De-gender:
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Starting from the 2006 Consensus Statement on Disorders of Sex Development (DSD), this article analyzes how diagnostic tools such as the Prader scale and sex testing function not only as medical instruments, but also as architectural mechanisms of classification. Drawing on decolonial and postcolonial feminist theory, we argue that the production of “scientific universality” constitutes a form of epistemic coloniality and of continuous maiming (the right to maim), where embodied difference is pathologized and regulated according to racial, cis-normative, and techno-scientific standards. In the postwar decades, figures such as Andrea Prader and institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation, together with a broader state–corporate framework, promoted a scientific model of “universality” aligned with the urban vision of Constantinos Doxiadis’s Ecumenopolis, conceived as a technical management of the “Third World.” In line with Talcott Parsons’s functionalist schema, which cast American society as the superior and “functional” model for global stability during the Cold War, Ecumenopolis emerged as an imaginary mechanism of control and obedience to the American mode of world organization. Within this imaginary, we propose that gender can be understood as Ecumenogender: a constructed gender, embedded in the colonial interpretation of nature through masculinity–femininity and the production of a “Third” gender-genus. The article situates the management of social and biological sex within the broader assemblage of pétro-sexo-racial capitalism, calling for the abolition of gender identity as a point of epistemic rupture and communal re-existence.
Source: Culture-Borders-Gender/Studies
Authors: Tzanaki, Demetra, Georgopoulou, Ourania
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7127322382
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