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Books by Jennifer Germon

Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies, 2017

This chapter details shifting regimes of gender, sex and sexuality in various parts of the world.... more This chapter details shifting regimes of gender, sex and sexuality in various parts of the world. Although we note the familiar feminist and queer concerns about globalization we temporarily bracket well-worn lines of critique to refocus an empirical lens on the changing taxonomies of sex and gender across the globe. The aim is not to produce a dispassionate objectivity, but rather a more passionate consideration of the material, semiotic and affective reconfigurations of sex, sexuality and gender through various global processes. Such empirical detail provokes feminist and queer critiques to be accountable to the political present in specific local entanglements.

The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory, 2014

Constructing Gendered Bodies , 2001

Papers by Jennifer Germon

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1999

This paper considers some of the contradictions of authenticity as a defining feature of lesbian ... more This paper considers some of the contradictions of authenticity as a defining feature of lesbian community in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. We sketch the genealogy of marginalization within the lesbian community through the development of subjectivity, community and political struggle for equality. To this end, we deconstruct three major, interrelated “problems” in speaking of lesbian politics: subjectivity, community and universality. At its broadest, the lesbian subject refers to any woman who desires women. But in practice such a “continuum” does not satisfactorily identify a bounded community. In articulating its voice, any community necessarily creates a governing discourse, thereby creating outsiders and insiders to that community. This paper explores the conditions under which the lesbian community has marginalized an “other” lesbian subject with particular reference to sexual practices and associations with heterosexuality in order to establish an authenticity of identity.

ABSTRACT Thesis (MA--Sociology)--University of Auckland, 1998.

Qualitative Research Journal, 2014

The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical ... more The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that consists of dual narratives that bolster an oppositional complementary model of sex-gender. By these accounts male sexual development results from complex and multi-faceted processes generated by the Y chromosome while female sexual development is straightforward, articulated through a discourse of "default sex" (Jost 1953). Such apparent truths fit seamlessly with the timeworn notion of maleness and masculinity as always already active, and femaleness and femininity always and inevitably passive. In other words, he does and she is.
Despite embryogenetic findings thoroughly debunking these ideas, contemporary medical and biological textbooks remain haunted by outdated androcentric models of sex development. This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.

NZ Sociology, 2012

Annabel Cooper: It is one mark of a good book that it can make you change your mind. For me, Jenn... more Annabel Cooper: It is one mark of a good book that it can make you change your mind. For me, Jennifer Germon's Gender: a Genealogy of an Idea resolved some of the questions that had been hovering around my first-year introductory paper on Gender - and made me change it. It asked some hard questions of a famous article which I had held dear for years. And it emphatically returns to the notice of gender scholars some figures many of us have not wanted to address seriously for some time now - most especially, that valorised and vilified alumnus of Victoria University, John Money.

Journal of Bisexuality, 2010

This paper examines the epistemological status of bisexuality in North America since the mid-20th... more This paper examines the epistemological status of bisexuality in North America since the mid-20th century. It argues that the status of bisexuality remains marginal because of its capacity to destabilize a monosexual order. Using Alfred Kinsey’s research to anchor the discussion, the author demonstrates that the persistent rejection of bisexuality as a sexual identity category (and as a critical perspective) acts to contain the crisis of identity that haunts the supposed naturalness of the two privileged subject positions: homosexuality and heterosexuality. It also demonstrates how that same order is upheld by the epistemological and material banishment of the intersexed.

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1999

Conference Presentations by Jennifer Germon

This paper is concerned with heterosexual women’s agency in World War II when almost a million Am... more This paper is concerned with heterosexual women’s agency in World War II when almost a million American servicemen were based in or passed through Australia during the Pacific War. It uses a series of media articles that appeared in mainstream newspapers at the end of 1943 to explore the unsettling effects that sexually active middle-class women had on historical class-based divisions between good girls, and good-time girls. It goes on to examine contemporary feminist responses to the “girl problem” that highlight the conceptual limits of the wave metaphor for Australian feminist histories.

This paper attends to the more-than-human in the context of sport, particularly athletics. The re... more This paper attends to the more-than-human in the context of sport, particularly athletics. The recent London Olympics remain relatively fresh in the collective memory; a true spectacle of the more-than-human. The efforts of Usain Bolt for example, are celebrated as “superhuman.” Excess is the name of the game - so long as the excess is not at the level of sex-gender. For here we find the limits of the human. Nowhere is this more evident than in the representations of and responses to, Caster Semenya following her spectacular form at the 2009 World Athletics Federation track meet in Berlin. She set a new personal best with her finishing time of 1min 55.45sec along with a new world title but the victory was short-lived. Two of Semenya’s competitors called her gender into question and in so doing generated a full-scale media spectacle.
If the subsequent global media furore surrounding Semenya’s case reflects a pernicious global endorsement/enforcement of the gender binary system, the response from international sporting bodies reflects a capacity for global authorities to literally intervene in the discursive constitution of gender categories, as well as the sexual and gendered materiality of its athletes.
In 2010, The International Olympic Committee (IOC) revised its protocols for gender verification testing in women’s sport. The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) followed suit in 2011. The effects of the tests extend into the bodies of intersex women athletes in new ways due to the convergence of two distinct disciplinary regimes: that of global biomedicine with that of international elite sport. Tracing media representations of Caster Semenya since 2009 I highlight the ways in which those of “doubtful sex” are comprehended and apprehended by the binary gendered imaginary.

