Product Description

Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73275 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 488 pages

Customer Reviews

An informative and revealing read
An accessible book that lays out the historical assumptions about sex and gender and subjects them to insightful critique. "Sexing the Body" reveals the important role science has played in reinforcing social consensus on the nature of sexuality and effectively erasing sexually ambiguous bodies from society.

Fausto-Sterling's arguments are so decisive that it is impossible to close the book without a serious re-examination of one's own attitudes to sex and gender, and a sense of shock at the physical, sexual and psychological obstacles intersexuals - those with physical elements of both male and female - face in a world which acknowledges only two sexes.

Informative, challenging and much recommended.

Polemics �r� us
OK so it's a polemic but it's funny, well researched, intelligent and frankly disturbing.

Fasto Sterling shows how scientists have constructed false gender dichotomies out of insufficient data and deletion of anything that didn't fit (the Damned data of Charles Fort's Book of the Damned if you like) and that scientific 'truth' is no more than a collection of unchallenged assumptions and predeceases.

This is not the first book to discuss these topics but that it does so with a political agenda makes it invigorating. Her claim that science and surgeons are trying to remove gender variant bodies from existence is a wake up call.

Highly recommended.