Exhaustive Study Guide: Conceptual History and Critical Theories of Gender and Girlhood
Epistemological Foundations and the Formula of Embodiment
Introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies routinely begin by rehearsing the foundational epistemological model:
The global export of Anglophone and United States epistemologies and taxonomies has rendered this specific triadic model of embodiment, identity, and desire pervasive across academic and social institutions worldwide.
Confrontations and theoretical debates regarding gender revolve around several key imperatives and questions:
The pursuit of a proper analytical model, an accurate definition, and a correct political stance.
Quantitative and qualitative inquiries into the total number of existing genders.
Questions regarding whether the twenty-first century possesses the most accurate and inclusive gender categories to date, or whether the conceptual openness of gender has diluted its meaning and undermined social order.
The impact of the success and diffusion of Anglophone gender terminology on non-Anglophone, nonsecular, and non-Western ways of knowing and being.
The historical origins of the distinction between sex, gender, and sexuality, including the widespread misconception that feminists were the original architects of the term.
Meaning, Flesh, and Spatial Contexts:
Spatialized fields of power produce multiple forms of flesh.
Flesh gains analytical meaning exclusively through relational and contextual dynamics.
The Mid-Twentieth-Century Sexological Invention of Gender
Counter to popular assumptions attributing the concept of gender to feminist theory, the contemporary term "gender" and its formal distinction from biological "sex" were invented by United States behavioral psychology and medicine in the mid-twentieth century.
Pre-Mid-Twentieth-Century Paradigm of Sex:
Prior to the mid-twentieth century, the overarching category "sex" encompassed somatic, psychic, and social dimensions simultaneously.
Terminology such as sex difference, the sexes, and sexual differentiation carried broad social and psychological meanings rather than strictly biological definitions.
Early twentieth-century Western life sciences operated under a model where human sex was understood as normally "bisexual."
The bisexual paradigm held that every human individual naturally possesses a mix of male and female attributes. Developmentally, all human life began in utero with the biological potential to become any sex; normal human development led to one sex becoming predominant, though the capacity to change sex was never entirely lost.
The Johns Hopkins Clinical Protocols and Intersex Intervention:
The bisexual paradigm was overturned through medical and psychological experiments performed on intersex infants, children, and young adults in the United States.
By 1950, urology and endocrinology clinicians at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, utilized synthetic hormones alongside nontherapeutic plastic surgeries to coercively alter intersex children's biological development.
Decisions regarding surgical sex assignment were routinely executed by medical clinicians without consulting the children or their families, frequently determining a child's "true sex" based purely on which plastic surgery was easier to execute.
These clinical protocols designed to assign binary sex to intersex children simultaneously established the foundational procedures for transsexual medicine, which was emerging to meet transgender demands for medical transition.
John Money and the Inauguration of "Gender Role":
Psychologist John Money was hired at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the early 1950s to manage the clinic treating intersex children.
In 1955, Money and his clinical research team (Money, Hampson, and Hampson) published several foundational articles outlining the concept of "gender role."
The inaugural appearance of the word "gender" in English occurred in the 1955 paper published in the Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital (Money, Hampson, and Hampson 1955b, p. 254): > "The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to sexuality in the sense of eroticism."
Gender role was formulated to delimit the social and psychological components of human development that had previously been categorized under "sex."
Theoretical Mechanisms and Pathologization:
Money suppressed the concept of intersex individuals as a natural "mix" of two sexes, enforcing a strict binary framework through social input rather than biological determinism.
Money analogized gender acquisition to a native or first language: once acquired during early childhood, it becomes nearly impossible to unlearn, and any gender learned later in life fails to achieve natural fluency.
Clinical evaluation shifted from determining an individual's innate biological sex to assessing how "normal" patients felt, defined as how successfully they adapted to normative social expectations.
A gender identity that failed to match a binary-conforming body was designated as pathological because nonconformity produced social distress from failing to be perceived as normal.
Medicine and psychiatry reframed their role as normalizing the development of non-matching individuals to guarantee they grew up exclusively as rigid social types: either a woman or a man.
Feminist Adaptation and Conceptual Evolution of the Sex/Gender Distinction
Genealogies of Popularization:
John Money initially treated the distinction between sex and gender as a matter of descriptive clinical convenience rather than an ontological theoretical claim.
Psychiatrist Robert Stoller popularized the distinction between sex and gender in the 1960s through research with queer and transgender patients, culminating in his published work (Sex and Gender, [1968] 1994).
