CONTEXT:
This image was reprinted on Alice Dreger's personal website, which states that Dreger focuses her research and writing on ethical issues within medicine and science. The image above was originally created by Kiira Triea, cited as being one of the founders of the intersex rights movement. The "Phall-O-Meter" resembles a ruler and was created as a satirical look at how surgeons make decisions regarding the sex of babies with ambiguous or intersex genitals.
Course Reading:
In organizing 'cells', 'places' and 'ranks', the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation; they carve out individual segments and establish operational links; they mark places and indicate values; they guarantee the obedience of individuals, but also a better economy of time and gesture. They are mixed spaces: real because they govern the disposition of buildings, rooms, furniture, but also ideal, because they are projected over this arrangement of characterizations, assessments, hierarchies (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 148).
Analysis:
Foucault argues that creating ranks and structures also creates “spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical.” In the creation of the Phall-O-Meter, these spaces are all seen. While the Phall-O-Meter was created for satirical purposes, the basis behind the idea is true: surgeons do have standards (these standards may be formed through personal belief or a set precedence in the medical realm) by which they determine whether a baby with ambiguous genitalia should be a boy or a girl. The Phall-O-Meter is architectural in the sense that it provides scaffolding and structure for defining gender; the three colors indicate the three cases on the ruler, with remarks that provide further knowledge about gender and the way the patriarchal United States society perceives it. This architecture leads into the ruler’s function: the set categories of length provide the surgeon with guidance on how to proceed with children who fall into the purple (literally a mix of boy blue and girl pink) area on the ruler. Lastly, this classification of differing genital lengths is organized into a hierarchy, as noted by the remarks that span the length of the ruler. The pink section is the smallest section on the ruler, spanning only 0.9cm and is noted with “Just A GIRL.” The purple section is 1.6cm in length and has an urgent “SURGERY! FIX IT QUICK!” and the blue section takes up the rest of the 3-inch ruler, each half-inch is denoted with a different phrase: “Just squeeks by!” “Whew. OK.” “Texan!” and “Wow! SURGEON!” The differences in phrases create a hierarchy of gender, creating a space that can “mark places and indicate values.” The pink girl section is qualified with “just a girl,” signifying that girls are nothing special, but do not need surgical fixing. The blue boy section is marked by relief (“Whew!”), then compliments: “Texan!” and “Wow!” praise the child for his penis size, and validate his body as being correct and accepted. However, and perhaps most importantly, the urgency of the purple, intersex section indicates that this length is inappropriate, unnatural, and needs fixing, which in turn invalidates the bodies of intersex individuals. Overall, the Phall-O-Meter is a critique on medical practices that hide and erase intersex bodies, and its representation of the medical discourse surrounding genital corrective surgery resonates with Foucault’s ideas about classification and control of bodies.