Sex and Gender: Beyond the Binaries

Abstract

ality ” polarized as “homosexuals ” and “heterosexuals, ” and “gender” polarized as “women ” and “men”—reflect unnuanced series that conventionalize bodies, sexuality, and social location. Such research designs cannot include the experiences of hermaphrodites, pseudo-hermaphrodites, transsexuals, transvestites, bisexuals, third genders, and gender rebels as lovers, friends, parents, workers, and sports participants. Even if the research sample is restricted to putative “normals, ” the use of unexamined categories of sex, sexuality, and gender will miss complex combinations of status and identity, as well as differently gendered sexual continuities and discontinuities. (Lorber, 1996, p. 144) For more than a decade researchers such as Lorber (1996, 2005) have challenged us to carefully reconsider the ways that we use the terms gender and sex in research. Despite these challenges, health researchers, on those occasions when they have considered sex and gender in their research, have tended to rely on conceptually stagnant notions of gender

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 146 citations exist upstream.