Genital Killjoys and Crip Embodiment

Abstract This essay is an inquiry into the narrative of happiness in intersex management and the American imaginary in the post–World War II era in the United States. Beginning with the profound importance of happiness as evidence of sexual and gendered rehabilitation for young intersex patients, medical specialists produced a discourse of happiness for patients and parents to follow. Intersex bodies that did not produce happiness, owing to their refusal to sexually cohere, were discursive blocks to happiness and insults to the sexually normative body that could have been. Following the feminist work of Sara Ahmed in The Promise of Happiness (2010), this essay originates the term genital killjoys to name intersex and crip outsiders who may, through crip willfulness and queer attachments, become untethered from the discourse of happiness.