Book Review

Methods/Theory

It was bound to happen. Cultural historians and historians of science in recent years have focused a great deal of attention on what was once taken more or less as given: the ways in which sexual identities are constructed. It was easiest to see this with women, who vocally contested naturalized definitions of womanhood. Then manhood and masculinity began to be interrogated, and what had formerly seemed most stable now appeared problematic. Alice Domurat Dreger extends this line of inquiry to those persons of "doubtful sex" known as hermaphrodites. With sensitivity and wit, she has studied the medical management, in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century France and Britain, of individuals who seemed to be neither wholly male nor wholly female but somewhere in between. The subject is anything but esoteric, for, as the author notes, once we discern abnormality in a set of bodies, we are led to ask "what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable" (p. 6). What does it mean to be a "normal" male or female? Do not expect to conclude this book with an answer, or at least not with a categorical answer, for Dreger posits as one of the lessons of her study that definitions of maleness and femaleness are specific to time and place.

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