Changing
Sex:
Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender,
(Duke University Press,1995)
Changing Sex considers the emergence of technological transsexualism in the 20th century. My research links the history of the concept of gender to medicine through an analysis of the development of plastic surgery and endocrinology and their contribution to the emergence of transsexualism in the 20th century. I argue that technological advances in medicine can have far-reaching effects on social concepts and experiences, because physicians must ground new treatments that utilize those techniques in theoretical language, which subsequently introduces new concepts about the body into social circulation. In this case,“gender” emerges as a technical term to ground medical practices on the sexed body; subsequently it moves into popular culture to reconfigure common understandings of sexual difference and its relation to biology and embodiment.
Other publications by Bernice L. Hausman on this topic:
“Recent Transgender Theory.” Feminist Studies 27 (Summer 2001): 465-90.
“Do Boys Have to Be Boys?: Gender, Narrativity, and the John/Joan Case.” NWSA Journal 12.3 (2000): 114-38.
"Virtual Sex, Real Gender: Body and Identity in Transgender Discourse." Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Embodied Space and Subjectivity. Ed. Mary Ann O'Farrell and Lynne Vallone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. 190-216.
"Demanding Subjectivity: Transsexualism, Medicine, and the Technologies of Gender, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3.2 (October 1992): 270-302.