SEXING THE BODY BY ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING

"SEXUALITY IS A SOMATIC FACT CREATED BY A CULTURAL EFFECT" (21)

HUMANS ARE BIOLOGICAL AND IN SOME SENSE NATURAL BEINGS AND SOCIAL AND IN SOME SENSE ARTIFICIAL - OR IF YOU WILL, CONSTRUCTED ENTITIES. CAN WE DEVISE A WAY OF SEEING OURSELVES, AS WE DEVELOP FROM FERTILIZATION TO OLD AGE, AS SIMULTANEOUSLY NATURAL AND UNNATURAL? (25)

Grosz proposes we think of the body - the brain, muscles, sex organs, hormones, and more - as composing the inside of the Mobius stip. Culture and experience would constitute the outside surface. But, as the image suggests, the inside and outside are continuous and one can move from one to the other without ever lifting ones feet of the ground. (24)

"In Renaissance Europe, scientific and medical texxts iften propounded contradictory theories about the production of hermaphrodites. These theories could not fix gender as something real and stable within the body. Rather, physicians stories competed both with medicine and with those elaborated by the Church, the llegal profession, and politicians." (34)

"In Piedra, Italy, in 1601, [...] Daniel Burghammer shocked his wife when her gave birth to a healthty baby girl. After his alarmed wife called in his army captain, he confessed to being half male and half female. [...] The Church declared the child's birth a miracle, but granted Burghammer's wife a divorce, suggesting that it found Burghammer's ability to give birth incompatible with the role of a husband." Concern was not at all scientific or medical but based on rigidly established gender roles by the church (35)

"in the early 1600s, French hermaphrodites "shared with medical and legal experts the right to decide which sex prevailed but, once having made a choise, was expected to stick with it. The penalty for reneging could be severe." (36)