Abstract
Whether seen as portents of evil, legal conundrums, sexual menaces, or medical monsters, hermaphrodites have long challenged the basic Western assumptions about the existence, stability, and "naturalness" of the categories of male and female. In nineteenth-century Europe, the body of the hermaphrodite became, according to Alice Dreger's noteworthy study, an important locus of several contested domains. Dreger tracks the various and shifting criteria of defining/diagnosing true sex. What, according to medical theory, makes a man a man, and a woman a woman? Is it the configuration of the genitalia? The dominant set of reproductive organs? The gonads? The gender? All of the above? Dreger does a wonderful job of showing how the definitions of sex shifted over time, across national boundaries, and between medical luminaries vying for authority over the (mis)gendered body.
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