CFP: Queering America: Gender, Sex, and Recognition in U.S. History, Culture, and Literature
On December 1, 1952, World War II veteran Christine Jorgensen became the first American to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Her long-standing legacy has helped reignite a fundamental debate on gender, sex, and recognition. Indeed, as historian Joanne Meyerowitz notes in How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2009), the redefinition of gender identity, “as opposed to biological sex,” was the ultimate product of a long process that “emerged from the medical discourse of the mid-1950s and as a result of the post-Jorgensen phenomenon.” Since then, the non-binary understanding of gender has featured prominently in an ever-expanding debate on American society as it struggled to achieve inclusiveness, freedom, and equality.