Thesis ID: CBB001567298

The Birth of Gender: Clinical Encounters with Hermaphroditic Children at Johns Hopkins (1940--1956) (2011)

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Eder, Sandra (Author)


Comfort, Nathaniel C.
Walkowitz, Judith
Johns Hopkins University


Publication Date: 2011
Edition Details: Advisor: Comfort, Nathaniel C., Walkowitz, Judith.
Physical Details: 368 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation analyzes the clinic as one of multiple twentieth-century sites in which knowledge about gender was produced. Specifically, it interrogates clinical definitions of gender and their emergence through clinical practices such as diagnoses, treatment, and management. In the early 1950s, the concept of "gender role" was formulated at the Pediatric Endocrinology Clinic at Johns Hopkins's Harriet Lane Home as a means to help physicians address the physiological and psychological complexities of "hermaphroditic," or intersex children, most of whom had a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Pioneering scholarship has revised our understanding of the emergence of the concept of "gender role" and the treatment of intersex children by revealing the significant ways in which sex was medicalized in the twentieth century. Yet no one has assessed the role clinical practices and the complex fabric of clinical encounters between physicians, patients, and their families has played in the coining and developing of "gender role." This project shifts the focus of previous research from John Money to Lawson Wilkins and consequently from the psychological study of intersexuality to clinical practices around CAH. Using 25 of the clinic's patient records, archival materials, and published case studies, this dissertation recreates the world of doctors, patients, and their families as they made sense of the notions of health and disease, and of masculinity and femininity. Gender role emerged out of the clinic's need for a practicable solution for what was perceived as an endocrinological, social, and psychological problem. The close reading of the patient records reveals normalization as a process, in which treating somatic effects and assuring psychological health were deeply enmeshed in the conviction that a normal life was only possible as a clearly gendered and sexed person. Finding and adjusting to the optimal gender role was folded into the management of CAH as one aspect of successful treatment and on a long list of physical and psychological markers to be checked in the process of normalization. As such, the project contributes to the history of gender and provides a new approach to exploring modern patient records and clinical practices in the mid-twentieth century.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 73/05, Nov 2012. Proquest Document ID: 925784692.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567298/

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Authors & Contributors
Vázquez García, Francisco
Reis, Elizabeth
Eder, Sandra
Cleminson, Richard
Karkazis, Katrina
Epstein, Randi Hutter
Concepts
Gender identity
Medicine and gender
Science and gender
Sex differences
Androgyny; hermaphroditism
Psychology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
17th century
Early modern
20th century, late
Places
Spain
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
England
Barcelona (Spain)
Americas
United States
Institutions
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins Hospital
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