Skip to content
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL DOMESTIC ORDERS $35+
FREE SHIPPING ON ALL US ORDERS $35+
Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex

Availability:
in stock, ready to be shipped
$32.00 - $32.00
$32.00
$44.99
$44.99 - $44.99
$44.99

This renowned history of intersex in America has been comprehensively updated to reflect recent shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices.

In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present. Arguing that medical practice must be understood within its broader cultural context, Reis demonstrates how deeply physicians have been influenced by social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and same-sex desire throughout American history

In this second edition, Reis adds two new chapters, a new preface, and a revised introduction to assess recent dramatic shifts in attitudes, bioethics, and medical and legal practices. Human rights organizations have declared early genital surgeries a form of torture and abuse, but doctors continue to offer surgical "repair," and parents continue to seek it for their children. While many are hearing the human rights call, controversies persist, and Reis explains why best practices in this field remain fiercely contested.

ISBN-13: 9781421441849

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Publication Date: 07-13-2021

Pages: 288

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

Age Range: 18 Years

Elizabeth Reis is a historian and professor of gender and medical ethics at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York. She is the author of Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England and the editor of American Sexual Histories.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

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.
—Alice D. Dreger, Northwestern University

Alice D. Dreger

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.

— Alice D. Dreger, Northwestern University

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 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