The Normal Woman: On the Irrelevance of the Body to Sex in Early Twentieth Century Gynecology

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Beans Velocci is a historian of sex, science, and classification, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science and Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work uses queer, trans, and feminist methods to interrogate how classification systems become regarded as biological truths, primarily in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. Their first book, "Binary Logic: The Power of Incoherence in American Sex Science" is currently under review with Duke University Press. It is a prehistory of cisness that looks at how sex emerged as a privileged way of sorting bodies not despite but because of its incoherence.