Feminist Gender Theory Summary Margaret Simmonds Summer 2012

FEMINIST GENDER THEORY SUMMARY

Introduction
In the course of background reading on feminist gender theory for my PhD (awarded Sept
2012) it seemed that a lot of the concepts could be useful to XY-women in gaining a broader
view of their life situation and in reducing the focus on biological divisions. I then discovered
that my colleague Lih-Mei Liao, Consultant Clinical Psychologist at UCLHs Middlesex Centre
(adult intersex clinic) had in fact recommended this.
In an article (Liao 2003) she suggested that the psychological formulation of XY womens
difficulties (e.g. distress about the non-disclosure of crucial aspects of their condition or nondiscussion of the implications, and about discussing atypical genitalia with sexual partners)
should take account of dominant ways of conceptualising sex and sexuality in society. These
dominant ways of conceptualising are of course the strict division of people into two sexes
based on biology (dimorphism - two forms), the sanctioning of only two genders (a binary
system) based on sex, and the favouring by society of a sexuality that is appropriate to ones
sex and gender, i.e. a heterosexual sexual orientation. She recommended that
psychotherapeutic intervention and information delivery within a feminist-discursive framework
could be helpful by drawing on alternative and subordinated discourses, allowing exploration
of meanings of aspects of the condition, and challenging notions of normality.
Lih-Mei was not involved in my study, but her words spurred me into compiling a few pages that
I feel may be interesting and helpful to you.
The introduction of gender
The concept of gender, as opposed to sex, wasnt introduced until the 1970s. Robert Stoller, a
psychologist who worked with individuals born with ambiguous genitalia, was the first to point
out a distinction between sex and gender. He posited four concepts: sex, gender, gender
identity and gender role (Stoller 1964, 1968). Although the term gender role soon faded from
view in feminist circles, Stollers other three concepts were quickly appropriated by feminists.
Following Stoller, feminist scholar Ann Oakley (who supervised the PhD of one of my two
supervisors) suggested that gender is not a direct product of biological sex. She defined sex
as the anatomical and physiological characteristics which signify maleness and femaleness
and gender as socially constructed masculinity and femininity (Oakley 1972). Masculinity and
femininity are defined not by biology but by social, cultural and psychological attributes which
are acquired through becoming a man or a woman in a particular society at a particular time.
From the 1970s onwards there was much discussion about sex and gender, and whether men
and womens bodies have natural (given by Nature) differences that pre-determine a specific
gender, which in turn leads to a corresponding sexuality (sexual orientation).
Anne Fausto-Sterlings landmark Five Sexes article then pointed out the inadequacy of a twosex system for conceptualising intersex (Fausto-Sterling 1993) and Sue Vice pointed out that
Freud had suggested humans could have ended up divided into more than two sexes, perhaps
following various psychological drives (Vice 1998). Had this happened, much of the medical
intervention in intersex, and the associated stigma, might not have occurred?
Sex is an idea, as much as an anatomy?
Try to forget, for a moment, all that you know about sex and gender. You are living in the period
prior to 1800 when religion had not yet been replaced by science as the main explainer of our
world.

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At that time there wasnt even the concept of sex as we know it. There was thought to be a
single type of genital structure or anatomy, one that was exteriorised in men and inverted in
women (in whom it could even pop out sometimes, e.g. in the case of shepherdesses being
stressfully pursued by shepherds!). And the difference between men and women was
considered in a vertical, hierarchical fashion, rather than the polar, oppositional way that we
now have. God was at the top, then men, then lower down were women, then animals etc. As
Thomas Laqueur puts it, If the social order was a manifestation of Gods plan for mankind then
there was no need to appeal to biology to explain why women could not preach or inherit
property. (Laqueur 1990).
Looking back, and using the more recently introduced terms sex and gender with hindsight,
we could thus say that before 1800 it was gender (i.e. how men and women appeared in the
social realm) that was more foundational than peoples sex (their genital anatomy). But by the
late 19th century male and female bodies had come to be seen as opposites, rather than two
arrangements or layouts of the same components. After 1800 bodies are being thought of in a
different way, as the foundation and guarantor of certain types of social arrangements. And this
is some 100 years before scientific discoveries are brought to bear to support it. As Laqueur
puts it, No one was much interested in looking for evidence of two distinct sexes until such
differences became politically important. This new view has endured into recent times, with sex
being said to act as a regulative ideal, operating to exclude or pathologise those whose
anatomy does not fit its normative parameters (Lloyd 2007).
