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 Harold Garfinkel in ethnomethodology (especially his analysis of Agnes in Studies in Ethnomethodology); Stanley Milgram, their social psychology professor; and the sociologist Peter McHugh, McKenna's professor. Kessler and McKenna were the first to argue that the distinction between "gender" and "sex" is a socially constructed one and the latter (defined by biological markers) should not be privileged. Their articulation of what later became known as the social construction of gender was part of the foundation for works of ultimately more well-known gender theorists, Judith Butler (1990), Anne Fausto-Sterling (1992), and Kate Bornstein (1994). Kessler and McKenna's concept of "gender attribution" predated William Zimmerman and Candace West's concept of doing gender and Butler's concept of gender performativity.
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]
