Intersex persons are individuals who cannot be categorised into the rigid, normative definitions of either ‘male’ or ‘female’, thus presenting a challenge to the binary categorization of sex. Discourse on ‘intersex’ in contemporary India has been largely influenced by the West and heavily medicalized. Perceiving ‘intersex’ beyond the lens of biomedicine and situating it within the local socio-cultural, political and historical contexts is essential to understand intersex representations of the non-west. It is important to do so, to ensure the lived experiences and histories of intersex persons in India—who are otherwise categorised as transgender or perceived as ‘true-born’ hijras—are not erased or subjugated within a universal global discourse. This study is a result of a yearlong ethnographic research in the southern states of India that attempts to subvert the western understandings of ‘intersex’ by building on a narrative-based approach and storytelling by several intersex persons. Through this ethnographic research the nuances of the everyday experiences of living as an intersex person is highlighted apart from reflecting on the battles intersex persons face to make themselves visible in this society—that is structured on heteronormative and hegemonic forms of power. In this paper I draw attention to how intersex persons navigate extremely gendered spaces—of the private and the public realm, of the rural and urban contexts—and reclaim it through their representations of their intersex selves in their intersex bodies. I argue that their struggle for recognition and acceptance comes from the discourse they create around their bodies as being ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ as opposed to its warranted perception as ‘abnormal’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘abject’ or ‘diseased’. I argue that, intersex persons’ fight in claiming a political space for self-representation of this global idea of intersex, within local contexts, redefines and at some level subverts the normative notions of sex and gender.
