Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives

This article serves as an introduction to the phenomena of transgender and intersex, contextualizes these fields of studies, and delineates the major aims of this research anthology, that being: to take both transgender and intersex positions into account and—instead of playing them off against each other—to ask about commonalities and strategic alliances, in terms of knowledge, theory, philosophy, art, and life experience. The aim is to strike a balance between work on literature, film, photography, law, sports, and general theory, bringing together humanistic approaches with social science approaches and integrating lenses for studying gender. Further, this introduction argues that what is needed is a non-hierarchical, multi-perspective approach that endeavors to overcome the limitations of sex and gender research within the disciplines and fields of studies mentioned above by asking how transgender and intersex issues are negotiated and conceptualized from a variety of different points of view, what specific findings arise from there, and to what extent artistic and creative discourses offer their own uniquely relevant forms of knowledge and expression. The last part of this article introduces the reader to the different contributions, emphasizing how they relate to and communicate with each other