Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in - download pdf or read online

By Geertje Mak

An adolescent lady is mocked whilst she takes a tub together with her friends, simply because her genitals seem like these of a boy. a pair visits a physician asking to ‘create extra space’ within the lady for sex. a physician reveals testicular tissue in a girl with appendicitis, and comes to a decision to maintain his findings quiet. those are only many of the 300 eu case histories of individuals whose intercourse used to be doubted in the course of the lengthy 19th century that Geertje Mak attracts upon in her awesome new book.How did humans care for such occasions? How did they choose to which intercourse anyone may still belong? This groundbreaking research of medical case histories exhibits how intercourse replaced from an outward visual appeal inscribed in a social physique to whatever to be discovered deep inside of physique and self. a desirable, effortless to stick with, but refined argument addressing significant problems with the background of physique, intercourse, and self, this quantity will healthy complex undergraduate classes, whereas demanding specialists.

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Additional resources for Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories

Sample text

S communities even used general idiom to express their peculiar position; Meier, like many other people in Germany, had the reputation of being a Zwitter or hermaphrodite. Finon was called Finon because in the region of Lorraine masculine women were given the suffix ‘on’. Other hermaphrodites raised as females were described as ‘bearded’ or ‘viragos’. This indicates a structural space for people of ambiguous sex. I have found evidence for such tolerance mostly in stories from rural areas, among farmers and in villages.

As for her external appearance, the woman was a virago, around 5′5″ tall, broad-shouldered and of a muscular build; the breasts on her corpse were under-developed but not withered or flaccid. Her facial hair, particularly her moustache, was highly developed. According to everyone who knew her, Frau Holzheid was an enterprising, dauntless woman who managed and farmed her extremely large agricultural estate almost entirely without the help of her husband. I also heard that in school she had played more with the boys than with the girls.

These three elements are always present: the registration as male or female, the clothing and the occupation. They represent someone’s sex in the public arena after the first (and normally only) inspection of the genitals at birth. It is through ambiguities in outward appearance and occupation that doubt might be instilled in a local community concerning the sex which somebody had initially been inscribed with. Both were related to the sex of the body as well as to certain social and cultural assumptions about sex: to a woman’s physical strength and to the definition of men’s work, for example, or to the growth of facial hair and the habit of shaving, or to the ability of being able to urinate standing up and the custom of men wearing trousers.

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