The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus

In: Alternatives: global, local, political, Band 38, Heft 3, S. 228-244

Abstract

This article argues that gender was invented in the 1950s as a new sexual apparatus of biopower. Through a reading of mid-century sexological studies against the background of structural–functionalist and behaviorist theories of social order, it shows how gender was born in the clinic to discipline the reproduction of life in new ways. The truth of sex was no longer found in the genitals or mind, but in the contingent cognitive processes of a behavioral control system. The gender apparatus produced systematized protocols for sex reassignment surgeries for infants with ambiguous genitalia and rendered the family a panoptic institution, all to ensure that children were socialized into normative gender roles guaranteeing the continued reproduction of the life of the species. The violence of this new life-administering technology was crystallized in the pedagogical techniques employed by physicians designed to persuade their child patients to submit themselves to the normalizing care of surgeons and psychiatrists.