Embodying Change: Social Justice and the History of Sex Difference

My current research focuses on understandings of intersex from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. These centuries constituted a critical period for the formation of ideas about sex, as well as for the establishment of professionalized fields such as medicine, surgery, and law, which defined the boundary between male and female. This paper explores how medieval writers understood male and female anatomy, and it demonstrates how surgical interventions in cases of intersex helped to codify binary (and other) sex categories. Because sex is such a fundamental tool of social organization, scholars and the general public often interpret the basic division of humanity into male and female as “natural” – that is, outside the bounds of historical inquiry. Yet modern conceptions of sex are shaped by a long history of contested ideas about bodies, nature, and sex as they were formulated by the medical practitioners of the premodern period. Such practitioners often discussed the existence of multiple, non-binary sexes. I argue that a study of the range of sex possibilities in the past has the potential to offer tools to the modern gender/sex movement. In the twenty-first century, the rights of intersex, transgender, and other people with norm-challenging sex anatomies or identities are the source of fierce debate in the United States. As an LGBTQ activist who has advocated for the rights of gender variant people through my teaching, my position as the head of a university LGBTQ organization, and my work as a public scholar who has appeared on television, I also discuss how my study of the past has shaped my political activities in the present.