rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) (11/09/89)
In article <16709@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> HUXTABLE@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Kathryn Huxtable) writes: > >In article <47423@bbn.COM>, rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro) writes: >[stuff about the depiction of 'gender switching' in tv shows & movies] > I suggest the book _Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach_, >by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna. The authors are psychologists >studying the process of gender attribution, i.e. how we decide upon >meeting a person what gender that person is. They distinguish several >different types of gender: "gender assignment", which is what the >doctor said you were when you were born; "gender identity", which is >what you feel yourself to be; and "gender attribution", which is what >most other people think you are. These are distinct from biological >"male" and "female" and from the cultural behaviors "masculine" and >"feminine". An interesting first person account of the differences between these concepts can be found in 'Herculine Barbin: Being the recently discovered memoirs of a 19th century French hermaphrodite', introduced by M Foucault. This is a translation of a diary by a young woman (culturally speaking) whose assigned gender at birth was 'female', and whose gender identity and attribution were likewise 'female' until age 22, at which point she was reassigned to the category 'male' and compelled to live as such. Also included are the doctors reports (biological determinism rearing its ugly head...) as well as a short story from 1893 based on this person's fairly tragic life (she committed suicide not many years after her redesignation). The brief introduction by Foucault (under whose auspices the book was originally published) is typically pithy.