After many decades in which femininity, ‘female experience,’ and the social-political situation of women have formed the rightful foci of research, the male psyche and self have, at least since the 1980s, begun to receive attention in the US and UK academy. However, in most European countries masculinity studies are still the exception, and in comparison to the importance of gender studies they represent a minority interest in the field of gender research worldwide. Due to the relative lack of communication and exchange among the various disciplines dealing with masculinity, no consensus has been reached about the role that biological determinism, anthropological, evolutionary, and socio-historical factors, and representations as well as images of masculinity circulating in the cultural imaginary actually play in the construction of masculinity. Thus masculinity is still a highly problematic and controversial field of study that is located at the intersection of the humanities and the arts, the social sciences and natural science. This chapter begins by critically taking stock of the images of masculinity presented in the media in the early twenty-first century; it then offers a short survey of current approaches to and concepts in masculinity studies, ranging from a survey of US American perspectives and Raewyn Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity to recent European approaches and theories. This is followed by a discussion of topics that are still unresolved by masculinity studies, such as the notion and importance of the body, female masculinities, and the question of whether there is something ‘queer’ about or within masculinity as such. In the conclusion, the chapter presents complementary, and up until now neglected, perspectives on masculinity and argues for rethinking masculinity with the help of concepts taken from intersectional, trans-, and interdisciplinary theories, the new field of comparative masculinity studies, and transgender and intersex studies. Masculinity studies as well as gender, transgender, queer, and intersex studies interest me because they ultimately revolve around more complex understandings of identity and subjectivity. Because of their inherent power to blur and question binaries, masculinity and sexuality studies are intimately linked to questions of epistemology (“What can we know?”) and insurgent forms of knowledge (“What are we allowed to know?”), as well as to the distribution of power and the marginalization of minorities within societies.

Using hauntology as a linchpin, this dissertation explores the undertheorized connection between intersex and disability. Building on important feminist research in the fields of intersex, queer, disability, crip, and hauntology studies, I ask, how do we understand and reconcile the contested meanings, responses to, and effects of intersex? Intersex is “a perpetually shifting phantasm” (Holmes 2002: 175), yet intersex is typically represented and treated as innate disorder, disability, or disease by medical professionals. That said, many intersex people appear to distance from disability. By engaging intersex studies with feminist disability and crip theories, however, I demonstrate that an intersex politic and intersex studies must be rooted in a disability politic and disability studies. Through a feminist disability and crip lens, I conduct a textual and critical discourse analysis of three case studies of interphobic violence or, what I term, “compulsory dyadism,” meaning the instituted cultural mandate that people cannot have intersex traits or house the “spectre of intersex” (Sparrow 2013: 29); such a spectre must be exorcised. The three case studies include nonconsensual medical interventions, sport sex testing, and employing reproductive technologies to select against intersex variations. My analyses of these case studies produce three important observations. First, intersex is presently and effectively being integrated into conventional notions of disability; second, ableist logics underpin interphobic violence; and third, compulsory dyadism is intertwined with, or is an iteration of, compulsory able-bodiedness. In recognizing this interconnection, theorizing intersex and disability together is not merely beneficial, doing so is necessary. Ultimately, my dissertation interrogates and extends questions of the ever-shifting categorization of body-minds, culturally mandated ways of being, and (the haunting effects of) pathologization. I apply pressure to the academic field of intersex studies as well as intersex activist and advocate communities to center disability in discussions concerning intersex human rights and interphobia.