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  • Disciplining Sex:Intersex and the Specter of Gender Certainty
  • Anne Enke (bio)
Elizabeth Reis . Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xvii + 216pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $55.00.

In British colonial America, and in the United States up to the present day, law has required that humans have a specific—and with few exceptions, consistent—sex status as male or female. Whether mediated by religious, social, or medical authority, the requirement to be female or male is so ubiquitous and consequential in social life that it appears to confirm an alleged biological law: humans have female bodies or male bodies that are clearly distinguishable. At the same time, both science and common lay perception has generally acknowledged that all bodies vary a great deal and that all humans present a range of sex/gender characteristics that exceed stereotypical expectations associated with maleness and femaleness. But how much variation is permitted? How have dominant social institutions regarded bodies that are less easily interpreted as simply male or female? How have the many medical disciplines developed in part around methods for maintaining the appearance of two distinct sexes and ensuring that all humans are confirmed as one or the other? These are the questions that Elizabeth Reis seeks to answer in her book, Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex.

Bodies in Doubt is the first work to present a comprehensive history of the ways that people and institutions have adjudicated the sex status of atypically sexed bodies in the United States. As such, it is a welcome addition to more contemporary studies of intersex and the history of sex/gender more broadly. Reis has meticulously researched a vast range of sources to discern instances in which physical bodies and/or inconsistently gendered behaviors have been the object of scrutiny, puzzlement, and often scorn. Reis' narrative is filled with rich detail and engaging questions that pull the reader along through an accessibly written monograph. No longer are we limited to a small handful of well-documented pre-twentieth century cases that yield a rather limited set of interpretations.1 Indeed, one of the strengths of this work is that it presents such a wide range of cases that we can finally see that bodies, and [End Page 644] social responses to bodies, really do vary not only across time and place, but even within any given context.

Reis first efficiently surveys meanings associated with ambiguously sexed bodies from the colonial era through the eighteenth century. Her sources include medical (including midwifery), clerical, and legal treatises and responses to particular cases of "mistaken" or unclear sex. While medical treatises often sought to establish or refute the biological possibility of hermaphroditism (a question which rested on changing definitions of "hermaphrodite"), medical and midwife practitioners, clergy, and juridical practitioners found themselves wrestling with more immediate and consequential questions concerning the legal and even existential status of persons whose genitalia and/or secondary sex/gender characteristics were perceived to be problematic. Interpretations revolved around monstrosity, portents, and Providence; but authorities placed equal emphasis on reproductive capacity and appropriate (heterosexual) sexual behavior.

Among works on sex and gender, Reis provides a worthy discussion of the ways that these categories were formed in relation to racial categorization and hierarchy. Chapter two, on the nineteenth century, helps us see these processes in the context of the professionalization of medicine. As scholars have shown, this century initiated the establishment of medical practitioners as the sole authority over the physical processes experienced in human bodies, in part through taxonomies of normal and deviant.2 Bodies in Doubt shows that the determination of atypically sexed bodies, in conjunction with colonized and enslaved bodies, was one of the realms through which medicine acquired this authority; medical practitioners simultaneously took it upon themselves to declare a definitive sex for every body that came under scrutiny and to develop a taxonomy of raced and classed body types. Explicit discussion focused on the appropriateness of marriage, enfranchisement, inheritance, and divorce, and obsessively invoked charges of dishonesty, impersonation, illicit sex, and imposters getting someone else's due. These concerns reflected even broader anxieties about racial categorization and hierarchy...

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