For my final project in my American Studies 201 course with Professor Mukherji, I performed archival/primary source research in order to investigate normative conceptions of sex identity. I chose this topic because understandings of the self seems to be individual and self-defined, but in actuality they are embedded within social operations of power that result in the acquisition of knowledge of the self. Our ways of knowing, or determining truth, are largely influenced by society through “[the] politics of truth, a politics that pertains to those relations of power that circumscribe in advance what will and will not count as truth, that order the world in certain regular and regulatable ways, and that we come to accept as the given field of knowledge.” Society limits us to the gendered being, where we recognize ourselves and others as human when we/they conform to gender norms on the grounds that gender expresses an internal truth, or natural fact about personhood. 

 

I performed my research by comparing representations of transgender individuals in medical/psychiatric scholarship and high art in the mid to late twentieth century (1940-1970). 

This time frame is important because the medical/psychiatric scholarship wielded much power over productions of knowledge and this time period marks the climax of sexology’s influence. Conversely, high art during this period was created by many artists that challenged the Western male canon of art history, reshaping society’s normative conceptions of bodies. My research centered on the question how has medical/psychiatric scholarship and high art shaped the knowledge about personhood in relation to the “truth” of sex, gender, and sexuality?