Gender Identity and the Performativity of Language ―The Rhetoric of Trauma in Diagnostic Medicine―
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Medical conversation over gender identity and homosexuality may belong to the realm of rhetoric, rather than a purely scientific exercise. The language of biological essentialism, this essay argues, still involves certain interpretations of reality and sexual differences and even contributes to the development of an idea of unity and stability about a person. By arguing so, this essay calls attention to the potential complexity of the act-person analysis in Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of rhetoric. While the new rhetoric distinguishes the techniques and procedures of non-demonstrative arguments from those of formal logic and science, medical documents and hygienic discourses may occasionally turn out to be argumentative rather than purely demonstrative in presenting a concept of a stable, unified, and even “normal” personhood. For example, the construction of childhood sexuality is affected by the rhetoric of human biology and diagnostic medicine, whose means of proof, this essay claims, consists not entirely in formal demonstration but in practice hinges on a discursive enforcement of a norm, a performative use of normative language. In this case, gender atypicality and sexual differences in children represent not merely a function of the person but also manifestations of the rhetoric of trauma in clinical pathology and diagnostic medicine.
Abstract
Medical conversation over gender identity and homosexuality may belong to the realm of rhetoric, rather than a purely scientific exercise. The language of biological essentialism, this essay argues, still involves certain interpretations of reality and sexual differences and even contributes to the development of an idea of unity and stability about a person. By arguing so, this essay calls attention to the potential complexity of the act-person analysis in Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory of rhetoric. While the new rhetoric distinguishes the techniques and procedures of non-demonstrative arguments from those of formal logic and science, medical documents and hygienic discourses may occasionally turn out to be argumentative rather than purely demonstrative in presenting a concept of a stable, unified, and even “normal” personhood. For example, the construction of childhood sexuality is affected by the rhetoric of human biology and diagnostic medicine, whose means of proof, this essay claims, consists not entirely in formal demonstration but in practice hinges on a discursive enforcement of a norm, a performative use of normative language. In this case, gender atypicality and sexual differences in children represent not merely a function of the person but also manifestations of the rhetoric of trauma in clinical pathology and diagnostic medicine.
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