Abstract
Money and colleagues’ work was especially profitable to psychoanalysts and others who were dealing with transsexed subjects in their clinical practices and theorizing transsexuality as a phenomenon. A prominent figure in United States psychoanalytic circles from the early 1960s onward was analyst and MD Robert Stoller. His work determined to a significant degree, gender’s history as an ontological concept. Stoller’s role in this history is commonly recognized, in fact more so than Money’s. He was responsible for reconfiguring some of Money’s fundamental maxims concerning gender. As will become clear in the following pages, Stoller’s idea of what gender might mean was very different from Money’s.
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Notes
Robert Stoller, “A Contribution to the Study of Gender ldentity,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 45 (1964): 220–226. A modified version of this paper later appeared as a chapter in Stoller’s 1968 text, Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (London: Karnac Books).
See Rosie Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Georges Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing, 1978); and Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 1995) for critiques of this tendency.
See, for example, Ann Curthoys, ed., Gender in the Social Sciences in Australia (Canberra: Australian Publishing Service, 1998)
Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996)
Rachel Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Marbeck, “The Meaning of Difference: Gender Theory, Postmodernism and Psychology,” in The Gender and Psychology Reader, ed. Blyth McVicker Clinchy and Julie Norem (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 125–143
Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990)
Rhoda Unger, “Toward a Redefinition of Sex and Gender,” American Psychologist 34 (1979): 1085–1094.
West et al., “Robert J Stoller”; Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 133.
Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Money recounts that he first became aware of the term gender identity in correspondence with Evelyn Hooker, one of Stoller’s colleagues at the University of California (UCLA). According to Money, he learned from Stoller that the members of a Los Angeles — based psychoanalytic group that met regularly from the late 1950s on were responsible for splitting gender identity from gender role (John Money, Gendermaps: Social Constructionism, Feminism and Sexosophical History [New York: Continuum, 1995], 23).
David Haig, “The Inexorable Rise of Gender and the Decline of Sex: Social Change in Academic Titles 1945–2001,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 33, no. 2 (2004): 87–96.
Bernice Hausman, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology and the Idea of Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 103.
John Money and Anke Ehrhardt, Man and Woman Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 284.
See, for example, Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967)
Ann Oakley, Sex, Gender and Society (New York: Harper Colophon, 1972).
See John Archer and Barbara Lloyd, Sex and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)
Chodorow, “Feminism and Difference: Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective,” Socialist Review 46 (1979): 42–69
Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak, Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)
Julia Sherman, On the Psychology of Women: A Survey of Empirical Studies (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1971).
In recent times, the ratio of MtF and FtM transpeople has become somewhat less marked as increasing numbers of (apparently) born-women seek recourse to hormonal therapies and surgical procedures. See Holly Devor, FtM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
Morty Diamond, From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FtM and Beyond (San Francisco: Manic D Press, 2004)
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998)
Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)
Jay Prosser, “Transsexuals and the Transsexologists: Inversion and the Emergence of Transsexual Subjectivity,” in Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 116–131.
Normals was a term that Stoller used liberally in his writings for many years. Finally in the mid-1980s he acknowledged how value laden it was and abandoned it. See Stoller, Presentations of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
Robert Stoller, “The ‘Bedrock’ of Masculinity and Femininity: Bisexuality,” Archives of General Psychiatry 26 (1972): 210.
Robert Stoller, “Gender-Role Change in Intersexed Patients,” Journal of the American Medical Association 188, no. 7 (1964): 164–165.
Money, Gay, Straight and in-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation (New York: Continuum, 1988), 41, 81.
For a particularly elegant analysis of the double nature of the meaning of “fixed” for the intersexed, see Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority and Lived Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
Robyn Weigman, “Object Lessons: Men, Masculinity and the Sign Women,” Signs 26, no. 2 (2001): 364.
Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a 19th Century French Hermaphrodite (New York: Pantheon, 1980), vii.
See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Bonnie Spanier, “‘Lessons’ From ‘Nature’: Gender ldeology and Sexual Ambiguity in Biology,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Katrina Straub and Julia Epstein (New York: Routledge, 1991), 329–350
Bryan Turner, Medical Power and Social Knowledge (London: Sage, 1987).
See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits Of “Sex.” (New York: Routledge, 1993)
Anne Edwards, “Discussion: The Sex/Gender Distinction: Has It Outlived Its Usefulness?” Australian Feminist Studies 10, Summer (1989): 1–12
and Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996) for examples of such assumptions.
Money, “The Conceptual Neutering of Gender and the Criminalisation of Sex,” Archives of Sexual Behaviour 14, no. 3 (1985): 282.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 27.
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© 2009 Jennifer Germon
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Germon, J. (2009). Stoller’s Seductive Dualisms. In: Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101814_3
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