Sandra Eder | How the Clinic Made Gender

Professor Eder offers an alternative lineage for the conceptualization of our current understanding of gender as socially and culturally determined, one that emerges and intersects with the clinic where physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists developed a pragmatic understanding of psychological or learned sex in their engagement with children manifesting intersex traits. The book details gender’s transition from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender individuals in the 1960s. It then considers the variable ways feminists integrated gender into their theories and practices in the early 1970s.

About the Speaker

Sandra Eder (she/her) is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian of medicine, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of How the Clinic Made Gender: The Medical History of a Transformative Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and co-editor of Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children (Rutgers University Press, 2021)