å Tuesday, February 14th, 2017

Due Monday, February 20th, by midnight. Word count: 300 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. Absolutely no quotes should be used. If you paraphrase from the text (from Kessler’s work or anywhere else), you must be sure to include the proper citation (either MLA or APA).

In Suzanne Kessler’s essay, “The Medical Construction of Gender,” she claims that cases of intersexuality point to a lack of imagination on the part of physicians and Western society: a failure to understand how each of the “management decisions” described constitute a moment when “biological sex” is transformed into a “culturally constructed gender” (1990:26). Drawing on the examples in Kessler’s work, describe the factors that impact the way physicians, parents, and patients understand and / or manage the medical condition referred to as intersexuality.

In Linda Schiebingers essay, “Skeletons in the Closet,” the main focus of the discussion is on the anatomy of women and men in the scientific community of eighteenth and nineteenth Europe. These differences became the groundwork for the argued social and political differences between the sexes. Western science was viewed as the correct answer to the questions comparing whether or not women and men, because the greater part of the scientific community consisted of white males there was no questioning the reasoning behind their “observations” about women. The lack of females in the scientific community definitely held back women’s rights from advancing and used anatomy and science to justify the oppression of female minorities and minorities in general. The scientific findings made it seem that women were inferior to men due to their skull size which they linked to be less intellectually inclined. The scientific community always had another explanation to back up the idea that women lesser than men and even used the uterus against the fact that women are more than just child breeding machines. Science is super important because it is the fact behind the ideas and questions that people have so it is imperative that these findings consist of actual reasonable data. The heavy sexist ideals behind the research done by scientists definitely held back women as a whole from progressing at a faster pace because the findings led to institutionalized sexism which is still present in today’s society and will continue to get in the way of females from achieving jobs, awards, and social acceptance that is just handed out to men especially white men of privilege. It is difficult to undo the mistakes of the past but slowly change is underway and has led to major milestones from having the first women president in countries like Argentina to having female scientists working in NASA.