I argue here that critics of biological explanations of human nature are mistaken when they maintain that the truth of genetic determinism implies the end of critical evaluation and reform of our social institutions. Such a claim erroneously presupposes that our social values, practices, and institutions have nothing to do with what makes biological explanations troublesome. What constitutes a problem for those who are concerned with social justice is not the fact that particular behaviors might be genetically determined, but the (...) fact that our value system and social institutions create the conditions that make such behaviors problematic. (shrink)

“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for (...) critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion. (shrink)

Through a discussion of the way science has been used to address intersexuality, I explore an idea about how to understand science as objective and yet influenced by social, historical, and cultural factors. I propose that the Semantic View of theories provides a means of understanding how science describes reality, and I look at the way science has been used to distinguish the sexes to provide an illustration.

This paper argues that Article 8 of the ECHR, as applied to the protection of a person’s right to wear a headscarf, is an inappropriate locus for thrashing out arguments about the right to protection of religious freedom, and that Article 9 allows for a broader legal and political analysis of the multiple meanings and impacts of religion in our lives. However, the law should not prohibit women from wearing the headscarf. Legal regulation of the headscarf should be replaced with (...) robust political debate about the many diverse and intersecting ways in which it is possible to experience womanhood, sexuality, culture, religion, race, nationality and economic security in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

Bruce Lincoln suggests that myth is "that small class of stories that possess both credibility and authority". When studying the history of mythology we find that myths often are understood as something other people have—as if the group in question possesses the truth while others live by falsehoods. In examining contemporary North American society, we can see how Judeo-Christian narratives structure popular and medical discourses regarding sex and gender. The idea that humans are born into male and female, and male (...) and female only, is a deeply held belief—so much so that it appears as fact rather than belief. Anthropologists such as Serena Nanda and Will Roscoe have documented the cross-cultural and historical "gender variants" who exist in societies where three or more genders are the norm. The origin of the belief in two sexes could well be the opening verses of Genesis where the origin of the human species is described in bipolar, dimorphic forms: "… in the image of God He created them; male and female created He them". In the article I explore the mythology that underlies the clinical management of transgender children. (shrink)

In this critical, feminist account of the management of intersex conditions under 2006's controversial “Disorders of Sex Development” (DSD) treatment model, I argue that like the “Optimal Gender of Rearing” (OGR) treatment model it replaced, DSD aims at securing a cisgendered future for the intersex patient, referring to a normalized trajectory of development across the lifespan in which multiple sexed, gendered, and sexual characteristics remain in “coherent” alignment. I argue this by critically analyzing two ways that intersex management has changed (...) between OGR and DSD: 1) regarding sex‐assignment recommendations for three patient populations and, 2) with the prenatal treatment of pregnant individuals at risk of conceiving a fetus with congenital adrenal hyperplasia with the steroid hormone dexamethasone. I conclude that like OGR before it, DSD also unjustifiably presumes that typical genitalia are necessary for cisgendered development. However, unlike OGR, it appeals to the empirically inadequate, theoretically suspect, and biologically determinist model of gender development known as brain‐organization theory. Given this, I conclude that the treatment of intersex people under DSD continues to be driven by problematically heterosexist and transphobic assumptions regarding the value and normalcy of cisgendered life, while practically and discursively constituting it as such. (shrink)

Traditionally, Gender Studies differentiates between the term “sex”, indicating sex differences from the biological point of view, and the term “gender”, indicating that sex differences are social and cultural constructions. In this paper I discuss some recent neuroscientific theses concerning sexual differences to sketch a path of inquiry that goes beyond the logic of the separation of biological and cultural studies.

Over the last decade, humans have produced each year as much data as were produced throughout the entire history of humankind. These data, in quantities that exceed current analytical capabilities, have been described as “the new oil,” an incomparable source of value. This is true for healthcare, as well. Conducting analyses of large, diverse, medical datasets promises the detection of previously unnoticed clinical correlations and new diagnostic or even therapeutic possibilities. However, using Big Data poses several problems, especially in terms (...) of representing the uniqueness of each patient and expressing the differences between individuals, primarily gender and sex differences. The first two sections of the paper provide a definition of “Big Data” and illustrate the uses of Big Data in medicine. Subsequently, the paper explores the struggle to represent exhaustively the uniqueness of the patient through Big Data is highlighted prior to a deeper investigation of the digital representation of gender in personalized medicine. The final part of the paper put forward a series of recommendations for better approaching the complexity of gender in medical and clinical research involving Big Data for the creation or enhancement of personalized medicine services. (shrink)

