Bones that matter: Sex determination in paleodemography 1948–1995

Gere, Cathy

doi:10.1016/s1369-8486(99)00021-7

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“… See Haraway 1989Schiebinger 1993;Fausto-Sterling 1995 Rob- erts 1997;Gere 1999;Briggs 2002; Reardon 2005. 22 See Fausto-Sterling 2008; Fujimura, Duster, and Rajagopalan 2008; Fullwiley 2008; Koenig, Lee, and Richardson 2008; Roberts 2009.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies

Subramaniam¹

2009

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies

Subramaniam¹

2009

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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“…It is, in part, through its inherent ability to appeal to and please the viewer's sense of beauty that a skull becomes discernible as an instance of femaleness. This is as clear an example of performative sexing as any I have seen (Butler, 1990(Butler, , 1993Gere, 1999).…”

Section: The Feminine Typementioning

confidence: 52%

Description of sex difference as prescription for sex change: On the origins of facial feminization surgery

Plemons

2014

Soc Stud Sci

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This article explores the research project that led to the development of facial feminization surgery, a set of bone and soft tissue reconstructive surgical procedures intended to feminize the faces of male-to-female trans- women. Conducted by a pioneering surgeon in the mid-1980s, this research consisted of three steps: (1) assessments of sexual differences of the skull taken from early 20th-century physical anthropology, (2) the application of statistical analyses taken from late 20th-century orthodontic research, and (3) the vetting of this new morphological and metric knowledge in a dry skull collection. When the 'feminine type' of early 20th-century physical anthropology was made to articulate with the 'female mean' of 1970s' statistical analysis, these two very different epistemological artifacts worked together to produce something new: a singular model of a distinctively female skull. In this article, I show how the development of facial feminization surgery worked across epistemic styles, transforming historically racialized and gendered descriptions of sex difference into contemporary surgical prescriptions for sex change. Fundamental to this transformation was an explicit invocation of the scientific origins of facial sexual dimorphism, a claim that frames surgical sex change of the face as not only possible, but objectively certain.

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“…Just as masculinity is a problem of excess, in the surgical clinic 'ethnic' features were also framed as layered on top of an ostensibly neutral and normal feminine within. The early 20th-century physical anthropology literature that is used in FFS discourse to delineate osteological sex distinctions was shot through with racialized understandings of the body, and their idealization of European beauty as the very definition of female form (Fee, 1979;Gere, 1999;Stepan, 1986). As such, racial politics inhere in received scientific claims to sex difference, becoming the common sense of bodily -and especially facial -classification (Wegenstein and Ruck, 2011).…”

Section: Excess Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…aesthetics played in early definitions of biological sex distinction. For an account of the beauty/biology collapse in early anthropological analyses of skulls see Fee (1979) and for its application in paleodemography see Gere (1999). 5.…”

Section: Feminist Historians Of Science Have Demonstrated the Centralmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender, Ethnicity, and Transgender Embodiment: Interrogating Classification in Facial Feminization Surgery

Plemons

2018

Body & Society

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Facial feminization surgery (FFS) is a set of bone and soft tissue procedures intended to feminize the faces of transgender women. In the surgical evaluation, particular facial features are identified as 'sex specific' and targeted for intervention as such. But those features do not exhibit 'maleness' or 'femaleness' alone; they are complexly entwined with morphologies of ethnic classification. Based on clinical observation, I show how the desired feminine ideal conflicted with facial characteristics identified as 'ethnic'. In FFS practice, 'masculinity' and 'ethnicity' were entangled as the constitutive outsides by which desirable 'femininity' was articulated. I argue that surgery that self-consciously enacts a patient's move away from physiognomically identifiable ethnicity in order to achieve an ostensibly unmarked and neutral femininity becomes not only a process of feminizing the face but of whitening it, regardless of whether 'white' features are the express desire of the patient or aim of the surgeon.

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Bones that matter: Sex determination in paleodemography 1948–1995

Cited by 9 publications

References 37 publications

Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies

Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies

Description of sex difference as prescription for sex change: On the origins of facial feminization surgery

Gender, Ethnicity, and Transgender Embodiment: Interrogating Classification in Facial Feminization Surgery

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