Binarytech in Motion: Intersex Persons in the Binary Lawscape

In this text, we are mapping how law and its adjudication have an active role in how both matter (bodies) and meaning (binary sexgender) enable and constrain the emergence of legal subjectivity as a material-discursive phenomenon. Through analysing the decision of M v. France of the European Court of Human Rights, we address how legal subjectivity can be understood as an entanglement that emerges from intra-actions: of enactments of differences between law, court reasoning, body matter, binary discourses, and space. Our analysis demonstrates how the law prescribes material consequences on the level of bodies that are deemed “abnormal”. We argue that understanding these practices as material-discursive, without giving precedence either to matter or meaning, aids in elaborating the ways in which not only law but also power, matter and space affect intersex persons, or anyone, who does not conform to the binary lawscape of male/female. BinaryTech methodology mobilised in the article illustrates how law and binaries become expressed in and through bodies and how the sexgender hierarchy becomes an ontological part of legal subjectivity through matter and discourse.