Presented by the IHC Queer Theory Research Focus Group Monday, May 12 / 4:00 P.M. / Free McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building Joanne Meyerowitz presents material from her new, award-winning book How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002). Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of How Sex Changed will be available for purchase and signing at this event. Winner of the Stonewall Award for nonfiction sponsored by the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table About the Book: How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today. About the Author: Joanne Meyerowitz is Professor of History at Indiana University and Editor of the Journal of American History. Her new book, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002) uses the social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality as a window into changing definitions of biological sex, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth century. It builds on her earlier research on the history of women. In Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988), she looked at how a seemingly marginal group of women workers challenged and reshaped mainstream conceptions of womanhood. And in her edited volume, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994), Meyerowitz presented a revisionist view that challenged the stereotype of domestic, complacent women in the postwar era. For a more recent and updated version of that argument, see her historiographic essay, "Rewriting Postwar Women's History," in Nancy Hewitt, ed., Blackwell Companion to U.S. Women's History (2002); see also "Gender, Sex, and the Cold War Language of Reform," in Gilbert and Kuznick, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (2001). This event is sponsored by the IHC Queer Theory Research Focus Group. Top of Page <<Back