24 LT -
Reclaiming the Body I: Transgressing the Sex/Gender Binary
Thursday, June 1, 2017: 2:00 PM-3:30 PM
SC Theater (Hofstra University)
Organizer:
Sandra Eder, University of California, Berkeley
Comment:
Rebecca Jordan-Young, Barnard College
Session Abstract
The division between sex and gender has relegated the material body to the realm of biology. Bodies are, however, simultaneously social and biological. This Lightning Session aims to reclaim the body as an object of historical analysis and to rethink how the body is constituted through the mutual absorption of the social and biological. It pays special attention to embodied practices and the materiality of bodies in medicine and science. How are bodies read in medicine and science and what is their agency in these encounters? How do historically contingent concepts of the body and lived embodied experiences shape ideas about how bodies work, as well as notions of masculinity and femininity? How does the relationship between body and identity shift over time? This lightning session draws together a group of historians of medicine/science whose work addresses the relationship between sex, gender, and the body from early modern Europe to twentieth-century America. Themes include the emergence of the sex/gender split in American biomedicine in the 1950s; the ailing body as a key site for capturing gendered beliefs and behaviors in early modern Britain; the unstable role of pleasure in nineteenth-century American clitorectomies; the effects of old age on ideas about sex difference in early modern England; and sexual differences in the diagnosis and treatment of male sterility in nineteenth-century Europe. This is the first of two lightning sessions designed to critically engage with histories of the body and gender.Together, we aim to reevaluate the body and its materiality in historical research.
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See more of: Lightning Session
See more of: Lightning Session