United States feminists in the 1970s directly adopted this sexological distinction from Money and Stoller.
The sex/gender distinction is frequently misattributed to 1970s feminists or to earlier texts like Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex ([1949] 1989, p. 267) and its statement: "one is not born, but rather becomes a woman."
Anglophone Feminist Re-theorization:
Joan Scott ("Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," 1986, p. 1054) observed that gender was adopted by American feminists to emphasize the fundamentally social quality of sex-based distinctions, serving as a tool to critique sex stereotypes, sexed hierarchies, and political power imbalances.
Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) utilized the sexological distinction to argue that male political domination over women was socialized under patriarchy rather than rooted in biological difference, citing Money and Stoller to establish that "sex is biological, gender psychological, and therefore cultural" (Repo 2015, p. 80).
Landmark 1970s Anglophone feminist authors—including Germaine Greer, Ann Oakley, and Nancy Chodorow—rapidly integrated the concept, causing direct citations of Money and Stoller to drop away as the sex/gender distinction became consolidated feminist consensus.
Shift to Material Systems and Queer Theory:
White 1970s feminism initially utilized gender without destabilizing the overarching analytical category of "women."
Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women," [1975] 1997) introduced the critical analysis of the "sex/gender system," questioning the intrinsic stability of "women" as a static reference point.
Gayle Rubin ("Thinking Sex," [1984] 2011) and Donna Haraway ("A Cyborg Manifesto," [1985] 1991) expanded gender beyond the study of women, establishing a bridge to queer theory.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Epistemology of the Closet, 1990, p. 27) established as an analytical axiom that: "the study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender. . . . But we can't know in advance how they will be different."
Queer Theory, Performativity, and Transgender Studies Critiques
Judith Butler and Performativity:
Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, [1990] 1999) introduced the theory of gender performativity, marking a shift from analyzing "women" as the primary subject of feminism to a queer analysis of how gender is discursively produced, regulated, and subverted.
Butler omitted the sexological history of the sex/gender distinction, arguing instead that biological "sex" is a conceptual back-formation of gender—a retrospective production designed to supply the illusion of pre-discursive physical substance.
Feminist Materialist Debates:
Critics argued that Butler's performative theory reduced the physical, material body—its flesh and blood—to an unthinkable, opaque state.
Feminist materialists, such as Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies, 1994), advocated for a feminist theory of sexual difference over a theoretical framework centered on performative gender.
Butler published Bodies That Matter (1993a) to clarify the materiality of bodies and address the relations between sex and gender.
Transgender Studies and Trans of Color Critiques:
Transgender studies scholars critiqued Butler's theoretical reading of the film Paris Is Burning, specifically her analysis of the murder of Venus Xtravaganza.
Jay Prosser (Second Skins, 1998) argued that Butler's interpretation of Xtravaganza's transsexuality and desire for normative safety ("a white picket fence") functioned as a self-fulfilling narrative: Butler framed Xtravaganza's gender as inherently unstable while treating the Black transsexual body as a tragic failure to subvert norms.
Sandy Stone ("The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto," 1992) framed the trans body as a subversive text capable of disrupting medical protocols that force trans people to perform normative gender, challenging the stability of gender as tied to a legibly sexed body.
Leslie Feinberg (Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, 2013, p. 5) rejected the synonymity of sex and gender, defining gender directly as "self-expression, not anatomy."
Transgender studies scholars (Prosser 1998; Viviane Namaste 2000; Susan Stryker 2004) levied broad critiques against queer theory for reducing trans individuals to theoretical metaphors for gender instability while ignoring their lived experiences, material oppression, and self-generated theories.
Racial, Decolonial, and Indigenous Genealogies of Gender
Colonial and Racial Foundations of the Sex/Gender Binary:
Trans of color theory (J. Chen 2019) and decolonial theory (María Lugones 2007, 2010) demonstrate that the binary sex and gender system was constructed through European colonial expansion and racialized knowledge systems imposed on non-white cultures.
Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) introduced intersectionality, framing gender as one of several interconnected vectors of structural oppression experienced by Black women under legal and social frameworks.
Black feminist interventions precede and disrupt standard Anglophone periodizations, maintaining complex models of sexed and gendered oppression since at least the 1970s via the Combahee River Collective ("A Black Feminist Statement," 1977) and 1980s woman of color scholarship such as This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981).
Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands / La Frontera, 1987, p. 26) articulated a pre-colonial ancestral epistemology: "I know things . . . older than gender."
Re-contextualizing the 1950s Sexological Model:
Theoretical models centering race and colonialism do not adopt the sexological sex/gender distinction; they analyze sexology as part of racist projects.
C. Riley Snorton (Black on Both Sides, 2017) demonstrated that the theoretical malleability of gender in the twentieth century depended upon the antecedent construction of pliable, exchangeable Black flesh under transatlantic chattel slavery.
Qwo-Li Driskill (2016) documented the five-century-long violent imposition of binary sex and gender roles upon the Cherokee Nation, positioning the 1950s medical invention of gender as a minor moment within an ongoing Indigenous temporality of survival.
Scholarship in Indigenous studies (Paula Gunn Allen 1986; Sarah Deer 2009; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2017) and Black studies (Hortense Spillers [1987] 2003) re-frames gender as an instrument of colonial governance, racialization, and institutionalized violence established over centuries in the Americas.
Global Critiques:
Gender is a specific Western category that cannot be assumed to exist historically or cross-culturally outside the structural impacts of colonial and neocolonial processes.
Contemporary Categorizations, Governance, and Gender Abolition
Critiques of Modern Gender Models:
"Gender Spectrum" Models: Critiqued as a contemporary continuation of sexological taxonomy that forces individuals to declare and embody a legible, true identity, thereby expanding state surveillance mechanisms (Beauchamp 2019) and heighten visibility-based violence (Tourmaline, Stanley, and Burton 2017).
The Category "Cis": Rapid adoption of "cis" (Anne Enke 2012) risks converting structural gender privilege into a simple self-identity, obscuring the unmarked whiteness of the term when misapplied to non-trans Black or Indigenous women who are denied normative gender status.
Nonbinary Identity: While disrupting binary logic, nonbinary formulations risk creating a secondary binary (binary vs. nonbinary) and are frequently critiqued for their cultural alignment with whiteness and masculine-of-center androgyny (Rajunov and Duane 2019).
Gender as Governance and the Question of Abolition:
Gender operates as an administrative system for classifying and controlling populations (Dean Spade 2011), utilized by state apparatuses and institutions of captivity—including schools, medical facilities, and prisons—to limit self-determination (Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith [2011] 2015).
Current debates in gender studies weigh the necessity of gender abolition against the potential harms abolition might inflict on marginalized populations who rely on gender recognition for survival and self-affirmation.
Alternate Genealogies from Marginalized Subjects:
Virginia Prince, a self-identified transvestite woman active since the 1960s who interacted with clinical sexologists, claimed late in life that psychiatrist Robert Stoller had stolen the sex/gender distinction directly from her.
Regardless of historical verification, Prince's assertion highlights an alternative epistemology: individuals subjected to the violence of gender governance possess a deeper theoretical understanding of the category than academic or medical experts.
Emergence of Girlhood and Girl Studies
Contemporary Cultural and Development Configurations:
Celebrity girl-activists (such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg) circulate globally as figures of empowerment and future possibilities.
International development campaigns, including the Nike Foundation's "Girl Effect," designate the adolescent girl in the Global South as the ultimate human capital investment for economic growth, community development, and racial uplift.
Girls serve as prominent figures leading political and social movements worldwide.
Historical Context and Field Formation:
The girl has historically functioned as a site of colonial humanitarian intervention and anticolonial nationalist mobilization.
Girl studies emerged as a distinct academic discipline during the 1990s, leading to the founding of a dedicated journal for girlhood studies in 2008.
Founded primarily by white liberal feminist scholars, the field was established under the premise that girlhood was marginalized within both youth studies (which focused on male youth) and traditional women's and gender studies.
Epistemological Foundations and the Formula of Embodiment
The Basic Equation of Identity
Introductory classes about gender and sexuality often start with a simple formula:
This formula shows that a person's biological body (sex), social role (gender), and who they are attracted to (sexuality) are three different things.
Global Influence of Western Ideas
These ideas originally came from English-speaking countries, especially the United States.
Today, schools and institutions all around the world use this three-part model to describe identity and desire.
Big Questions and Debates
People often argue about how to define these terms correctly and how many genders exist.
Some people ask whether modern ideas are more inclusive or if having too many terms creates confusion.
Others look at how Western ideas might crowd out non-Western, non-secular, or traditional ways of understanding identity.
The Mid-Twentieth-Century Sexological Invention of Gender
**Who Invented