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Reviews
Reviews
[Reis's] goals of extending our thinking about intersex to an earlier era and linking often separate moments and issues are well realized in this engrossingly readable overview.
An excellent book that treats its subject matter with care and respect, and which encourages critical thinking about the issues discussed.
In telling her story, Reis has also provided an excellent collection of illustrations. For scholars and medical students, this pleasantly written history provides an opportunity to view examples of these unusual problems.
Informative, engaging, and intersex supportive in tone. [This book] might be most useful as a supplement in a university course on human sexuality or the psychology of gender. It is recommended to anyone interested in the sociological history of intersex, as one of the very few volumes on the subject.
An excellent history of attitudes towards intersex persons from the 17th century onward.
Offers much-needed voice to the much-silenced lives of intersex Americans... Reis captures their stories as told by a plethora of masculinist and authoritative treatises.
Bodies in Doubt is a thoughtful contribution to the historical analysis of intersex in the United States.
A valuable, important book.
Bodies in Doubt is the first work to present a comprehensive history of the ways that people and institutions have adjudicated the sex status of atypically sexed bodies in the United States. As such, it is a welcome addition to more contemporary studies of intersex and the history of sex/gender more broadly. Reis has meticulously researched a vast range of sources to discern instances in which physical bodies and/or inconsistently gendered behaviors have been the object of scrutiny, puzzlement, and often scorn. Reis' narrative is filled with rich detail and engaging questions that pull the reader along through an accessibly written monograph... One of the strengths of this work is that it presents such a wide range of cases that we can finally see that bodies, and social responses to bodies, really do vary not only across time and place, but even within any given context.
Throughout Bodies in Doubt we can see how the understanding of intersex has reflected contemporary cultural concerns about sex, and abnormality.
A thoughtful, engaging, and important addition to the growing body of scholarship that explores the interrelated histories of medicine, sex, and gender.
Bodies in Doubt makes an important contribution to our understanding of early American cultural history. Reis's revelation of the ways that anxieties about perceived violations of sexual borders intersect with anxieties about racial 'mixing' should receive special attention... Reis's treatment of the overlapping medicalization of racial and sexual 'difference' also suggests the number of intersections with which one must reckon in telling the history of the medical management of atypical sex anatomies.
Bodies in Doubt undoubtedly deserves a prominent place in the growing body of literature on intersex history and politics. One of Reis's main achievements is that she places present-day intersex politics in the context of a long and complex cultural history. Moreover, her discussion sheds light on the American history of intersex before the 1950s, a period that has not yet received much critical attention... Reis has unearthed a wealth of new American case histories that not only make for interesting reading but also offer fresh insight into the cultural construction of intersex bodies. Bodies in Doubt is an excellent and highly engaging introduction to the medical and cultural history of intersex. In addition, by raising awareness of the multiple ways in which intersex relates to other markers of human experience such as sexuality, race, or class, Reis invites further investigation and opens up a set of questions that might well prove central to intersex studies in the future.
A highly readable, novel, and interesting history on this topic. Bodies in Doubt helps readers see how the understanding of intersex has reflected contemporary cultural concerns about sex, abnormality, and civil society. It is not often you find a book that is so scholarly and yet so readable.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
288
ISBN
9781421441849
Illustration Description
7 b&w photos, 10 b&w illus.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note About Terminology and Illustrations
Chapter 1. Hermaphrodites, Monstrous Births, and Same-Sex Intimacy in Early America
Chapter 2. From Monsters to Deceivers in
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note About Terminology and Illustrations
Chapter 1. Hermaphrodites, Monstrous Births, and Same-Sex Intimacy in Early America
Chapter 2. From Monsters to Deceivers in the Early Nineteenth Century
Chapter 3. The Conflation of Hermaphrodites and Sexual Perverts at the Turn of the Century
Chapter 4. Cutting the Gordian Knot: Gonads, Marriage, and Surgery in the 1920s and 1930s
Chapter 5. Psychology, John Money, and the Gender of Rearing in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
Chapter 6. Bioethics, Informed Consent, and Children's Rights
Chapter 7. Who Stands Under the Umbrella? The Politics of Naming and Categorizing Intersex
Notes
Index
