Third Sex, Third Gender ― Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History

In the 1990s, questions of sex roles and individual identity have taken a centralposition in intellectual debates. These eleven essays in history and anthropology offer a novelperspective 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, asa means of critiquing thinking that privileges standard male/female gender distinctions and rejectsthe 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 theseventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The anthropological studies include the Native Americanberdache, the Indian Hijras caste, hermaphrodites in Melanesia, third genders in Indonesia and theBalkans, and transsexuals in America.Third Sex, Third Gender emphasizes desires on the margins ofsociety, and pleasures and bodies outside the assumed arenas of social reproduction. It opens up thepossibility of understanding in new ways how, for example, Byzantine palace eunuchs and the Hijrasof India met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated self-castration, and howheartfelt yet forbidden desires were expressed among seventeenth-century Dutch Sodomites, the Mollysof eighteenth-century England, and the Intermediate Sex or so-called hermaphrodite-homosexual ofnineteenth-century Europe and America.Gilbert Herdt is Professor of Human Development at theUniversity of Chicago. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of a dozen books, including RitualizedHomosexuality in Melanesia, Gay and Lesbian Youth, and Intimate Communications.The essays:Introduction, Gilbert Herdt. Living in the Shadows: Eunuchs and Gender in Byzantium, Kathryn M.Ringrose. London's Sapphists: 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 derMeer. Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans, Rene Gremaux. A Female Soul in a Male Body: Sexual Inversionas Gender Inversion in Nineteenth Century Sexology, Gert Hekma. The Hijras: An Alternative Sex andGender Role in India, Serna Nanda. How to Become a Berdache: Toward A Unified Analysis of GenderDiversity, Will Roscoe. The., Third Sex Among the Sambia, Gilbert Herdt. The Waria of Indonesia: ATraditional Third Gender Role, Robert Oostvogels. Transcending and Transgendering. Male to FemaleTranssexuals in the United States, Anne Bolin. Historical and Cultural Reconsideration of the MabuThird Gender in Tahitia, Niko Besnier.