Over the last decade, humans have produced each year as much data as were produced throughout the entire history of humankind. These data, in quantities that exceed current analytical capabilities, have been described as “the new oil,” an incomparable source of value. This is true for healthcare, as well. Conducting analyses of large, diverse, medical datasets promises the detection of previously unnoticed clinical correlations and new diagnostic or even therapeutic possibilities. However, using Big Data poses several problems, especially in terms (...) of representing the uniqueness of each patient and expressing the differences between individuals, primarily gender and sex differences. The first two sections of the paper provide a definition of “Big Data” and illustrate the uses of Big Data in medicine. Subsequently, the paper explores the struggle to represent exhaustively the uniqueness of the patient through Big Data is highlighted prior to a deeper investigation of the digital representation of gender in personalized medicine. The final part of the paper put forward a series of recommendations for better approaching the complexity of gender in medical and clinical research involving Big Data for the creation or enhancement of personalized medicine services. (shrink)

This paper characterizes a phenomenon I call ‘binarism grammatical lacuna’ (BGL). BGL occurs when non-binary sex and gender identities are forced to choose between being he or she by the grammar of a language owing to the sex/gender binary. Although hermeneutical injustice (HI) lies at its core, given that non-binary communities come up with hermeneutical devices to overcome unintelligibility and these tools are discredited, a variety of epistemic injustices, besides HI, intertwine in BGL. I address contributory injustice, pragmatic competence injustice, (...) testimonial injustice, and testimonial smothering. Section 1 introduces the phenomenon by portraying it as an ensemble of epistemic injustices. Section 2 elucidates the variety of HI at the core of BGL by examining the case of mainstream Spanish, and section 3 reveals it as producing the primary harm of HI. Section 4 studies the relationship between grammar, ideology, and language use, calling attention to the fact that grammatical lacunae are performatively reenacted in daily speech acts. Section 5 explores the agential dimension of BGL, examining responsibilities. In addition to addressing some of the forms of epistemic injustice that might intertwine in BGL besides HI, I portray non-marginalized users of binary grammar when addressing non-binary people as hermeneutical misfirers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the most important developments in twentieth-century rhetorical theory is Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's insight that concepts, when under strain, can be split or dissociated into two separate terms. Not a simple binary, these terms remain interconnected in a value hierarchy with one term serving as the normative frame for the other. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca theorize that either term can be dissociated further, producing a fan-type dissociation. Unlike ordinary dissociations, fan-types place three or more terms in hierarchical relationship, resulting (...) in unique rhetorical features. Fanning a dissociation can serve three basic rhetorical functions: purging undesirable elements, preserving less undesirable elements from total devaluation, and purifying desirable elements. Building on these basic functions, rhetors can perform complex rhetorical actions, from intensifying a dissociation's values to completely undoing a dissociation. Long ignored by theorists and critics, fan-types complicate our understanding of dissociation, argumentation, and value-based reasoning, and therefore deserve more scholarly attention. (shrink)

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.

This paper investigates the gendered and racialized discourse on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in India. A complex metabolic, endocrinal and reproductive disorder, PCOS is one of the most common endocrinopathies in women of reproductive age today. Due to an unclear etiology, there is no single clinical definition for PCOS, contributing to a sense of confusion around the syndrome. India has one of the highest rates of PCOS in the world. Medical and social discourses on PCOS suggest the high rates are due (...) to the failures of Westernized lifestyle and diet in women from developing countries. Taking the example of India, I argue that the lack of a clear etiology creates a discursive vacuum and that PCOS in itself is not a gendered and racialized syndrome, but the discourse on it is. Through the figure of the “new Indian woman,” I address the socio-political anxieties of nationalism projected onto the female body and suggest that the discourse on PCOS in India is in reaction to a rising nationalist rhetoric. As a syndrome that presents through “masculine” symptoms, PCOS acts a unique entryway into the intersectional issues of gender, race, sexuality, class and national identities. An analysis of the Indian setting might shed light on PCOS discourses that are increasingly relevant globally. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

At the end of their article, Earp, Sandberg, and Savulescu (2014) argue that commenters need to take seriously the moral status of the project, and suggest that it would be more productive to focus...

