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Getting Started
In this class, you will be writing an original research paper related to regulating gender. You will be required to engage with three (3) of the course texts in additional to at least four (4) scholarly sources. What is original research? What are scholarly sources and how can you find them?
This guide is designed to help you develop a unique research topic and find scholarly sources for your paper using library databases and search strategies. Use the tabs on the left to navigate to different sections in this guide as needed.
If you have any questions about the resources in this guide, or would like one-on-one assistance from the library coordinator, email Tessa Withorn at glbtlib@indiana.edu.
Image: Mary Frith ("Moll Cutpurse") scandalized 17th century society by wearing male clothing, smoking in public, and otherwise defying gender roles. From Haynes, Alan: Sex in Elizabethan England, page 119. Wrens Park Publishing, 1997.
Course Texts
Located at the GLBT Library:
How Sex Changed by
How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.
Call Number: 2.648 MEYho 2002ISBN: 0674013794Publication Date: 2004
Dude, You're a Fag by
High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.
Call Number: 3.510 PASdu 2007ISBN: 0520252306Publication Date: 2007
Located at the Wells Library:
Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences by
Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences explores cosmetic surgery as a cultural phenomenon of late modernity. From its onset as a medical specialty at the end of the nineteenth century, cosmetic surgery has been intimately liked to discourses of 'normalcy, ' as well as to gender, race, and other categories of difference that have shaped its technologies and techniques, its professional ideologies, and the objects of its interventions. Davis considers how cosmetic surgery is taken up in representations of cosmetic surgery in medical discourse and in popular culture, drawing on a wide range of cultural manifestations including televised 'infotainment, ' popular music, performance art, surgeon biographies, stories of patients, public debates, and medical texts. Davis critically engages with the notion of cosmetic surgery as a neutral technology and shows how it is implicated in the surgical erasure of embodied differenc
Call Number: RD119 .D3848 2003 (10th floor)ISBN: 074251420XPublication Date: 2003
On Female Body Experience by
Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity.
Call Number: HQ1190 .Y679 2005 (8th floor) or OnlineISBN: 0195161939Publication Date: 2005
Located at the Collins and Wilkie RPS Libraries:
The Male Body by
In this surprising, candid cultural analysis, Susan Bordo begins with a frank, tender look at her own father's body and goes on to perceptively scrutinize the presentation of maleness in everyday life. Men's (and women's) ideas about men's bodies are heavily influenced by society's expectations, and Bordo helps us understand where those ideas come from. In chapters on the penis (in all its incarnations), fifties Hollywood, male beauty standards, and sexual harassment, and in discussions of topics ranging from Marlon Brando and Boogie Nights to Philip Roth and Lady Chatterley's Lover, Bordo offers fresh and unexpected insights. Always -- whether she is examining Michael Jordan or Humbert Humbert, the butch phallus or her own grade-school experiences -- she rejects rigid categories in favor of an honest, nuanced version of men as flesh-and-blood human beings.
Call Number: HQ1090 .B67 1999ISBN: 0374280657Publication Date: 1999-06-01
