The Discursive Construction of Sex

Abstract

The division between biological sex and social gender is critical in much of feminist theory as well as in discourses about gender that circulate in transgender communities. This chapter investigates the role of body part terminology in the discursive construction of biological sex through a lexical analysis of interaction in an online community for transgender men. Members of the community under study in this chapter tease apart conventional definitions of genital terminology that collapse the body parts themselves from the gender categories with which they are associated in ways that allow them to use both canonically female and canonically male terminology (e.g., vagina and cock) in reference to the same individual. Ultimately, these discourses challenge the naturalization of sex. They instead suggest support for the poststructuralist notion that the gendered meanings attached to the body are themselves contingent on discourse.

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 — 78 citations exist upstream.