In these biomedical discourses, the construction of the body as something with a sex has been a central theme all through the centuries. The myriad ways in which scientists have understood sex provide many illuminating counter-moves to the argument that sex is an unequivocal, ahistorical attribute of the body that, once unveiled by science, is […]

What about sex and the body? Early-twentieth-century scientists were definitely not the only ones who struggled with the question of how we can think about female and male bodies. During the second wave of feminism that started in the 1970s, (fe)male bodies were of central concern in many debates, although in a rather peculiar way. […]

“When you meet a human being,” Freud has said, “the first distinction you make is ‘male or female’, and you are accustomed to making the distinction with unhesitating certainty,” (Freud 1933:120 as cited in Strachney 1965). In the early decades of the twentieth century, scientists were less confident about the distinctions between female and male […]

In the early 1980s, my feminist friends repeatedly asked me to explain what biologists have had to say about women, and why it is that women are depicted as determined and limited by their “biological nature” in ways that men, in general, are not. Despite my years of education in biology, I had no answers […]

Beyond the Natural Body presents an episode in the history of life sciences that is essential to our current understanding of sex and the body, and the relations between gender and science. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, the notion of the hormonally constructed body has become the dominant mode of conceptualizing bodies, […]