Social construction
The notion that mens and womens mode of operation in society is governed by their biology
is known as biological essentialism and has been hotly contested by many feminist theorists.
The arrival of the concept of gender enabled the social components of our sexual make-up to
be formulated.
Concepts of the social construction of gender, and even sex, may be particularly helpful to
intersex people in enabling their situation to be seen through a less essentialist lens, thus
allowing some degree of re-conceptualisation. Simone de Beauvoirs original feminist ideas
could well prove inspirational for XY-women. In Le Deuxieme Sexe she famously stated: One
is not born, but rather becomes, a woman (de Beauvoir 1949), or, as Toril Moi puts it, A
woman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied situation in the world, or in
other words, through the way in which she makes something of what the world makes of her.
(Moi 1999). XY women might be said to fulfil de Beauvoirs paradigm in a rather more concrete
sense than most women.
Of particular note are the works that appeared in the early 1990s on the social constructionist
aspects of gender (and sex) operating in intersex medicine. A pioneer article in what might be
termed the recent de-medicalisation of intersex was Suzanne Kesslers 1990 article revealing
how clinicians claiming to uncover an intersex babys real sex actually rely on social factors in
their decision-making (Kessler 1990, 1998). Prior to her interest in intersex, Kessler (with
Mckenna) had drawn attention, in 1978, to the presumption that biological markers (genitals)
are unequivocal under clothing; with male and female being cultural events that are ascribed
via a gender attribution process (Kessler and McKenna 1978). In other words, you look at
someone and make a judgment of their sex or gender based, on the genitals that you presume
they have under their clothes (their so-called cultural genitals).
Morgan Holmes discusses how medical practices obfuscate social interests and suggests that
intersexed children are often made more intersexed by surgery (one assumes she means that
surgical feminisation of an XY child moves the child further away from male end of spectrum
than its chromosomes might otherwise have dictated). The difference between intersexed and
not intersexed, she points out, can be only a few millimetres (in length of the phallus, i.e. clitoris/
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penis) so maybe no one is truly intersexed, but we are all, in our infinite differences from each
other, intersexed (Holmes 2002, 2008). And Cheryl Chase, founder of the Intersex Society of
North America, points out that a phallus can change from being a small penis to being a large
clitoris, without any actual change in its dimensions, merely as a result of redefining its owner
as female rather than male (Chase, quoted in Holmes 1995).
Sex and gender as a political idea
Materialist feminists question the very existence of gender categories, arguing that women
and men are social categories defined in relation to each other rather than on the basis of a
pre-social biological essence.
Some have even gone as far as to suggest that the chain of influence works in the opposite
direction, so that rather than gender being a social expression based on sex, sex itself is a
product of society and culture. Christine Delphy suggests that gender creates anatomical sex,
and that sex has no inherent social implications until transformed by a hierarchical division of
humanity into two (Delphy 1992 [?2002]). There are parallels here with the pre-1800 situation,
in which, Laqueur suggests, gender precedes sex. And Delphy claims that recognizing a
difference is a social act, as opposed to the differences being a self-evident fact, and she calls
into question the very existence of the categories. The container (the category itself, sex)
should be treated as a variable, like the content (gender); and as a social product (Delphy
1993).
Thus materialist feminists postulate a Marxist class-like relationship, with patriarchal
domination causing a social division rather than following from pre-existing sex differences.
Patriarchal society is said to take certain features of male and female biology and turn them
into a set of gendered characteristics that serve to empower men and disempower women, and
which are then presented as natural attributes of males and females. Hence a (power-based)
hierarchy is said to precede division. Men and women exist as socially significant categories
because of the exploitative relationship that binds them together and sets them apart (Delphy
and Leonard 1992).
Monique Wittig, following Delphy, even argues that those such as lesbians, who opt out of
social relations that make us men and women (heterosexual relations and the male/female
marriage contract) are thereby not men and women (Wittig 1992). This somewhat restrictive
view has been criticised, but on a theoretical level it opens up the interesting idea of XY CAIS
individuals with internal testes who are attracted to men being classed as women, where XXfemale lesbians are not.
Cultural mediation and discourse
As described above, materialist feminists emphasise social structural relations, treating men
and women as social groups founded upon unequal, exploitative relationships. Post-modern
feminists, on the other hand, emphasise cultural factors, seeing men and women as
discursively constructed categories.
