ABSTRACT

It is often assumed that the concept of gender – understood as masculinity and femininity – has always existed. It hasn’t. The concept came about through the work of sexologist John Money (1952, 1978), who took the term from linguistics during the 1950s and used it initially to explain how intersexed persons learnt to embody the behaviours, tastes, values, attitudes, comportment, etc. of their assigned gender. In other words, those qualities attributed to one of two (legitimate) human sexes, male and female. By Money’s reasoning, if intersex people could acquire an unequivocal identity as a girl/woman or a boy/man despite variant sexual anatomy and physiology then the relation between a gender and a sex had to be contingent rather than essential. Given physical cultural studies’ aim is to make visible the specificity of cultural practices that ascribe meanings to bodies and give form to their representation, analyses of gendered bodies cannot ignore the conditions under which the concept of gender emerged.