on topics ranging from to gay history, to lesbian poetry, to comparative psychology, to mystical theology, to intersex aesthetics, to expressive philosophy, to sea life, to revolutionary thought, Juliana has toured worldwide as both a political thinker and stand-up comic.
Juliana has also been closely involved with running varied night-time events for around a decade. Most recently: she was a founder of Whole Festival’s DTF tent, and now runs Whole Talks with Ben Miller, and the monthly Sonntags SM Munch.
This event will be held in spoken English spoken language. Admission: Free!
This event is part of the series “A History of Sneaking,” a series of talks on inter* history by Juliana Gleeseon, Jako Wende, and River Roux. A project of the Schwules Museum Berlin.
Bild: ILGA-Europe, Protect Inter Children