Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea

Gender stands as one of the great conceptual devices of the twentieth century. It has becomes such a part of the English language that it seems indispensable and even ahistorical today. Yet until the 1950s, gender in English marked relations between words rather than people. Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea represents a critical intervention into the concept of gender. It traces gender’s historical specificity from its mid-twentieth century origins in sexology through the present and demonstrates the complex relation that the intersexed have to the concept. In doing so, this text applies a fresh approach to the study of gender as an object of knowledge and embodied experience.