Human beings experience their world through the senses and interpret what they see, hear
etc., using the brain. This making sense of things is mediated or influenced by cultural/
sociological notions. Sociologists debate whether there is such a thing as an unmediated
knowledge of the world, coming straight from things in the outside world into our understanding
of those things. Perhaps all knowledge is filtered by cultural assumptions and created as a
result of discourse (language).
Discourse analysis follows from the 1970/80s turn to language in sociological thought. There
was a challenge to the assumption that language provided a set of unambiguous signs with
which to label internal states and describe external reality. Language was re-conceptualised as
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productive, i.e. that it constructs versions of social reality and achieves social objectives. The
focus shifted away from the individual and his or her intentions, to language and its productive
potential. So in post-structuralist or post-modern models, language constitutes rather than
reflects or expresses the meaning of society, experience and the individuals sense of self.
Human beings are said to have no fixed essence; you construct who you are through
discourse. There is no I (and no body?) prior to (in the absence of) language and discourse.
The most influential version of the concept of discourse is that derived from the work of Michel
Foucault. For Foucault, discourses are anything which can carry meaning (languages, images,
stories, scientific narratives and cultural products) but are also things we do; social practices
such as the marriage ceremony. Discourses are not a reflection of an already ordered reality;
instead they are that with which reality becomes ordered. They are the means by which
differences between people become produced. For Foucault, discourses are normative,
carrying with them standards for behaviour, defining what is proper and improper. Discourses
are said to be historically variable and to be tied up with power. The emergence of certain
discourses of sexuality are inter-dependent with social power exercised by medical, judicial
and religious communities. But wherever power is exercised, a resistant discourse arises which
is empowering for different groups of people.
From a Foucauldian perspective, all forms of knowledge are constructed through discourse
and discursive practices, including scientific knowledge. It can be argued that even scientific/
biological knowledge comes to us through a filter resulting from the scientists position as an
interpreter influenced by sociological concepts, from their use of language etc. Moira Gatens
writes that, the anatomical body is itself a theoretical object, for the discourse of anatomy is
produced by human beings in culture (Gatens 1996: 70). In this way a pre-1800 knowledgesystem based on religion determined that a one-sex arrangement was the basic truth.
This post-modern form of theorising recognises the mediated nature of our relation to the world,
through the ideas, concepts and so on, by means of which we make sense of it. It also
recognises that these meanings can vary according to context and over time. Such theories
reject notions of a coherent unified self, capable of rational reflection and agency, in favour of
a model of the self which is fragmented, constantly in the process of formation, constituting
itself out of its own understandings. The theorizing of gender in response to these strands of
thought comes to emphasise the process whereby subjects become gendered as a process in
which subjectivities form in relation to the meanings that people have available to them. The
concept of discourse gives a role to subjects in the making of themselves as gendered, via the
appropriation of discourse.
Performativity
A number of post-structuralist feminist theorists, influenced to different degrees by Foucault,
Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray (a French feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst), have
sought to theorise the body and its relation to difference and gendered subjectivity (sexually
specific personality), resulting in concepts of subjectivity as embodied performance.
Influential feminist scholar Judith Butler, for example, attempts to theorise the ways in which
bodies are materialized as sexed in the light of a critique of heterosexism, and bringing
attention to a performative aspect of gender (Butler 1990).
Butler no more accepts sex as a natural (given by Nature) category than gender itself. There
is no recourse to a body that has not already been interpreted by cultural meanings, hence sex
could not qualify as a pre-discursive anatomical facticity (Butler 1990: 8). Our understanding
of material, anatomical differences is mediated through our cultural frame of meaning. Rather
than gender following from biology, for Butler, our gender norms are seen as structuring
biology. We view biological factors as requiring a binary division into two sexes, male and
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female, because of a socially constructed gender to which heterosexuality is central.
Heterosexuality, of course, requires a binary division into male and female. For Butler, then, it
is the epistemic regime of presumptive heterosexuality (Butler 1990: viii) which drives our
division into male and female, and which itself structures our understanding of biology.