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke, one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies. This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments and (...) outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice. (shrink)

Gender staff in the World Bank -- the world's largest and most influential development institution -- have a policy problem. Having prioritised efforts to get women into paid employment as the ȁ8cure-allȁ9 for gender inequality they must deal with the work that women already do -- the unpaid labour of caring, socialisation, and human needs fulfilment. This article explores the most prominent policy solution enacted by the Bank to this tension between paid and unpaid work: the restructuring of normative heterosexuality (...) to encourage a two-partner model of love and labour wherein women work more and men care better. Through a case study of Bank gender lending in Ecuador I argue that staff are trying to (re)forge normative arrangements of intimacy, a policy preference that remains invisible unless sexuality is taken seriously as a category of analysis in development studies. Specifically, I focus on four themes that emerge from the attempt to restructure heteronormativity in the loan: (1) the definition of good gender analysis as requiring complementary sharing and dichotomous sex; (2) the Bank's attempt to inculcate limited rationality in women such that they operate as better workers while retaining altruistic attachments to loved ones; (3) the Bank's attempt to inculcate better loving in men, such that they pick up the slack of caring labour when their (partially) rational wives move into productive work, and; (4) the invocation of a racialised hierarchy resting on the extent to which communities approximate ideals of sharing monogamous partnership. Aside from providing clear evidence that the world's largest development institution is involved in micro-processes of sexuality adjustment alongside macro-processes of economic restructuring, I also critique the Bank's sexualised policy interventions and suggest that they warrant contestation. (shrink)

Feminist theorists have long looked to motherhood and mothering behaviour as an important site at which to examine women’s lives, gender inequality and the social construction of gendered institutions. One important line of theorisation has concerned itself with the de-essentialisation of motherhood, a project that I argue remains incomplete, as feminist theorisation of motherhood naturalises biological sex and therefore essentialises mothering as behaviour performed by ‘female bodies’ and fathering behaviour as performed by ‘male bodies’. Using two cases from a larger (...) qualitative interview project with LGBTQ parents, I show that current theories of motherhood fail to have explanatory power in cases – such as gay and transgender parents – when gendered embodiment and mothering (and/or fathering) fail to align as expected. I suggest that research related to queer parenting – particularly research on gay male co-parenting, on the experiences of transgender parents and their children, on non-white LGBTQ parents and on mothering from outside the nuclear family – will be especially fruitful in moving the de-essentialisation of mothering in new directions that will further contest heteronormative, cisnormative and nuclear assumptions about the family. (shrink)

This essay brings to bear insights from continental philosophers Michel Foucault and Judith Butler on the science of (homo)sexuality and, more importantly, the desire to use such science to resolve contemporary conflicts over homosexuality’s acceptability. So-called queer science remains deeply beholden to modern notions of sex, gender, and sexuality, the author argues, a schematic that its premodern (Christian) roots further denaturalize. The philosophical insights drawn from this analysis are then applied to the controversy over homosexuality within global Christianity that often (...) pits the backward former colonies against the modern west. (shrink)

The covid-19 pandemic has supposed a greater marginalization of sexual and gender minorities. This marginalization has been an effect both of the public management’s prioritization of the epidemiological situation, and of a generalized social backlash attributed to the unprecedented lockdown conditions. Within this framework, and among other vulnerable social collectivities, trans people have seen their testimonies particularly unaddressed and exempt of credibility. Group dynamics of reinforcement of categories, as well as the dissemination of fake news through the Internet and the (...) reactivation of outdated debates on legitimacy within the public sphere, have given rise to a generalized mistrust and polarization. The present text utilizes qualitative data obtained through a larger research project on accessibility of trans people to psychological services, to conflate barriers to health services, with infodemia on social media, social distancing, the uprising of conservative discourses, and minority stress. (shrink)

This article reviews the development of feminist studies during the latter quarter of the twentieth century, identifying initial themes in feminist theory and highlighting three major themes framing feminist scholarship today: the relationship between structure and agency; the intersection of race, class, and gender; and emerging studies of the political economy of sexuality. The article emphasizes the significance of understanding structured inequality, including new studies of sexuality and their relationship to race/class/gender stratification.

_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

Disability activists influenced by queer theory and advocates of “human enhancement” have each disputed the idea that what is “normal” is normatively significant, which currently plays a key role in the regulation of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Previously, I have argued that the only way to avoid the implication that parents have strong reasons to select children of one sex (most plausibly, female) over the other is to affirm the moral significance of sexually dimorphic human biological norms. After outlining the (...) logic that generates this conclusion, I investigate the extent to which it might also facilitate an alternative, progressive, opening up of the notion of the normal and of the criteria against which we should evaluate the relative merits of different forms of embodiment. This paper therefore investigates the implications of ideas derived from queer theory for the future of PGD and of PGD for the future of queerness. (shrink)

