Meet Our Researcher: Dr. Limor Meoded Danon

We would like to introduce you to Dr. Limor Meoded Danon who joined our academic faculty in 2020.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I was born and raised in Dimona in the 1980s, in the "Victory/נצחון" neighborhood (yes, that's the name) near the central bus station. This is a neighborhood that for me symbolized freedom, creativity, and playing; it was bustling with children and adults meeting and just spending time together. I was very sporty and sometimes I was mistaken (are you a boy or a girl?), and every time they made distinctions between boys and girls, it made me angry. Over time, the people I loved left the neighborhood and finally we did too. When I recently visited the neighborhood, it pained me greatly to see the neglect, as if time stood still and the sense of vitality was sucked away.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed of working for MTV and creating music programs, but when I was in the second year of my master's degree in communication, at Ben Gurion University, the dream changed. It happened when Prof. Uri Ram came to lecture at the departmental seminar. I was fascinated by his critical way of thinking, by the way he analyzes the "obvious" of science, of society, and I simply decided to follow his footsteps, literally. I followed him to the elevator and asked what I needed to do to study with him in the department.

My main research topic is the sociology of "different sexual development" (intersexuality, difference of sex development, Variation of sex characteristics). Superficially, this appears to be a marginal, point-specific field that deals with physical conditions in which the biological species is atypical, but in fact this field is infinite. It includes the sociology of the body, of gender, medical sociology, sociology of knowledge, and each of these fields touches every field of social life. Intersexuality embodies the tension between the limits of biological-medical knowledge and the human body; it reflects the characteristics and issues of the dominant medical culture; investigating intersexuality means learning about relationships between parents and children, between doctors and patients, between wo/men and their bodies, between body and gender; between technology and the body, between fertility and parenthood; between time and body and more.

One of my current research projects deals with the fertility journey of wo/men with different sexual development and the meaning of becoming parents for them. This topic developed from the previous studies I conducted that show the longing for fertility and parenthood, the difficulty of people with different sexual development to create an intimate relationship and the complex and tense relationships between them and their parents because of the decision-making that was done in their childhood, in relation to their bodies (surgical, hormonal intervention, hiding information). The study examines the meaning of parenthood and the physical, social, personal costs that wo/men in different parts of the world go through in their fertility journeys and in the journey to social parenthood. For example, I follow women who were born without a uterus and are waiting to undergo a uterus transplant in Israel and around the world, or who have undergone a uterus transplant and are trying to conceive. I meet wo/men who were born with a variety of sexual developments who struggled to become parents in different ways even though their environment did not believe that they would be parents.

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