Butler posits that if gender does not follow automatically from sex, then there is no reason to
assume only two genders (Butler 1990). Questioning the linkage between sex and gender
leads to a speculation that sex may be a product of scientific discourses, and may thus be as
culturally constructed as gender (the influence of Delphy is seen here). Butler says that the
body does not have a pre-given, essential sex and that bodies become gendered by means of
a continual performance of gender. She cites drag as mimicking real women then goes on to
suggest that if gender is a construction then there can be no original gender for the drag artist
to parody, so that drag highlights the imitative structure of gender itself (Butler 1990).
In other words, she explores the way in which certain transgressive performances may subvert
the binary logic of gender, the rigid division between masculine and feminine. In focusing on
those performances that parody aspects of femininity and masculinity she suggests that
gender cannot be thought of as having some essential basis; there is no original authentic
femininity or masculinity located in male or female bodies or in our inner selves. In Bodies That
Matter she explains that this performance is not casual or ad hoc but that we are constrained
into gender. She also now (in that book) shifts her focus towards the materialisation of sexed
bodies, in answer to accusations from other scholars of having denied (in earlier works)
materiality or the reality of the body. She argues that as an effect of power, sexed bodies are
forcibly materialised through time. This is said to occur via a linguistic performativity which is
citational in nature, making pronouncements (e.g.Its a girl!) with reference to existing
normative conventions.
So, for Butler, physical sex differences are marked and formed by discursive practices, a
productive power that demarcates and differentiates bodies. Sex is not a simple fact or static
condition of the body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize sex (Butler 1993:
2) and far from being chosen, femininity is an effect of the forcible citation of a norm (Butler
quoted in Lloyd 2007: 63). Gendered subjectivity is thus acquired through the repeated
performance by the individual of discourses of gender. Allied to this is an internalised social
surveillance or disciplining, that individuals apply to themselves (Foucault 1976-1984).
Talking about gender as a performance can suggest an actor on a stage, an agent or subject
who is formed prior to the acts and who engages in them, maybe choosing which acts to
perform. Butler is at pains to resist such a construal. There is, she argues, no doer behind the
deed. The doer becomes formed from the doing. Her account, as is Foucaults, is an account
of the formation of subjectivity. We become subjects from our performances and the
performances of others towards us. The gendered performances in which we engage are
performances in accordance with a script which provides us with ideals of masculinity and
femininity that render certain behaviour appropriate and others not. Subjectivity is a process of
submitting ourselves to socially constituted norms and practices.
A return to the body
Following on from the emphasis on the social determinants of gender, and then the turn
towards language or discourse in conceptualising sexual identities, there was a return in the
1990s towards acknowledging the body, or corporeality, as having been neglected or negated.
The Foucauldian approach had treated the body as an inscriptive surface, a surface given
meaning through discourse. Feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz claim to distrust the
representation of bodies which disregard their materiality, thereby enabling the dominance of
reason and consciousness (Grosz 1994). These feminists align themselves with an approach
originating in the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, an associate of de Beauvoir and proponent
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of a philosophical line of thought known as phemonenology, which sees the body as lived
experience, as a corporeal ground of subjectivity.
Merleau-Ponty challenges dominant neo-Cartesian1 models of subjectivity, by highlighting the
a priori coincidence of consciousness and the body, that is, abandoning the mind/body dualism
in favour of the notion of a body-subject. We experience things through our body, not in a
separate relationship to it. He challenges the notion of the human subject as being made up of
two modes of existence, the mind and the body, which extricates consciousness from its
embodiment in the world. He employs the concept of corporeal schema or body-image to
describe the middle space between the Cartesian mind and body.
Feminists such as Rosalyn Diprose, Moira Gatens, Elizabeth Grosz, Vicki Kirby, Gail Weiss
and Elizabeth Wilson have built on this phenomenological concept, and on psychoanalytic
theories, to derive the notion of imaginary bodies. Our identities are formed as ways of giving
significance to particular body forms. Gender is biology-as-lived. This is a potentially useful
move in feminist thought as far as XY-women are concerned because it is all too easy for an
over-emphasis on gender to mask a banishing of the intersexed body to the realms of shame
and stigma. The challenge is to enable XY-females to integrate the male aspects of their bodily
make-up into their sense of self in a more satisfactory way than has hitherto been the case.
