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Paper short abstract

Arguing for intersex epistemologies within queer and material feminist thought, my paper articulates the concept of "embo‑died‑ment" as an analytic lens that renders visible the tension between forms of necropolitical differential inclusion and embodied persistence.

Paper long abstract

Situated amid the resurgence of authoritarian formations in the Italian neo‑fascist landscape, increasingly invested in regulating social reproduction along racialized and gendered lines of selective exclusion, the paper analyzes how “normalizing” interventions on non‑dyadic bodies reveal differential regimes of care that reproduce hierarchies of desirability and livability.

Extending debates on desirability to intersex politics, the paper interrogates how the fantasy of protecting life legitimizes non‑consensual interventions on those deemed ‘ambiguously‘, ‘insufficiently‘ or ‘excessively‘ sexed. I argue that the medical, social, and political “correction” of non‑normative corporeality constitutes a mechanism of differential inclusion—granting recognition to some (normative‑sexed) bodies while producing (im)possibilities of existence over which bodies count as life.

Recent political/media discourses in Italy – such as the coverage of the 2024 Olympics vis-à-vis the Meloni government’s discourse of ‘protecting women athletes’ – reveal how the non‑dyadic body becomes a polarized site where expectations of normalcy, desirability, and life itself are continuously negotiated and constricted.

In this configuration, embo‑died‑ment emerges as a conceptual intervention grounded in non‑dyadic remembrance and intersex activism. Drawing on Berlant’s slow death (2011) and Raha’s trans‑Marxist elaboration (2017), it theorizes the necropolitical condition of non‑normative and intersex bodies under medical, social, and state normalization, shaping differential livabilities. Engaging feminist materialism, queer necropolitics, and intersex activist epistemologies, I situate this concept within a critique of racial capitalism and biopolitical governance, linking intersex struggles to broader intersectional contestations over which forms of life are permitted to exist, be desired, and be cared for.