Despite tremendous advances in neuroscience, the topic “brain, sex and gender” remains a matter of misleading interpretations, that go well beyond the bounds of science. In the 19th century, the difference in brain sizes was a major argument to explain the hierarchy between men and women, and was supposed to reflect innate differences in mental capacity. Nowadays, our understanding of the human brain has progressed dramatically with the demonstration of cerebral plasticity. The new brain imaging techniques have revealed the role (...) of the environment in continually re-shaping our brain all along our lifetimes as it goes through new experiences and acquires new knowledge. However, the idea that biology is a major determining factor for cognition and behavioral gender differentiation, is still very much alive. The media are far from being the only guilty party. Some scientific circles actively promote the idea of an innate origin of a gender difference in mental capacities. Experimental data from brain imaging, cognitive tests or genetics are often distorted to serve deterministic ideas. Such abuse of “scientific discourses” have to be counteracted by effective communication of clear and unbiased information to the citizens. This paper presents a critical analysis of selected examples which emphasize sex differences in three fields e.g. skills in language and mathematics, testosterone and financial risk-taking behavior, moral cognition. To shed light on the data and the methods used in some papers, we can now—with today’s knowledge on cerebral plasticity—challenge even more strongly, many false interpretations. Our goal here is double: we want to provide evidence against archaic beliefs about the biological determinism of sex differences but also promote a positive image of scientific research. (shrink)

This paper will unfold in two different critiques, first dealing with how neuroscience has sexed the brain, ignoring cultural elements of gender formation, and further focusing on the masculine bias of neuroscience research, which, we claim, adopts male physiological and social patterns as “normal”. In order to do so, we will start our investigation with some insights on the sex/gender debate and how it is of consequence for research on neurosciences of sexuality. Secondly, we will critic the way studies are (...) focusing on differences rather than similarities between genders, and how such strategy re-enforces gender biases. Finally, we use contributions from social cognitivist theory and feminism to support a more complex view of body, identity and gender performance. (shrink)

Sex is often thought of as a straightforwardly binary categorical variable. Yet there is considerable variation in would-be sex traits; from genitals and hormones to morphology, neurology and behaviour, there is rarely if ever a categorical binary. We introduce a strategy that researchers use to deal with this variation: Individualising Variation (IV). IV involves treating non-binary and gradual variation as idiosyncratic, as individual differences rather than sex-based differences. Using the contrasting cases of sex identification in field ornithology and the debate (...) about sex differences in neuroscience, we illustrate IV and investigate its epistemic and conceptual consequences. We argue that IV stabilises the ontological picture of sex as categorical and binary. While IV can be an epistemically benign research strategy in some cases, we argue that it can also be epistemically detrimental. This is because of its ability to mask evidence that would otherwise challenge related assumptions about the phenomenon of interest, such as what sexes are and what they look like. We also identify an alternative strategy, De- individualising Variation, which works against IV and helps life scientists recognise variation beyond categorical binaries. (shrink)

In conjunction with the growing feminist literature on pregnancy and visualization, this paper uses Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic to demonstrate how the effort to make the interior of the pregnant body visible in medical discourse was a crucial part of the development of the modern medical gaze. In doing so I develop two concurrent arguments. First, I argue that the pathological corpse of the Clinic can conceptually serve as a double for the pregnant body as it emerged in (...) modern medicine in the 20th century. At the same time I use the insights of the Clinic to illustrate changes in pregnancy from early modernity to the 20th century. In early modernity, the pregnant body was understood in terms of generation, as a tree that bears fruit; by the 19th century, the pregnant body was a machine that reproduced the species. This transition can be seen in the overlap of pathology and pregnancy in early modernity, an overlap that continued throughout the 19 century and is inadvertently reinforced through the practice of ultrasound. (shrink)

Dynamic engineering models have yet to be evaluated in the context of feminist engineering ethics. Decision-making concerning gender in dynamic modeling design is a gender and ethical issue that is important to address regardless of the system in which the dynamic modeling is applied. There are many dynamic modeling tools that operationally include the female population, however, there is an important distinction between females and women; it is the difference between biological sex and the social construct of gender, which is (...) fluid and changes over time and geography. The ethical oversight in failing to represent or misrepresenting gender in model design when it is relevant to the model purpose can have implications for model validity and policy model development. This paper highlights this gender issue in the context of feminist engineering ethics using a dynamic population model. Women are often represented in this type of model only in their biological capacity, while lacking their gender identity. This illustrative example also highlights how language, including the naming of variables and communication with decision-makers, plays a role in this gender issue. (shrink)

