Sex
by
The English word sex has multiple origins, from Old French sex and Latin sexus (possibly from sec_ā_re, “to cut”), and locates the first English usage in the fourteenth century, referring to the divisions of humans and many other living organisms between male and female on the basis of genitalia and other physical organs involved in reproductive functions. The term evolved, in the commonsense Western usage, to index an identity and a practice. One has a sex (a specific set of genetic, chemical, and anatomical characteristics that mark one as “male” or “female”), and one has sex (based off the heterosexual or homosexual attraction one has to others). Beginning in the late 1800s, Western science and medicine proliferated a series of narratives in which sex was vested with “truth” about human bodies. These narratives imposed upon sex an intensified system of classification, observation, and intervention. The poststructuralist turn in the humanities and social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s introduced new ways of thinking about sex and its engagement with power and modes of governance. Experts in the humanities and social sciences refuted the dogma that outwardly observable behavioral attributes (gender) corresponded with biological or anatomical features (sex; Karkazis et al....
This essay may be found on page 187 of the printed volume.