- Copyright Page
- About the Editors
- About the Contributors
- Toward a Sociology of the Body
- Methodologies for Categories in Motion
- Pregnant Embodiment and Field Research
- Sensory Experience AS Method
- Mixed Methods in Body and Embodiment Research
- YouTube Vlogs as Illness Narratives: Methodological Consideration
- Representations of Fatness by Experts and the Media and How This Shapes Attitudes
- Health at Every Size (HAES<sup>™</sup>) as a Reform (Social) Movement within Public Health: A Situational Analysis
- Fat as a Floating Signifier: Race, Weight, and Femininity in the National Imaginary
- Animal, Mechanical, and Me: Organ Transplantation and the Ambiguity of Embodiment
- Aging, Gender, and the Body
- Beyond Binary Sex and Gender Ideology
- Male Breast Cancer in the Public Imagination
- Good-Looking Men Require Hard-Working Women: The Labor of Consumption in the Grooming Industry
- Feeding and Fasting Bodies
- Contrasting Scientific Discourses of Skin Lightening in Domestic and Global Contexts
- Unruly Bodies: Figurative Violence and the State’s Responses to the Black Panther Party
- Race, Phenotype, and Nationality in Brazil and the United States
- The Aesthetic Labor of Ethnographers
- Bodies That Don’t Matter, but Labor That Does: The Low-Wage Male Migrant in Singapore and Dubai
- Embodied Spatial Practices and the Power to Care
- Contesting New Markets for Bodily Knowledge: When and How Experts Draw the Line
- Managing Risky Bodies: From Pregnancy to Vaccination
- The Artificial Pancreas in Cyborg Bodies
- Contesting Lyme Disease
- “Laying Hands” and Learning to Touch and Grab in the Police Academy
- The Place of the Body in Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence: What Do We Know?
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Perceived as natural and universal, the framing of sex and gender as binaries is in fact a cultural ideology. The empirical reality is that sex is a spectrum, manifesting in a wide array of sex variance, some of it formally categorized as intersex by scientists and doctors, and some not. This article gives an overview of how different societies have organized sex and gender into three, four, or more categories, and of the imposition of binary sex/gender as part of the European colonialist project. It then presents case histories examining four transgender and/or intersex individuals in the contemporary context, illustrating how individuals negotiate, exploit, or subvert binary sex/gender ideologies in conceptualizing physical sex variance and gender transition.
Keywords: sex, gender, binary, nonbinary, non binary, spectrum, intersex, DSD, transgender, trans, transition, variance
Cary Gabriel Costello is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the LGBTQ+ Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Costello engages in research in embodied experience and interventions into embodied identity. In one line of research, Costello studies the regulation of sex and gender through medical interventions into the bodies of intersex and transgender people. In another, ze examines embodiment in virtual settings. In a longitudinal study of avatar embodiment in the virtual world of Second Life, Costello studies how identification with the avatar body facilitates sensation in virtual flesh, and the ways in which avatar identification impacts people’s real-life experiences.
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- Copyright Page
- About the Editors
- About the Contributors
- Toward a Sociology of the Body
- Methodologies for Categories in Motion
- Pregnant Embodiment and Field Research
- Sensory Experience AS Method
- Mixed Methods in Body and Embodiment Research
- YouTube Vlogs as Illness Narratives: Methodological Consideration
- Representations of Fatness by Experts and the Media and How This Shapes Attitudes
- Health at Every Size (HAES<sup>™</sup>) as a Reform (Social) Movement within Public Health: A Situational Analysis
- Fat as a Floating Signifier: Race, Weight, and Femininity in the National Imaginary
- Animal, Mechanical, and Me: Organ Transplantation and the Ambiguity of Embodiment
- Aging, Gender, and the Body
- Beyond Binary Sex and Gender Ideology
- Male Breast Cancer in the Public Imagination
- Good-Looking Men Require Hard-Working Women: The Labor of Consumption in the Grooming Industry
- Feeding and Fasting Bodies
- Contrasting Scientific Discourses of Skin Lightening in Domestic and Global Contexts
- Unruly Bodies: Figurative Violence and the State’s Responses to the Black Panther Party
- Race, Phenotype, and Nationality in Brazil and the United States
- The Aesthetic Labor of Ethnographers
- Bodies That Don’t Matter, but Labor That Does: The Low-Wage Male Migrant in Singapore and Dubai
- Embodied Spatial Practices and the Power to Care
- Contesting New Markets for Bodily Knowledge: When and How Experts Draw the Line
- Managing Risky Bodies: From Pregnancy to Vaccination
- The Artificial Pancreas in Cyborg Bodies
- Contesting Lyme Disease
- “Laying Hands” and Learning to Touch and Grab in the Police Academy
- The Place of the Body in Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence: What Do We Know?
- Index
