Now updated with groundbreaking research, this award-winning classic examines the construction of sexual identity in biology, society, and history. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms -- sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed -- and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.

Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sex/Gender is the only interdisciplinary book for undergraduate courses to explain sex and gender from a biological, social, and cultural perspective.

In this Very Short Introduction Chris Shilling considers the social significance of the human body, and the importance of the body to individual and collective identities. He examines how bodies not only shape but are shaped by the social, cultural, and material contexts in which humans live.

This path-breaking study of gender and sexuality is the first to go beyond the nature/nurture debate to offer an alternate framework for considering questions of sex and sexuality.

History of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns by describing the developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology.

Gendered Bodies introduces readers to women's visual art in contemporary China by examining how the visual process of gendering reshapes understandings of historiography, sexuality, pain, and space. When artists take the body as the subject of female experience and the medium of aesthetic experiment, they reveal a wealth of noncanonical approaches to art. The insertion of women's narratives into Chinese art history rewrites a historiography that has denied legitimacy to the woman artist. The gendering of sexuality reveals that the female body incites pleasure in women themselves, reversing the dynamic from woman as desired object to woman as desiring subject. The gendering of pain demonstrates that for those haunted by the sociopolitical past, the body can articulate traumatic memories and psychological torment. The gendering of space transforms the female body into an emblem of landscape devastation, remaps ruin aesthetics, and extends the politics of gender identity into cyberspace and virtual reality. The work presents a critical review of women's art in contemporary China in relation to art traditions, classical and contemporary. Inscribing the female body into art generates not only visual experimentation, but also interaction between local art/cultural production and global perception. While artists may seek inspiration and exhibition space abroad, they often reject the (Western) label "feminist artist." An extensive analysis of artworks and artists—both well- and little-known—provides readers with discursively persuasive and visually provocative evidence. Gendered Bodies follows an interdisciplinary approach that general readers as well as scholars will find inspired and inspiring.

Faced with the seemingly enormous difficulty of representing `others', many theorists working in Cultural Studies have been turning to themselves as a way of speaking about the personal. In Sexing the Self Elspeth Probyn tackles this question of the sex of the self, an issue of vital importance to feminists and yet neglected by feminist theory until now, to suggest that there are ways of using our gendered selves in order to speak and theorize non-essential but embodied selves. Arguing for `feminisms with attitude', Sexing the Self ranges across a wide range of theoretical strands, drawing upon a body of literature from early Cultural Studies to Anglo-American feminist literary criticism, from `identity debates' to Foucault's `care of the self'.