This paper engages with what can be considered a foundational gendered imaginary in Western disco... more This paper engages with what can be considered a foundational gendered imaginary in Western discourse known as the default sex hypothesis. First proposed by embryologist Alfred Jost in the late 1940s, the idea that all mammalian species begin life as female gained considerable traction in medical and psychological circles over subsequent decades before being taken up and promoted by early second-wave feminists such as Kate Millet and others. After all it was and remains an idea that provides compelling evidence with which to repudiate determinist claims of women’s apparently natural inferiority. It also bolstered the efforts of those feminists seeking to invert the hierarchical relation of men to women by reifying qualities traditionally associated with the feminine.
Yet what are we to make of the underlying assumptions of the default sex hypothesis? What are the consequences – and costs - of such a ‘truth’ for feminism given its seamless fit with the timeworn idea of maleness as always active, and femaleness as always passive? And what of the costs for those whose bodies and subjectivities exceed oppositional models of sex-gender? This paper seeks to destabilise the default sex narrative as ‘truth’ to highlight the violent ambivalence of this particular gendered imaginary.

The sexological thought realm is particularly fruitful site for exploring the production of knowl... more The sexological thought realm is particularly fruitful site for exploring the production of knowledges about sex, sexuality and gender. Historically the sexual sciences have drawn from the well of embodied experience via case studies, many recorded -and reproduced- in the first person. The resultant mountain of sexual stories has generated all manner of theories and ‘commonsense’ notions about sexed subjectivity. This paper seeks to reconfigure the archive by examining the generative (rather than accumulative) work of the archivist. It draws on material from two meticulous cataloguers and chroniclers of sexual behaviours, Magnus Hirschfeld and John Money. Working at different moments during the twentieth century, each amassed hundreds of thousands of case studies, accrued notable collections of erotic paraphernalia, produced large bodies of work, and developed interpretive frameworks of deep significance to the wider social body. John Money for example, offered ‘gender’ as a new conceptual realm of sex during the mid-1950s. While initially employed to discuss the masculinity and femininity of intersex individuals Money extrapolated his theories to account for how everybody acquired a gender. While his work has been largely discredited, many of the key principles of Money’s gender have become axiomatic and thus remain worthy of engagement. While the fruits of Hirschfeld’s labour fared less well his work remains significant for its refusal of sexual dimorphism. Read together, Hirschfeld's Doctrine of Sexual Intermediaries and Money’s theory of gender acquisition make possible fresh ways of thinking about gender, sexuality, the archive and the archivist.

My doctoral research is concerned with the (relatively recent) history of the concept of gender, ... more My doctoral research is concerned with the (relatively recent) history of the concept of gender, arguably the most significant conceptual tool available in the English language today. The use of gender in the context of a human attribute can be traced back to the early 1950s when eminent sexologist Dr John Money used it to explain how intersex individuals were able to acquire a masculine or feminine identity despite contradictory bodily morphology. Using an interactionist model marked by social and biological explanations of identity formation Money extended his theories to explain how everybody acquired such an identity. His work has had an enduring influence on clinical and medical practices over the past fifty years, but has certainly not been limited to those domains. Feminist theorists writing during the early 1970s were among those who drew on Money’s research. Within a decade the concept had became integral to a burgeoning ‘woman-centered’ body of knowledge and remains so to this day. More recently gender has been put to work in the interests of gay/lesbian and queer identities and theory. In addition to a textual analysis of these various bodies of knowledge, face to face interviews were conducted with adult intersex individuals in order to gain access to some of the ways that gender is understood and articulated by those from whom the concept derived. Data from those interviews suggest the existence of a form of sexuality hitherto unaccounted for in sexological research and therefore of considerable import to the field. In addition to offering an historical overview of the concept of gender, this paper explores another dimension of the erotic.

Talks by Jennifer Germon

In the late 1940s French embryologist Alfred Jost proposed that in the absence of testosterone a ... more In the late 1940s French embryologist Alfred Jost proposed that in the absence of testosterone a foetus would develop as female - by default. The default sex hypothesis had a profound effect on the production of knowledge about human sex for almost half a century. When feminist geneticists Eve Eicher and Linda Washburn reexamined Jost’s research in the 1980s, their findings stimulated a paradigm shift of revolutionary proportions paving the way for a radical reconceptualisation of the materiality of sex. Informed by the border crossings of feminist science studies, this paper engages with contemporary embryo-genetic research to illustrate the pleasures and rewards of engaging with bio-scientific data both as an object and as a resource.

Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies, 2017

The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory, 2014

Constructing Gendered Bodies , 2001

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1999

ABSTRACT Thesis (MA--Sociology)--University of Auckland, 1998.

Qualitative Research Journal, 2014

NZ Sociology, 2012

Journal of Bisexuality, 2010

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1999