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| Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality | 
 enlarge | Author: Anne Fausto-sterling
Publisher: Basic Books
Discount Category: Book
Selling Price: $21.00
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Customer Ratings:  16 comments
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 488
Shipping Weight (pounds): 1.1
Dimensions (inch): 8 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0465077145
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.3
EAN: 9780465077144
Publication Date: November 22, 2000
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Condition: Inventory subject to prior sale. Used items have varying degrees of wear, highlighting, etc. and may not include supplements such as infotrac or other web access codes. Expedited orders cannot be sent to PO Box. Sorry, not able to ship to APO, FPO, Alaska, and Hawaii.
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| Customer Comments:
 Understanding Gender Through A New Lens October 7, 2005
8 out of 8 found this comment useful.
Anne Fausto-Sterling's account of all genders and sexes (not just male/female, but everything in between) provides a humanitarian outlook which demonstrates just how far our culture will go to enforce gender dichotomies. About one in 5000 births results in an intersexed (ambiguous genitalia) infant. Most of the time doctors assign a sex to these babies, believing they could never grow into well-adjusted adults with ambigious sex organs. Yet, these surgeries usually include the removal of some or all nerve tissue leading most post operative intersexed people wishing they had never been touched when they grow older. Some of these stories are truly heart breaking and Fausto-Sterling not only explores the history behind these surgeries, but their impact on the day to day lives of thousands of individuals. Giving voice to a group that's not heard from much in mainstream media, Sexing the Body is a must read for anyone interested in the development of gender identity or social injustice.
Outstanding, Essential Piece for the Sexologist's Library March 9, 2005
6 out of 8 found this comment useful.
As a biologist, feminist, and historian of science, Fausto-Sterling lends a modern day expert's voice to the case that many other historians have made -- that women's genitalia was actually more accurately depicted throughout the 18th and 19th centuries than it has been throughout the 20th and into today.
While much of this book focuses on a variety of aspects regarding the ways that society and the medical industry works to `boy' and `girl' babies, as well as claiming that there are only two sexes (which Fausto-Sterling demonstrates is not true) there is some information that is directly relevant women's bodies and women's health.
This book is very well documented with a notes section that is virtually as long as the text itself. In the sections that are relevant to feminist research in sexuality and the body, Fausto-Sterling argues that because there is such an extreme lack of knowledge about the clitoris, its structure, and its function, countless urologists, surgeons, and doctors across the country routinely perform "minor" operations on women - some just hours old - that alter their sexual lives forever (p.300).
An essential read for anyone interested in biology, the body, sexuality, gender and how society molds and shapes what we know as "truth" about ourselves and our world.
 Dismal arguments by a Biology prof. who should know better December 29, 2004
31 out of 74 found this comment useful.
This book would deserve 3 stars, perhaps even 4 stars, had it been written by a layperson, but Dr. Fausto-Sterling is a professor of biology, and developmental biology at that, and her major arguments are horrible. This book and a corresponding literature review of intersex conditions in a journal [Am J Human Biol 12, 151; Mar, 2000] represent the culmination of 6 years of research on the part of Dr. Fausto-Sterling. To start with, intersex conditions are medically defined as conditions where the sex of the person cannot be inferred based on external appearance (including genitals) or where the external appearance of the person is inconsistent with the genetics of the person. Dr. Fausto-Sterling defines an intersex individual as any "individual who deviates from the Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels," which is a remarkably broad definition; the majority of individuals who would satisfy this definition are unambiguously either male or female. In her journal review, Dr. Fausto-Sterling arrives at a 1.7% figure for the prevalence of intersex conditions. 99% of these cases are not considered intersex in the medical literature and comprise of non-intersex anomalies such as late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia, sex chromosome aneuploidies (abnormal number of chromosomes), and vaginal agenesis (absence or failure to form vagina). If one removes the non-intersex cases from the 1.7% figure, the prevalence of intersex conditions turns out to be a mere 0.018%. Worse, the 1.7% figure is the product of shoddy research on the part of one who is too keen on showing a high prevalence of intersex conditions; the actual figure of intersex conditions using Dr. Fausto-Sterling's definition is about 0.37% [Am J Human Biol 15, 112; Jan-Feb, 2003], and if one removes the non-intersex conditions from the latter figure, then the prevalence of intersex conditions turns out to be 0.015%.
