Gender: Pathways and dialogues between feminist and biomedical studies from the 1950s to 1970s

Abstract

Despite the importance of the concept of gender for feminist studies, its use and meaning in biomedical research on intersexuality during the 1950s has been little problematized in the national feminist literature. This essay aims to map the uses of the term/ concept of gender in feminist Anglophone productions in the 1970s and in the field of biomedicine throughout the 1950-70s, in order to understand the paths of the term "gender" and the contexts in which its diverse conceptualizations are produced. We concluded that the term was first used in the biomedical field in the 1950s and that there are important interlocutions between the two fields in the 1960s and 1970s.