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Book Cover for: Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex, Elizabeth Reis

Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex

Elizabeth Reis

Paperback
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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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Publish Date: Jul 13rd, 2021
  • Pages: 288
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - 0002
  • Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.10in - 0.80in - 0.85lb
  • EAN: 9781421441849
  • Categories: • History• Gender Studies• Ethics

About the Author

Reis, Elizabeth: - Elizabeth Reis is an associate professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department and the History Department at the University of Oregon and author of Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England.

Praise for this book

[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.
--Bulletin of the History of Medicine
An excellent book that treats its subject matter with care and respect, and which encourages critical thinking about the issues discussed.
--American Journal of Human Biology
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.
--Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
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.
--PsycCRITIQUES
An excellent history of attitudes towards intersex persons from the 17th century onward.
--Choice
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.
--Health and History
Bodies in Doubt is a thoughtful contribution to the historical analysis of intersex in the United States.
--Medical History
A valuable, important book.
--Journal of American History
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.
--Reviews in American History
Throughout Bodies in Doubt we can see how the understanding of intersex has reflected contemporary cultural concerns about sex, and abnormality.
--Social History of Medicine
A thoughtful, engaging, and important addition to the growing body of scholarship that explores the interrelated histories of medicine, sex, and gender.
--Pacific Historical Review
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.
--International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics
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.
--GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
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