[Somean] Invitation to Ashlee Dauphinais's dissertation defense

[Babel, Anna M.]

You are cordially invited to




Guerreiras: Linguistic and Social Practices Among Women with Turner Syndrome in Brazil

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense by Ashlee Dauphinais
Department of Spanish & Portuguese
The Ohio State University

Monday, April 12th, 1:00-3:00 pm EDT
Via Zoom

https://osu.zoom.us/j/95903992777?pwd=aVhuOFZ1dVRUdS9UYzVBaWhQMHF4dz09


Abstract:

This dissertation is a mixed-methods ethnographic study of how local understandings of femininity interact with medical practices among women with Turner Syndrome (TS), an intersex chromosomal condition affecting 1/2,500 women. For intersex individuals, social experiences of gender often collide with biological interpretations of sex and its material realities. Innovations in medical technology push the limitations of bodily manipulation and gendered norms and can mitigate tensions between the biological and the social experiences of gender. This intersection of the social and the biological is particularly salient in intersex populations. For those with TS, medical practices often have profound physiological and social effects. While previous research in anthropology and public health has investigated social categories and their effects on health, few examine how health and medicine affect social identity formation. In Brazil, this is amplified as bodies are prominent both in the public eye and in national discourses on beauty, surgery, and hormones, where biomedicine is used to negotiate gendered bodily norms.

This research speaks to a broader move in sociocultural linguistics and the field of language and gender to explore practices of non-binary communities. Little has been studied, however, about intersex populations and the role of the body in shaping linguistic and social practices. In this vein, previous research in public health has examined the effect of social categories on health, yet less is known about how healthcare affects such social identities. In Brazil, where bodies are prominent both physically in the public eye and in national discourses on beauty, surgery, and hormones, biomedicine is increasingly used to establish and negotiate bodily gendered norms. As the first in-depth ethnographic study of linguistic practices among intersex individuals, my dissertation’s central contribution is its analysis of what it means to be “almost” female in Latin America in an age of rapid biomedical advances.

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