Hermaphrodite Logic

Presentation of Juliana Gleeson: Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation (Verso Books 2025)

The anxiety surrounding sex seems to be reaching unprecedented heights by the minute. While the paranoid discourse surrounding Imane Khelif’s participation in the Olympics still reverberates, ‘gender-critics’ around the world are finding a new feminist icon in Trump’s declaration “that there are only two genders.” But as Juliana Gleeson shows in Hermaphrodite Logic, neither the anxious impulse to create and maintain sexual polarity nor forms of resistance to it are new.

In her debut book, Gleeson traces how the intersex movement has challenged the violent management of the sexual order. These struggles affect us all; understanding the birth of the intersex movement in the 1990s is necessary to grasp what sex will become in the rest of the 21st century.

Gleeson will read excerpts from the book and talk to Liola Mattheis (ZfL) about edgy 90s internet activism, limits of sex’s plasticity, its expressiveness, hermaphrodite literary strategies, and sexual politics after the (German) elections.