All case studies of intersex conditions presented by Dr. Fausto-Sterling in her book are genuine examples of intersex, but she doesn't present a single case study of any of the non-intersex conditions that constitute the 99% of the conditions that she classifies as intersex. Much as homosexual activists have attempted to exaggerate the prevalence of homosexuality to suggest that homosexuality is normal since abnormal conditions supposedly cannot characterize a substantial minority, a high prevalence of intersex is central to the main argument of Dr. Fausto-Sterling's book, which disputes the idea of there being only two sexes among humans and implies that the notion of only two human sexes and especially what it means to belong to one of these two sexes is socially constructed. Of course, Dr. Fausto-Sterling doesn't provide a shred of evidence that any intersex condition results from normal development.
Furthermore, she harps on corpus callosum research, but doesn't document the unambiguous and extensive human neuroanatomical sexual dimorphism well-documented in the literature, including differential genetic expression in the brain.
I do not advocate any kind of discrimination against intersex individuals, but nothing is gained from exaggerating their prevalence by a 100-fold. By attempting to adapt biology to social constructionism, Dr. Fausto-Sterling has made a mockery of the scientific aspects of human sexual dimorphism.
Ambivalence March 16, 2004
29 out of 37 found this comment useful.
This book delves into some of the biological and cultural issues regarding gender identity. In the introduction, Fausto-Sterling tells us that as a biologist, she accepts that there are biological influences on behavior, but at the same time, she is a feminist who is determined that gender identity is also culturally influenced. This book is framed as a kind of reconciliation between the extremes of the two camps. The early part of the book examines hermaphrodites or intersexuals through history. Fausto-Sterling points out that before medical intervention was standard, hermaphrodites were a recognized gender category, who even had their own rules of conduct and inheritance under Jewish law. She then turns her attention to the modern treatment of intersexuals, describing how thanks to charlatans like John Money, many have been surgically adjusted to fit one sex, while finding that their natural gender goes the other way, and they are consequently trapped in bodies that go against nature. She reviews many studies of the medical intervention of intersexuals and infant gender re-assignment, finding dismally few success stories.The second half of the book takes up a variety of topics. Chapter 5, for instance, discusses and dismisses reported differences between the corpus callosum in men and women. In this chapter, Fausto-Sterling goes to great length to explain how the statistics for the corpus callosum studies may be flawed, but it seems she misses a larger point- -are there any behavioral traits that are associated with the corpus callosum anyway? Even if women turned out to have a corpus callosum that was five times as big, on average, than that of men, so what? We don't know enough yet about the function of the corpus callosum to hazard a guess as to what such results might point to, so finding or not finding a difference in size isn't that consequential. Later chapters in the book cover the history of sex hormone studies, hormones and the development of the brain. The book closes with an analysis of the author's own development of a gender identity, and an analogy of gender identity as a set of Russian dolls, where each influence on gender identity, from genetic to hormonal to cultural, fits within the larger context. And then comes 120 pages of endnotes, followed by 70 pages of bibliography, and the index. In previous work, Fausto-Sterling had proposed that there are not 2 but many human genders, including separate categories for each preference of sexual activity. In this book she doesn't exactly argue explicitly for many genders, but she almost seems to assume the idea. She also points out that people's sexual activities may change over time, and thus it may be hard to categorize a person as being throughout life a member of one gender or another. I'm not sure I agree with her on this point. I think it might be more accurate to recognize that are only 2 biological genders, each associated with specific physical and behavioral traits, but that not everyone actually fits neatly into these categories. Indeed, if we have a very tightly defined notion of male and female together with all associated traits, perhaps no one actually matches one gender exactly. But that's not to say that we need to multiply the gender categories- -we just need to recognize and respect each person for who he, she, or even it, is.
opens up the closed doors behind gender "research" June 11, 2003
8 out of 8 found this comment useful.
I highly recommend this book.It will liberate you from the
now recent obesession with gender "differences" and you will
see the world around you in a new light.
The book is pleasant and does not talk down to the reader
as many of the "gender difference" books do.It isn't
preachy or arrogant,instead it makes the reader think about
how the world around them has been so manipulated to keep
status quo thinking going.
This is not a gender differences book,it's a book which
let's us know we are all complex and not actually
limited by gender specific behavior,as the "researchers"
call "appropriate" behavior or apptitudes which people have
been labeled.
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