An eye-opening exploration of the medical origins of gender in modern US history. Today, a world without “gender” is hard to imagine. Gender is at the center of contentious political and social debates, shapes policy decisions, and informs our everyday lives. Its formulation, however, is lesser known: Gender was first used in clinical practice. This book tells the story of the invention of gender in American medicine, detailing how it was shaped by mid-twentieth-century American notions of culture, personality, and social engineering. Sandra Eder shows how the concept of gender transformed from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. Following gender outside the clinic, she reconstructs the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the 1970s. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and the route by which gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. In historicizing the emergence of the sex/gender binary, Eder reveals the role of medical practice in developing a transformative idea and the interdependence between practice and wider social norms that inform the attitudes of physicians and researchers. She shows that ideas like gender can take on a life of their own and may be used to question the normative perceptions they were based on. Illuminating and deeply researched, the book closes a notable gap in the history of gender and will inspire current debates on the relationship between social norms and medical practice.
...More
Article
Sandra Eder;
(2018)
Gender and Cortisone: Clinical Practice and Transatlantic Exchange in the Medical Management of Intersex in the 1950s
(/isis/citation/CBB390437615/)
Article
Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst;
Luna Dolezal;
(2018)
Cosmetic Surgery as "Cut-Up": The Body and Gender in Breyer P-Orridge's Pandrogeny
(/isis/citation/CBB410641240/)
Book
Greta LaFleur;
Masha Raskolnikov;
Anna Kłosowska;
(2021)
Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern
(/isis/citation/CBB256213398/)
Article
M. Hicks;
(2019)
Hacking the Cis-tem
(/isis/citation/CBB071329740/)
Article
Julie Walsh;
(2020)
Confusing Cases: Forrester, Stoller, Agnes, Woman
(/isis/citation/CBB971156075/)
Book
Peter Hegarty;
(2017)
A Recent History of Lesbian and Gay Psychology: From Homophobia to LGBT
(/isis/citation/CBB004668896/)
Article
Boel Berner;
Maria Björkman;
(July 2017)
Modernizing the flow of blood: Biomedical technicians, working knowledge and the transformation of Swedish blood centre practices
(/isis/citation/CBB596544906/)
Book
stef m shuster;
(2021)
Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender
(/isis/citation/CBB911591244/)
Book
Reis, Elizabeth;
(2009)
Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
(/isis/citation/CBB001020415/)
Article
Rupert, James L.;
(2011)
Genitals to Genes: The History and Biology of Gender Verification in the Olympics
(/isis/citation/CBB001250798/)
Article
Newcombe, Suzanne;
(2007)
Stretching for Health and Well-Being: Yoga and Women in Britain, 1960--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB000850167/)
Chapter
Sorin, Claire;
(2011)
Anatomy of the Female Angel or Science at the Service of Woman in Woman and Her Era by Eliza Farnham
(/isis/citation/CBB001221548/)
Thesis
Maybrey, Catherine R.;
(2005)
From Onanism to Orgasm: Masturbation, Medicine and Gender in America, 1646--1953
(/isis/citation/CBB001561916/)
Article
David Andrew Griffiths;
(February 2018)
Shifting syndromes: Sex chromosome variations and intersex classifications
(/isis/citation/CBB048462131/)
Article
Millard, Chris;
(2013)
Making the Cut: The Production of “Self-Harm” in Post-1945 Anglo-Saxon Psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB001252840/)
Article
Loss, Christopher P.;
(2011)
“Women's Studies Is in a Lot of Ways---Consciousness Raising”: The Educational Origins of Identity Politics
(/isis/citation/CBB001220669/)
Article
Sam Fernández-Garrido;
Rosa M. Medina-Domenech;
(2020)
‘Bridging the Sexes’: Feelings, Professional Communities and Emotional Practices in the Spanish Intersex Clinic
(/isis/citation/CBB196479953/)
Chapter
Haigh, Thomas;
(2010)
Masculinity and the machine man
(/isis/citation/CBB001180016/)
Book
Susanne Schmidt;
(2020)
Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché
(/isis/citation/CBB761025564/)
Article
Susanne Schmidt;
(2018)
The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA
(/isis/citation/CBB699307947/)
Be the first to comment!