#  Advance Praise 

 



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“This is the history I’ve been waiting for: the lucid recounting of a century’s worth of scientific and popular efforts to ground our notions of maleness and femaleness—and their supposed Mars/Venus opposition—in the strands of genetic material that we call X and Y. In *Sex Itself*, Sarah S. Richardson moves beyond simple notions of gender bias in science to carefully describe both how gender beliefs shape research trajectories and how scientific findings inform cultural and political agendas..”—**Steven Epstein, author of *Inclusion* and *Impure Science***

“Through a series of deeply researched case studies, Sarah S. Richardson shows how thoroughly gender ideologies permeated twentieth- and twenty-first-century research on the so-called sex chromosomes. An essential addition to feminist science studies.”—**Helen E. Longino, Stanford University**

“An understanding of the biology of sex and its relation to the complexities of human gender adequate to the postgenomic era is an urgently needed but dauntingly difficult task. It requires tracing the history from which scientific ideas of sex and gender have developed, and the echoes of which shape our contemporary concepts; a grasp of the decisive feminist critique of the science of sex and gender over the last half century, but one that goes beyond the disclosure of bias to survey comprehensively the influence of ideas about gender on science; and a proper understanding of the revolutionary developments in genomic science that have occurred in the last twenty years. This book provides all of these things with skill, sensitivity, and elegance. It will provide a definitive starting point for future discussions of this vital set of issues.”—**John Dupré, coauthor of *Genomes and What to Make of Them***

“Effortlessly combining methods from analytic philosophy of science, history of science, and gender analysis, Sarah S. Richardson offers a rich and extremely rewarding set of case studies of gender interactions with genetics, demonstrating how gender assumptions have led geneticists, over the course of a century, to ‘bypass standard methodology, ignore alternative models, privilege certain research questions, and skew their interpretation of evidence.’”—**Elisabeth Lloyd, Indiana University**

“*Sex Itself* presents an excellent study of the role of gender in human genomics. With this work, Richardson fills a perplexing—and crucial—gap in the literature of gender and science.”—**Evelyn Fox Keller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology**