num_pages: 624
description: These eleven essays in history and anthropology offer a novel perspective on these debates by questioning the place of sexual dimorphism in culture and history. In the 1990s questions of sex roles and individual identity have taken a central position in intellectual debates. These eleven essays in history and anthropology offer a novel perspective on these debates by questioning the place of sexual dimorphism in culture and history. They propose a new role for the study of alternative sex and gender systems in cultural science as a means of critiquing thinking that privileges standard male/female gender distinctions and rejects the natural basis of other forms of sexuality.The essays cover a wide range of times and cultures starting in the Byzantine Empire and moving eclectically forward with a special focus on the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The anthropological studies include the Native American berdache the Indian Hijras caste hermaphrodites in Melanesia third genders in Indonesia and the Balkans and transsexuals in America.Third Sex Third Gender emphasizes desires on the margins of society and pleasures and bodies outside the assumed arenas of social reproduction. It opens up the possibility of understanding in new ways how for example Byzantine palace eunuchs and the Hijras of India met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated self-castration and how heartfelt yet forbidden desires were expressed among seventeenth-century Dutch Sodomites the Mollys of eighteenth-century England and the Intermediate Sex or so-called hermaphrodite-homosexual of nineteenth-century Europe and America. EssaysIntroduction Gilbert Herdt  Living in the Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium Kathryn M. Ringrose  London's From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture Randolph Trumbach  Sodomy and the Pursuit of the Third Sex in Early Modern Europe Theo van der Meer  Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans Rene Gremaux  A Female Soul in a Male Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth Century Sexology Gert Hekma  The An Alternative Sex and Gender Role in India Serna Nanda  How to Become a Toward A Unified Analysis of Gender Diversity Will Roscoe  The Third Sex Among the Sambia Gilbert Herdt  The Waria of A Traditional Third Gender Role Robert Oostvogels  Transcending and Transgendering  Male to Female Transsexuals in the United States Anne Bolin  Historical and Cultural Reconsideration of the Mabu Third Gender in Tahitia Niko Besnier
language: English
title: Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History
publisher: Zone Books