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Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
 
 
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Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality [Paperback]

Anne Fausto Sterling (Author)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Basic Books; New edition edition (9 Nov 2000)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0465077145
  • ISBN-13: 978-0465077144
  • Product Dimensions: 20.2 x 13.7 x 2.7 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 195,700 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Anne Fausto-Sterling
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Product Description

Product Description

Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
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First Sentence
IN THE RUSH AND EXCITEMENT OF LEAVING FOR THE 1988 OLYMPICS, Maria Patiño, Spain's top woman hurdler, forgot the requisite doctor's certificate stating, for the benefit of Olympic officials, what seemed patently obvious to anyone who looked at her: she was female. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
An accessible book that lays out the historical assumptions about sex and gender and subjects them to insightful critique. "Sexing the Body" reveals the important role science has played in reinforcing social consensus on the nature of sexuality and effectively erasing sexually ambiguous bodies from society.

Fausto-Sterling's arguments are so decisive that it is impossible to close the book without a serious re-examination of one's own attitudes to sex and gender, and a sense of shock at the physical, sexual and psychological obstacles intersexuals - those with physical elements of both male and female - face in a world which acknowledges only two sexes.

Informative, challenging and much recommended.

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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Polemics r us 10 Jan 2005
Format:Paperback
OK so it's a polemic but it's funny, well researched, intelligent and frankly disturbing.

Fasto Sterling shows how scientists have constructed false gender dichotomies out of insufficient data and deletion of anything that didn't fit (the Damned data of Charles Fort's Book of the Damned if you like) and that scientific 'truth' is no more than a collection of unchallenged assumptions and predeceases.

This is not the first book to discuss these topics but that it does so with a political agenda makes it invigorating. Her claim that science and surgeons are trying to remove gender variant bodies from existence is a wake up call.

Highly recommended.

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Amazon.com:  16 reviews
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful
Bridging Essentialism and Constructivism 17 Mar 2000
By MICHELINE GROS-JEAN - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Hardcover
This book is wonderful. Fausto-Sterling does not take sides on the essentialism and constructivism. She argues that biology does matter in determining one's sexual orientation, but at the same time, culture plays a central role as well. In other words, culture and biology interact with one another, in a complicated fashion. It 's an interaction that is dialectical, rather than linear. The author skillfully weaves scientific knowledge with politics and history in a accessable language. Unlike many scientists,whose arguements tend to be ahistorical, she takes into account of history in building her arguements. This work will be interesting for both the scientifically inclined and the theoretically inclined.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
When It Comes to Sex ,... 25 July 2001
By tamiii - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
...it all comes down to emotions, recalling that the original meaning of that word was a movement of people, a civil disturbance. From the intersexual to the homosexual, Fausto-Sterling reviews the history and politics that informed the science and medical practice of 20th Century sex. I happily add this volume on the gender politics of popular science to a different but equally interesting work by Simon LeVay, Queer Science. However unlike LeVay, Fausto-Sterling recognizes a relationship between sexualized science and the rise of American monopoly capitalism (and its demands for social stability) though her observations in this arena are frustratingly preliminary. Readers of this book might also enjoy Jennifer Terry's An American Obsession which delves more deeply into cultural history.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Leading Feminist Embryologist Takes on Her Own Science 5 Feb 2003
By "md_2003" - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Fausto-Sterling will take her place in feminist history as the leading embryologist, and perhaps even, the leading scientist, doing gender studies in the latter 20th and earlier 21st centuries. Who would have thought she could excell beyond her ground-breaking text, "Myths of Gender"?

This time she takes on her own scientific field, exposing how blindered, sexist, heterosexist, and flat out stuck and harm-inducing it has become. Given that she presents her arguments in the body of the text in a very reader-friendly language and style, and has nearly a separate text of endnotes of hard-core feminist critical analyses ta boot, we've got in this great work of hers a text reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's "Three Guinneas."

Anne Fausto-Sterling's special interest this go around is science's primary complicity in the (hetero) sexing of psycho-medically dominated and controlled bodies. She provides one of the best feminist analyses of Gender Systematicity as the key politically shaped, shaping, and biased torture device for transsexual and intersex people today.

This is a very important text for sexology, feminist, gender, queer, US, cultural, and transgender studies, history of science, and anthropology of medicine and science. It's a brave read, if not deadly on point. Probably best for graduate scholars, but should be required for any professional in sexology, gender specialist, or medical personnel before they lay one hand or idea of treatment on transsexual or intersex people!

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