ELLEN COLE
Department of Psychology
Alaska Pacific University

Gender Demise or Gender Expansion?

The End of Gender: A Psychological Autopsy.
By Shari L. Thurer. New York: Routledge, 2005. 230 pp. Paper, $22.95.

In the mid- or perhaps late 1970s I first encountered the end of gender. Of course, at the time I didn't know that's what it was, but it remains one of the most powerful memories of my academic life. I was teaching at a small, private college in rural Vermont, Goddard College. I had recently read Monique Wittig's second novel, Les Gu³rill²res (in translation, 1971), and she arrived on campus with a theater troupe to stage and perform a feminist version of Don Quixote. I recall sitting in the cafeteria staring at the actors. I stared at them around campus. I sat in the audience fascinated by the performance. And oddly disturbed. Extremely disturbed. I knew cognitively that this was a troupe of women. It was a feminist play. An all-woman cast. But these actors did not look like women. And they did not look like men. What were they? And why was this turning my world upside down?