Luce Irigaray has promoted the sexual difference approach. This reacts against the feminist
thought of the 1970s which said that men and women would be equal in all respects if social
obstacles were removed. Women, she said, should acknowledge their fundamental differences
from men, and form their own identity based on the mother-daughter relationship, even develop
their own language, and seek a more self-referential identity situated directly in their otherness
not only from men, but from women also (Irigaray 1985). In the case of XY-females, this identity
might even be a more authentic form of the androgyny favoured in different ways in the 1970s
by feminists such as Gayle Rubin, Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millet, who were seeking at
that time to break down gender categories as a socially subversive act.
Narrativity
Post-modernisms turn to language and a discursive/performative construction of subjectivity
is also pertinent in terms of narrativity. Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest
among theorists and researchers in autobiographical recollections, life stories, and narrative
approaches to understanding human behaviour and experience. Important in this context is
Dan P. McAdams life story model of identity (McAdams 1985, 1993, 1996), which asserts that
people living in modern societies provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing
internalised and evolving narratives of the self.
Arthur W. Frank, a medical sociologist, has published extensively on the subject of patients
experience of illness and the value of personal story-telling (Frank 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996).
Vera Whisman talks, in relation to lesbian and gay life histories, about choosing a story and
suggests that the sexual self is a narrative construction (Whisman 2002). Teresa de Lauretis
tells us that subjectivity is not a fixed entity but a constant process of self-production: narration
is one way of reproducing subjectivity (de Lauretis 1984).
This is allied to Anthony Giddens concept of the reflexive project of the self in which the
existential question of self-identity is bound up with the fragile nature of the biography which
the individual supplies about herself and in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.
The individuals biography, if they are to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-today world, cannot be wholly fictive (Giddens 1991: 54). David Gauntlett explains that a stable
self-identity is based on an account of a persons life, actions and influences which makes
1. Cartesian = based on the thought of 17th century French philosopher Ren Descartes.

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sense to themselves, and which can be explained to other people without much difficulty
(Gauntlett 2002). Mary Hern also talks about narrative identities (citing Erik Homburger
Erikson) and about exploring different options before committing to an identity (Erikson 1980,
Hern 2008).
All this is pertinent to the secrecy and narrative inventiveness that many intersexed people feel
forced to adopt (hiding their lack of menstruation, fear of disclosure to partners and so on) with
a fear of admitting to being intersexed. Narrativity may offer possibilities for XY-women, but
also represents pitfalls in constructing, and maintaining the coherence of their stories.
Endnote
We can see from what is presented above that there may not be any absolute truths about the
body, and sex, and gender, because anything thats said about them is a product of human
beings situated in a particular culture at a particular time; and this includes the way that the
body is explained by biologists, anatomists and clinicians. As Alexandra Howson points out,
the meaning of the body (including the sex assigned to it and its reliance on distinctiveness,
opposition and hierarchy) is greatly determined by the interpretive framework through which it
is viewed (Howson 2005: 56). I want to encourage XY-women to think outside the box and
engage with patterns of thought that could help liberate them, to some extent at least, from the
limitations and restrictions of the dominant dimorphic, binary paradigm of sex and gender.
Recommended reading
AISSG Recommended Books on Intersex see http://www.aissg.org/PDFs/aissgrecommended-books.pdf.
Marchbank, J. and Letherby, G. (2007) Introduction to Gender: Social Science Perspectives
(Pearson Longman). Specifically Chapter 1 (Gendered Perspectives Theoretical Issues) ,
Chapter 7 (Psychology) and Chapter 15 (Sex and Sexuality).
Beasley, C. (1999) What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory (Sage). Specifically
Chapter 6 (Feminism and the Influence of Psychoanalysis), and Chapter 7 (Postmodernist/
Poststructuralist Influences).
Alsop, R., Fitzsimmons, A., and Lennon, K. (2002) Theorizing Gender (Polity Press). A clearlywritten introduction to all the main gender theories.
Cealey-Harrison, W. (2006) The Shadow and the Substance The Sex/Gender Debate, in
Davis, K., Evans, M. and Lorber, J. (eds) (2006) Handbook of Gender and Womens Studies
(Sage). A 17-page chapter that summarises the debate, and mentions intersex and the
formation of biomedical discourses.
Chapters in Jackson, S. and Scott, S. (eds) (2002), Gender, a Sociological Reader
(Routledge), in which scholars who are well-known in academic circles summarise their
specialist areas:
Chapter 1: Stanley, L. Should Sex Really be Gender or Gender Really be Sex.
Chapter 2: West, C. & Zimmerman, D.H. Doing Gender.
