Product Description: An adolescent girl is mocked when she takes a bath with her peers, because her genitals look like those of a boy. A couple visits a doctor asking to 'create more space' in the woman for intercourse. A doctor finds testicular tissue in a woman with appendicitis, and decides to keep his findings quiet...read more

Product Description: Through a collection of essays by leading scholars on women's history and gender history, Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation questions conventional chronologies while reassessing the relationship between gender, agency, continuity and change...read more

The author explores the relationship between same-sex love and civilization, comparing attitudes in the Christian west to classical Greek, Roman, Arab, Chinese, and Japanese views on the subject as they were influenced by religious superstition, political intrigue, and basic human desires.

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Featuring a new afterword by the author, the paperback edition of a unique, thoroughly researched, illustrated history of transexuals and transvestites documents the history of their lives and explores the meaning of their experience. Reprint. AB.

In the 1990s, questions of sex roles and individual identity have taken a central position in intellectual debates. These eleven essays in history and anthropology offer a novel perspective on these debates by questioning the place of sexual dimorphism in culture and history. They propose a new role for the study of alternative sex and gender systems in cultural science, as a means of critiquing thinking that privileges standard male/female gender distinctions and rejects the natural basis of other forms of sexuality.The essays cover a wide range of times and cultures, starting in the Byzantine Empire and moving eclectically forward, with a special focus on the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The anthropological studies include the Native American berdache, the Indian Hijras caste, hermaphrodites in Melanesia, third genders in Indonesia and the Balkans, and transsexuals in America.Third Sex, Third Gender emphasizes desires on the margins of society, and pleasures and bodies outside the assumed arenas of social reproduction. It opens up the possibility of understanding in new ways how, for example, Byzantine palace eunuchs and the Hijras of India met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated self-castration, and how heartfelt yet forbidden desires were expressed among seventeenth-century Dutch Sodomites, the Mollys of eighteenth-century England, and the Intermediate Sex or so-called hermaphrodite-homosexual of nineteenth-century Europe and America.Gilbert Herdt is Professor of Human Development at the University of Chicago. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of a dozen books, including Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia, Gay and Lesbian Youth, and Intimate Communications.The essays: Introduction, Gilbert Herdt. Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium, Kathryn M. Ringrose. London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture, Randolph Trumbach. Sodomy and the Pursuit of the Third Sex in Early Modern Europe, Theo van der Meer. Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans, Rene Gremaux. A Female Soul in a Male Body: Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth Century Sexology, Gert Hekma. The Hijras: An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India, Serna Nanda. How to Become a Berdache: Toward A Unified Analysis of Gender Diversity, Will Roscoe. The., Third Sex Among the Sambia, Gilbert Herdt. The Waria of Indonesia: A Traditional Third Gender Role, Robert Oostvogels. Transcending and Transgendering. Male to Female Transsexuals in the United States, Anne Bolin. Historical and Cultural Reconsideration of the Mabu Third Gender in Tahitia, Niko Besnier.

A copiously illustrated survey of historical and contemporary figures who have resisted the gender conventions of their day, from the Welsh peasants who cross-dressed to protest taxes to today's transsexual parents.

An important and timely book on a subject of enduring interest