Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality Author: Anne Fausto-Sterling Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465077145 Publishing Date: 2001 Pages: 480 Format: Trade paperback
This path-breaking study of gender and sexuality is the first to go beyond the nature/nurture debate to offer an alternate framework for considering questions of sex and sexuality.. 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.
Editor: Edwin Cameron and Mark Gevisser Publisher: ROUTLEDGE ISBN: 0415910617 Publishing Date: 1994 Pages: 376 Format: Softcover
An articulate and powerful testimony to the range of gay and lesbian experiences in South Africa, this book serves both as a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and a guide to the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.
"Defiant Desire" records the lives of lesbian and gay South Africans of all races, lived in the face of censure, denial and oppression, from a drag salon in Woodstock to a gay "shebeen" in kwaThema; from a church in a Pretoria nightclub to Johannesburg's lesbian and gay pride march; and from Afrikaans love poetry to the new activism. "Defiant Desire" brings together South Africa's most prominent gay and lesbian writers, activists and academics. The contributors set out to refute beliefs that homosexuality is a white, male or middle-class phenomenon. Their writing makes clear and vibrant the relationship between a growing lesbian and gay rights movement and the broader anti-apartheid struggle in a time of transition and upheaval South Africa, and challenges its people to build a new society that respects and cherishes all of its citizens. "Defiant Desire" is an articulate testimony to the range of gay and lesbian experiences in South Africa. It is both a document of lesbian and gay struggle, and an indispensable book for those interested in the sexual politics coursing beneath the country's troubled passage to democracy.
Tells the story of a man whose botched circumcision as a baby and subsequent surgical alteration to a female was mistakenly used as an argument for the success of such procedures.
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
Editor: Edwin Cameron and Mark Gevisser
Author: John Colapinto
Author: Christopher Durang