The ambiguous beginning of life and the binary pattern – a phenomenological analysis of intersexual experience

Abstract

In my paper, I attempt a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of intersexuality, which I view from the perspective of the problem of indeterminacy concerning the horizon of the givenness of homeworld founded on the broader basis of the pre-givenness of lifeworld. These horizons define the structure of the sedimentation of subjective experience, as well as the layers of cultural meanings sedimented in the lifeworld. The sedimented layers of self-experience and of the shared lifeworld function as a sphere of indeterminacy, that is the horizons of constituted phenomena. In this sense all intentional acts have the nature of horizontal indeterminacy, the layers of which are revealed in the genetic question (Rückfrage) directed toward them. Horizontal indeterminacy also accounts for the distinction between homeworld and alienworld, which appears as something unobvious and unexpected against the obviousness of the homeworld, at the same time thematizing the latter. One of the elements of the sedimented conceptual system, functioning as the horizon of indeterminacy of both self-experience and the pre-reflective life-world, is the notion of human corporeality as given in the binary sexuality/gender. A unique opportunity for phenomenological insight into the constitution of the phenomenon of sex/gender is provided by Hida Viloria's lived experience of intersexuality. Her lived body, originally experienced pre-reflectively as a transparent medium and a perfectly handy tool of undisturbed intentionality, unproblematized also in the sexual activities, gradually undergoes alienation under the objectifying gaze determined by the binary pattern of sexuality. Becoming an alienated object, her body loses its transparency. Viloria begins to experience her corporeality and identity in a way determined by the sedimented "ideology" of sex and gender, trying on the "constructs" of masculine and feminine identities, eventually overcoming alienation and, in a process of secondary self-identification, reclaiming her lived body in its intersexuality and her identity in its non-binary gender fluidity.