Situated Knowledges of Personal Embodiment

Abstract

Academic psychologists' treatment of `sex' as an ahistorical, pretheoretical notion in theories of `gender' is compared and contrasted with knowledge produced by persons whose own gendered embodiment is outside binary gender/sex categories and whose moral agency is erased by theories depicting them as exceptions to a binary-based scheme. This latter knowledge, emerging from an activist community's reflections on its own personal/political praxis in relation to dominant social institutions and ideologies, has selectively incorporated, challenged and transformed gender/sex discourses in significant segments of medicine and academic disciplines other than psychology. Psychological theories continue to reproduce binary categories (and practices organized around them), in part because they incorporate only some of the implications of a social constructivist perspective, and in part because psychologists seem to theorize gender/sex in isolation from other knowledge-producing communities.