Jarring bodies: thoughts on the display of unusual anatomies.

This past April I woke up suddenly from a frightening yet laughable little dream in which I couldn’t breathe because Governor John Engler, dressed in a power suit, was sitting on my naked chest. My dreams have always been this transparent; they would bore a psychotherapist. I knew immediately when I awoke what this dream was about. The next day I had an appointment with a professional photographer who was going to take a picture of me, bare except for my wedding ring on my left ring finger and a hospital bracelet around my right wrist. After he developed the picture in black and white—assuming I didn’t chicken out—he would use PhotoShop to make three changes: impose a stark measurement grid behind me, black out my eyes with a rectangular band, and blur what my mate, Aron, calls “the naughty bits.” This picture would then be used for an anthology I was editing about the medical treatment of people born intersexed—the kind of people who used to be called hermaphrodites. I wanted to use this picture to make a point about the difference it makes whether people (including doctors and medical students) see intersexed people primarily the way medical books show them, or the way intersexed people see themselves. The volume, Intersex in the Age of Ethics, includes autobiographies of living intersexed people, and accompanying many of the autobiographies are photos of the authors looking like “normal” people [1]. They are shown with their