Books like Sex and gender by James A. Doyle

Judith Butler’s seminal text challenges essentialist views of sex and gender, proposing that identity is constructed through repeated social performances.

"Bloom takes us on a provocative, intimate journey into the lives of "people who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated rather than monochromatic" - female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed. We meet Lyle Monelle and his mother, Jessie, who recognized early on that her little girl was in fact a boy and used her life savings to help Lyle make the transgender transition. On a Carnival cruise with a group of crossdressers and their spouses, we meet Peggy Rudd and her husband. "Melanie, "who devote themselves to the cause of "ordinary heterosexual men with an additional feminine dimension." And we meet Hale Hawbecker, "a regular, middle-of-the-road, white-bread guy" with a wife, kids, and a medical condition, the standard treatment for which would have changed his life and his gender.". "Bloom shows the essential humanity in this infinite variety, allowing us to appreciate these people as they really are - both like and unlike everyone else - and inviting us "to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share." Casting light into the dusty corners of our assumptions about sex, gender, and identity, about what it means to be male or female. Bloom reveals new facets to ideas about happiness, personality, and character, even as she brilliantly illumines the very concept of "normal.""--BOOK JACKET.

Judith Lorber examines gender as a social institution, dissecting paradoxes that challenge the binary view of sex, the cultural construction of women, and the persistent inequalities in family, work, and power.

Gender analysis remains central to understanding social life, yet focusing on gender alone is inadequate. Recent feminist sociological scholarship highlights how gender intersects with other systems of privilege and oppression. This exciting new text combines these insights with an innovative, student-centered pedagogical approach. Taking knowledge acquisition as an important first step, the book goes beyond this to provide students with tools and skills necessary to become critical thinkers and, ultimately, investigate gender on their own from a global feminist sociological perspective. -- Back cover.