Historicizing the Sex/Gender Split in 20th Century America

My paper positions the prime analytical category of our lightning session –“gender” – as a historical object of inquiry. By historicizing gender, I like to show how the body shaped the emergence of the concept of a social sex. Though “gender” gained its prominence in 1970s and 1980s feminism and social sciences, it was actually first coined in 1950s biomedicine. The term gender role was created in a clinical setting to decide which sex to assign to intersex children. Experts claimed gender role was acquired independent from biological characteristics. Though based on nurture, it became indelibly ingrained into a child’s mind after a critical period and thus part of the child’s nature. In this concept of sex/gender, the body was more malleable than a fixed gender role and thus subject to surgical and hormonal intervention. Using patient records as sources, I argue that this formulation of gender was based on specific clinical practices that conflated biological and social norms in a historically contingent manner into a notion of “health.” By focusing on medical practices, I suggest that the materiality of the body – though not necessarily its sex – shapes this specific formulation of gender. Historicizing “gender” reveals multiple and changing relations between the body and one’s social role, mind, self, or identity over time.