This paper examines how the new field of neuroethics is responding to the old problem of difference, particularly to those ideas of biological difference emerging from neuroimaging research that purports to further delineate our understanding of sex and/or gender differences in the brain. As the field develops, it is important to ask what is new about neuroethics compared to bioethics in this regard, and whether the concept of difference is being problematized within broader contexts of power and representation. As a (...) feminist science studies scholar trained in the neurosciences, it seems logical to me that, as a growing field, neuroethics should reach out to the rich bodies of scholarship on the history of medicine, feminist theory and feminist bioethics while attempting to approach discussions of sex, gender and sexuality differences in the brain. What is also clear to me is that feminist scholars need to learn how to engage with neuroimaging studies on sex, gender and sexuality not just to critique, but also to productively contribute to neuroscientific research. The field of neuroethics can potentially provide the appropriate forum for this interdisciplinary engagement and create opportunities for shared perplexity. I suggest three possible points of departure for creating this shared perplexity, namely (i) is difference being measured in the study for the purpose of understanding difference in and of itself, or for the purpose of division?; (ii) is there an appreciation for biological complexity?; and (iii) is it assumed that structural differences can be conveniently translated into functional differences? (shrink)

This paper explores a form of activism that operates with and within matter. For more than 150 years materialism has informed activist practice through materialist conceptions of history and modes of production. The paper discusses the ambivalences of these previous configurations of activism and materialism and explores possibilities for enacting activist interventions in conditions where politics is not only performed as a politics of history but as the fundamental capacity to remake and transform processes of matter and life. What is (...) activism when politics is increasingly performed as a politics of matter? What is activism when it comes to a materialist understanding of matter itself? (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to situate (...) the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)

Drawing on feminist and queer epistemologies, this article is concerned with the post-feminist media’s construction of girls’ sexual subjecthood. Broadly defined as a biopolitical ideal, post-feminism is here related to a set of principles of the neoliberal art of government. It will be argued that these principles ethically sustain the exponential mainstreaming of a post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence and its programme of governmentality. The article also links post-feminism to a particular methodology of subjectification, ultimately locating its hermeneutics of adolescence within (...) the pornographic and pharmacological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. On the empirical level, the analysis explores how techno-scientific discourses and bodily figurations (namely brains and hormones) enter the discursive apparatus of a Portuguese girls’ magazine, giving ideological ground to a distinctive production of adolescent body-subjects. Post-feminist media markets are finally discussed as a significant segment of the capitalist industrialisation of sexual difference that frames the general problematic of this study. (shrink)

This article discusses the imbrication of racialising and sexualising scientific practices of gender testing and verification in elite athletics competition, and their intersection with social politics, using as a theoretical frame the feminist, anti-racist work of Hortense Spillers (2003), Judith Butler (1990, 1993a, 1993b, 2004) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), among others. It traces the practice of sex-gender testing of ‘women’ at sanctioned International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and International Olympic Committee (IOC) track and field competitions in order to contextualise (...) South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya’s experiences at the 2009 Berlin World Championships and the subsequent spectacularisation of her body through the discursive practices of representation. (shrink)

How do institutions respond to expert contests over epistemologies of sex and gender? In this article, I consider how epistemological ascendancy in debates over the regulation of women athletes with high testosterone is established within a legal setting. Approaching regulation as an institutional act that defines forms of embodied difference, the legitimacy of which may be called into question, I show how sexed bodies are enacted through and as part of determinations of expertise. I focus on proceedings from 2015 when (...) the Court of Arbitration for Sport was asked to decide whether an Indian sprinter, Dutee Chand, could compete as a female athlete. Despite acknowledging that sexed bodies are unruly, the court ultimately endorsed the use of testosterone as seemingly essential to women’s athletic performance, thereby reasserting a two-category model of biological difference. The legitimacy of these regulatory efforts was established through the concurrent narrowing of expertise and the body, a process that is also revealed to be gendered. (shrink)

This article begins with an ethnographically documented incident whereby nursing students dissected a medical human simulator model and rearranged it so that the “male” head and torso was attached to the “female” lower half. They then joked about the embodiment of the model, thus staging a scene of anti-trans ridicule. The students’ lack of ability, or purposeful refusal, to recognize morphological biodiversity in medical settings indicates a lacuna in clinical imaginaries. Even as trans-identified and gender nonconforming people increasingly access care (...) in the clinic, the lacuna of transsex—as a proxy term for non-binary embodiment—persists at the heart of clinical practice. This article concludes that we might engage in more ethical clinical practice if we recognize and affirm the trace of multiple forms of human being in the non-human simulator. (shrink)

Operations on intersexuals indicate that the sex of a person is based on more than biology. Expectations about proper gender activities furnish the frameworks through which certain features and combinations of features are understood to be fundamental to bodies and to comprise their sex. Yet, we can ask whether this interpretation is either coherent or consistent with our fuller conceptions of ourselves. Is there a point to interpreting a person as a sex?