Suzanne Kessler

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Suzanne Kessler (born October 13, 1946, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American social psychologist known for the application of ethnomethodology to gender. She and Wendy McKenna pioneered this application of ethnomethodology to the study of gender and sex with their groundbreaking work, Gender an Ethnomethodological Approach.[1] Twenty years later, Kessler extended this work in a second book, Lessons from the Intersexed.[2]

Career

Kessler received her doctoral degree in social psychology at the City University of New York Graduate Center (1972) and a B.A. at Carnegie Mellon University (1968). She taught psychology for 30 years at Purchase College, State University of New York after which she became the dean of Natural and Social Sciences and then the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences.[2]

Kessler and McKenna's work was influenced by

gender performativity
.

The Phall-O-Meter by the Intersex Society of North America satirizes clinical assessments of appropriate clitoris and penis length at birth. It is based on work by Kessler.

Kessler's work in her book Lessons from the Intersexed detailed the medical treatment of intersex children, and summarized the range of medically acceptable infant penis and clitoris sizes.[3] Kessler states that normative tables for clitoral length appeared in the late 1980s, while normative tables for penis length appeared more than forty years before that. She combined those standard tables to demonstrate an "intermediate area of phallic length that neither females nor males are permitted to have", that is, a clitoris larger than 9 mm or a penis shorter than 25 mm.[3] Her findings were then presented visually by the (now-defunct) advocacy organization Intersex Society of North America in the Phall-O-Meter. Copies of the Phall-O-Meter are now held by the Wellcome Library in London,[4] and the Smithsonian Institution.[5]

The importance of the work of Kessler and McKenna in feminist/gender theory was acknowledged by Mary Hawkesworth in a 1997 article published in

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, "Confounding Gender". In it she investigates four efforts to theorize gender (Steven Smith's, Judith Butler's, R.W. Connell's, and Kessler and McKenna's). "The four works are the most ambitious efforts that I have found to theorize gender in ways that connect psyche, self, and social relations. They also represent some of the major methodological approaches (phenomenology, postmodern deconstruction, dialectical materialism, ethnomethodology) currently vying for the allegiance of feminist scholars." Three years later, most of a 2000 issue of Feminism & Psychology was devoted to a reappraisal of their book with commentary by seven theorists (Mary Crawford, Carla Golden, Leonore Tiefer, Holly (later Aaron) Devor, Milton Diamond, Eva Lundgren, and Dallas Denny). The introductory essay states that when Kessler and McKenna wrote their book, "the social construction of gender", let alone sex, was still a relatively novel idea. "They not only made the claim that sex is a belief system rather than a fact, but went on to analyze the interpretive practices that enable each of us to create the "fact" of two and only two sexes . The continuing importance of Kessler and McKenna's work is twofold: First, it provides compelling, lived examples of the social construction of gender in interaction . The second reason is: the current multiplicity of theoretical positions on gender mutability, coupled with the increased visibility of transgendered and intersex people."[6]

Books

Articles and chapters

Community service

Since 2002, Kessler has been on the board of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. She was also on the Board of The Children's Center at Purchase College, SUNY from 1986 to 2018.

References

  1. ^ Crawford, Mary (2000). Feminism and Psychology. London: SAGE. pp. 7–152.
  2. ^ a b c d Kessler, Suzanne (17 February 2017). "Suzanne Kessler".
  3. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8135-2530-3
    .
  4. ^ "L0031936". Wellcome Library.
  5. ISBN 978-1-4020-4314-7
    .
  6. ^ Crawford, Mary (2000). Feminism and Psychology. London: Sage. pp. 7–152.

External links

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