'Declining to describe': Intersex narratives and textual visibility

The increased visibility of intersex identity in the contemporary moment offers opportunities for legitimisation and understanding at the same time as it risks reinforcing a non-consensual display of bodies that are seen as ‘different’. I discuss here two novels—Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002) and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018)—which, in very different ways, address the withholding of knowledge, the policing of bodies and the sensationalising of difference that have characterised the real-life encounters of gender- and sex- variant subjects with medical authorities. The different connotations of exposing or hiding bodies and stories are dependent upon who is in charge of deciding what/when to reveal or to conceal. By examining the texts’ formal choices, I argue that novels can either repeat or challenge dynamics of exposure, surveillance, erasure and silencing through narrative acts of looking, hiding, speaking and revealing.