Every Body: Theories of the Body from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Catalog description

Discussions surrounding controversies about gender often exclude intersex, perpetuating the assumption that nonbinary gender is not "natural". We will examine the social and political stakes of including intersex in our thinking about gender, guided by the work of Hil Malatino, David Rubin, Iain Morland, and others, as well as by early modern theories of intersex and transgender elaborated by Ambrois Pare, Michel de Montaigne, and Jacques Duval, who recognized intersex as a natural variation. Intersex theory will be linked to George Canguilhem's critique of the concepts of normal and abnormal and contrasted with John Money's problematic theories of gender.