Chapter 3: Butler, J. Performative Subversions.
Chapter 4: Delphy, C. Rethinking Sex and Gender.
Chapter 40: Whisman, V. Choosing a Story.
Chapters in Jackson, S. and Jones, J. (eds) (1998), Contemporary Feminist Theories
(Edinburgh Univ. Press).
Chapter 10: Jackson, S. Theorizing Gender and Sexuality.
Chapter 12: Vice, S. Psychoanalytic Feminist Theory.
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Current Feminist Viewpoints (1999)2

2. From: Beasley, C. (1999) What is Feminism? An Introduction to Feminist Theory (Sage).

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Other works cited in the text
de Beauvior, S. Le Deuxieme Sexe (1949). Online edition: http://www.marxists.org/reference/
subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/index.htm.
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and
London, Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge).
Delphy, C. (1993) Rethinking Sex and Gender. Womens Studies Intl. Forum, 16(1): 1-9.
Delphy, C. and Leonard, D. (1992) Familiar Exploitation: A New Analysis of Marriage in
Contemporary Societies (Oxford: Polity).
Erikson, E. H. (1980) Identity and the Life Cycle (pub: Norton).
Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993) The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough The
Sciences, March/April.
Foucault, M. (1976-1984) Histoire de la sexualit. Vol I: La Volont de savoir, Vol II: L'Usage
des plaisirs, Vol III: Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard). The History of Sexuality. Vol I: The Will
to Knowledge, Vol II: The Use of Pleasure, Vol III: The Care of the Self (Translated by Robert
Hurley, New York: Vantage Books, 1988-1990).
Frank, A.W. (1992) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (University Chicago
Press).
Gatens, M. (1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (New York and London:
Routledge).
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Cambridge: Polity)
Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press).
Hern M. (2008) Medical Life Histories: Doctors on the Edge. Spring term seminar (26 Feb 2008)
by University of Sussex Centre for Life History Research at which Mary Hern (Brighton and
Sussex Medical School) gave presentation on how narrative methodologies can explore the
journey from medical student to junior doctor.
Holmes, M. (1995) Queer Cut Bodies: Intersexuality and Homophobia in Medical Practice.
http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/queerfrontiers/queer/papers/holmes.long.html. Also
Holmes, M. (2000) Queer Cut Bodies in Joseph Boone et al (eds.) Queer Frontiers: Millennial
Geographies, Genders and Generations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 84-110).
Holmes, M. (2002) Rethinking the Meaning and Management of Intersexuality Sexualities
5(2): 159-80. Also included in Holmes, M. (2008) Intersex A Perilous Difference.
Holmes, M. (2008) Intersex A Perilous Difference (Susquehanna University Press).
Irigaray, L (1985) This Sex Which is Not One (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y.).

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Kessler, S.J. and McKenna, W. (1978) Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. New York,
Wiley.
Kessler, S. (1990) The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexual
Infants Signs 16: 3-26. Available from http://www.aissg.org/PDFs/Kessler-MedicalConstruction-1990.pdf.
Kessler, S. J. (1998) Lessons From the Intersexed (Rutgers University Press).
de Lauretis, L. (1984) Alice Doesnt: Feminism, Semiotics, cCnema (London: MacMillan),
paraphrased in www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/anneke/filmtheory.html.
Laqueur, T. (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (First Harvard
University Press) (1991, London: Routledge).
Liao, L-M. (2003) Learning to assist women born with atypical genitalia: Journey through
ignorance, taboo and dilemmas. In L. M. Liao and L. Glover (eds) Reproductive Psychology:
Integrating Theory and Research in Practice (Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology,
special issue, 21(3), 229-238). Available from http://www.aissg.org/PDFs/Liao-Learning-toAssist-2003.pdf.
Lloyd, M. (2007) Judith Butler (Key Contemporary Thinkers) Polity Press: Cambridge and
Malden MA).
McAdams, D. P. (2001) The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology 5 (2).
Moi, T. (1999) What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford Univ. Press).
Oakley, A. (1972) Sex, Gender and Society (Oxford: Martin Robertson; reprinted in 1984 by
Blackwell)
Stoller, R. (1964) A Contribution to the Study of Gender Identity, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 45, 220-6.
Stoller, R. (1968) Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (New
York: Science House, London: Hogarth Press).
Wittig, M. (1992) The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf).

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