Introduction

The term ‘sex/gender self-determination’ will be important throughout the book. Scholars have been exploring self-determination in relation to individuals’ minority and majority identities, colonial and postcolonial nation building, citizenship, healthcare, pedagogy and more. These fields of literature are not impervious to theoretical changes. One stark omission in earlier debates has been in relation to sex/gender self-determination. It is as if this is an impossibility and that sex/gender is an inherent given. However, the concept increasingly crops up in the literature about intersex bodies, and also in relation to sexed/gendered bodies, in medicine more generally. When intensities of power shift through human and non-human bodies, that are either supportive of, or a challenge to, (a) people's self-determination, we begin to see nuanced conceptual changes in the literature. We can use these analytical conceptualizations as ‘types’ within a particularly Deleuzian form of empiricism and ethics to talk about differing levels of ‘self-determination’ as ‘desire’ if, indeed, we believe that there is such a thing in the first place. The ‘types’ of literature help us attend to an examination of the principle of self-determination on micro and macro planes of immanence and at all the levels between.

This chapter takes as its starting point the ways in which our bodies are produced and are sites of production. The dimensions of ‘sexual difference’ have been key cornerstones in how we produce, and how particular people are given, the power to sex/gender bodies, resulting in a context that has come to be understood as essential to life itself. While many think sex/gender is fixed and unchanging, many others argue that sex/gender is mutable, an ever-changing, relational product, with connections manifested within productive assemblages. As such, I discuss the Deleuzian framework that I will draw on throughout the book in this chapter, while working through several ways that sex and gender, and sex/gender, have been conceptualized and related to cis, trans, gender expansive and intersex people. Sexual difference and sex/gender is, as Braidotti (1994) suggests, a game of priorities played out in relation to our own cultural survival.