Alice Domurat Dreger, Doubtful Sex: Cases and Concepts of Hermaphroditism in France and Britain, 1868-1915 [Ph.D. Dissertation in History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, 1995]. The work that really started it all. This dissertation formed the basis for Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Harvard University Press, 1998) and won the Esther L. Kinsley…
Category: Uncategorized
Hermaphrodites in Love: The Truth of the Gonads
Alice Domurat Dreger, “Hermaphrodites in Love: The Truth of the Gonads,” in Science and Homosexualities, edited by Vernon A. Rosario [Routledge, 1997], pp. 46-66. This piece discusses the convergence of late-nineteenth century concepts of hermaphroditism and homosexuality. Chapter four of Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex contains much of the same material as this article.
The Limits of Individuality: Ritual and Sacrifice in the Lives and Medical Treatment of Conjoined Twins
Alice Domurat Dreger, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 29c, no. 1 [March 1998], pp. 1-29. In 1996, Cheryl Chase asked me: How much of the treatment of intersex arises out of anxiety about sex, and how much arises out of anxiety about abnormality? I wasn’t sure, so I tried…
From the Age of Gonads to the Age of Consent
From the Age of Gonads to the Age of Consent Alice Dreger, “A History of Intersexuality, from the Age of Gonads to the Age of Consent” in the Journal of Clinical Ethics, vol. 9, no. 4 [Winter 1998], pp. 345-355. I wrote this article for the special issue on intersex I edited for the Journal of Clinical…
Anatomy and Identity, or the Politics of Being Unusual
Alice Domurat Dreger, “Anatomy and Identity, or the Politics of Being Unusual,” in The Meaning of Being Human, edited by Michelle A. Stoneburner and Billy Catchings [University of Indianapolis Press, 1999], pp.169-189. I wrote this piece for a conference volume. It lays down the ideas that I later developed in One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the…
Metaphors of Morality in the Human Genome Project
Alice Domurat Dreger, in Controlling Our Destinies: Historical, Philosophical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on the Human Genome Project, edited by Philip Sloan [U. Notre Dame Press, 2000], pp. 155-184. A lot of folks don’t know how controversial the Human Genome Project was at the outset. This article looks at the political rhetoric that was used (particularly…
Culture Clash Involving Intersex
Alice Dreger and Bruce Wilson, commentary on “Culture Clash Involving Intersex,” The Hastings Center Report, vol. 33, no. 4 [July/August 2003], pp. 12-14. Pediatric endocrinologist Bruce Wilson and I wrote this as a response to a case study of a teenage boy unexpectedly diagnosed with intersex and internal female anatomy. Bruce and I argued that lying…
Cultural History and Social Activism: Scholarship, Identities, and the Intersex Rights Movement
by Alice Domurat Dreger, in Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, edited by Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004], pp. 390-409. This essay has a scary title (I don’t know what I was thinking), but it’s quite readable. For the book in which it appears, I was asked…
Changing the Nomenclature/Taxonomy for Intersex: A Scientific and Clinical Rationale
by Alice Dreger, Cheryl Chase, Aron Sousa, Joel Frader, and Philip Gruppuso, in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism 2005; 18: 729-733. Want a copy of this article? Contact me. When we wrote this, medical writers and clinicians still sometimes used the terms hermaphroditism and pseudo-hermaphroditism to talk about intersex conditions. I traced the political and scientific…
Intersex and Human Rights: The Long View
Alice Domurat Dreger, “Intersex and Human Rights: The Long View,” in Ethics and Intersex, ed. by Sharon Sytsma [Springer, 2006]: 73-86. More than once I’ve referred to this article as “one long shriek.” Incidentally, I thought this would be the last academic article I would ever write. (I wrote it after I quit MSU, but before…