I met Ashley for the first time at the RIT graduate research symposium in in the in the Summer of 2011. The event is a day of 15-minutes research presentations, with several adjudicators invited from the community. Although there were many technical innovations at the symposium, my fellow Jury members and I found ourselves discussing Ashley’s topic over the entire lunch break. The question of sexual identity touches on so many disciplines; including psychology, biology, chemistry, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and pedagogy. The conversation of Intersex will occur more frequently as our gender-based social institutions begin accepting or rejecting individuals based on their sexual presentation.
Ashley is in the final year of her undergraduate philosophy degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her sophomore year she discovered the field of Science, Technology, and Society, in which she began studying the “problem” of the intersex. This subsequently led to an independent study in which she began the work that has led her here today. Recently she was awarded a competitive research fellowship at R.I.T. for undergraduate research and presented at an international conference on sexuality hosted in Madrid by the International Association for Studies of Sexuality, Culture, and Society.
