New Issue of Signs: "Sex: A Thematic Issue"
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is pleased
to announce the publication of a thematic issue on "Sex"
(http://http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662942)
that may be of particular interest to H-Sci-Med-Tech members. The issue takes
an expansive approach to the many valences of "sex," bringing
together perspectives from sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and
science studies scholars to consider the emergence of sex as a category, its
surprising geographical and historical variability, and its imbrication with
processes of regulation, racialization, and commodification.
The issue begins with a symposium titled "Before
Sex." Edited by Michael McKeon and featuring essays by historians Thomas
W. Laqueur, Laura Gowing, Tim Hitchcock, and Randolph Trumbach, the symposium
recasts the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Western
Europe to show how the biologization of anatomical sexual difference is linked
to the solidification of penile penetration as the definitive sexual practice,
arguing that the abstract category of sex helped ground the emergent idea of
personal identity in anatomical difference. Moving through popular sex manuals,
cartoons, anatomical illustrations, court cases, broadsides, and demography,
the symposium revisits foundational questions in the history of sexuality while
breaking new ground in the excavation of the West's sexual heritance and posing
provocative questions for future research in the history of sexuality.
David A. Rubin's "'An Unnamed Blank That Craved a
Name': A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender" shows that the concept of gender
emerges from the effort to cover over the instability of the sexed body.
Through a close reading of psychoendocrinologist John Money's work, Rubin
demonstrates that the concept of intersex paradoxically preceded and
inaugurated what we would today call the sex/gender distinction, and he teases
out the regulatory tendencies in the deployment of "gender."
Sarah S. Richardson's article examines how the X became
the "female chromosome" and how the association of the X with
femaleness influences research questions, models, and descriptive language in
human sex chromosome research. Richardson demonstrates the continuing influence
of the feminization of the X by closely analyzing the assumptions made in the
literature on X chromosome mosaicism.
Erika Lorraine Milam's article interweaves two
polarities, animal and human, male and female, to elucidate the evolution of
biological constructions of animality and gender throughout the twentieth
century.
Tracing how sexual selection is understood, Milam
demonstrates how understandings of animal sexual behavior, and female mate
choice in particular, are intertwined with changing understandings of humans
after WWII.
To access the issue, go to http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662942.
The full table of contents is as follows:
*Symposium: Before Sex*
Edited by Michael McKeon
The Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Sexuality
Hypothesis Michael McKeon
The Rise of Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Historical
Context and Historiographical Implications Thomas W. Laqueur
Women's Bodies and the Making of Sex in
Seventeenth-Century England Laura Gowing
The Reformulation of Sexual Knowledge in
Eighteenth-Century England Tim Hitchcock
The Transformation of Sodomy from the Renaissance to the
Modern World and Its General Sexual Consequences Randolph Trumbach
*Articles*
Sexual Fluidity "Before Sex"
Leila Rupp
Transsexual Women and Feminist Thought: Toward New
Understanding and New Politics Raewyn Connell
"An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name": A
Genealogy of Intersex as Gender David A. Rubin
Sexing the X: How the X became the "Female
Chromosome"
Sarah S. Richardson
Gender across the Animal-Human Boundary: Making Males
Aggressive and Females Coy Erika Lorraine Milam
Paradoxes of Butchness: Lesbian Masculinities and Sexual
Violence in Contemporary South Africa Amanda Lock Swarr
Open Normativities: Gender, Disability, and Collective
Political Change Alexis Shotwell
What is Human Trafficking? A Review Essay
--
Andrew Mazzaschi
Deputy Editor
/Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society <http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/journals/journal/signs.html>/
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Voorhees
Chapel, Room 8 New Brunswick, NJ 08901 amazzaschi@signs.rutgers.edu
732.932.5125
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