Somatics Toolkit

A Somatics Toolkit for Ethnographers

Extended Practice 

Extended Practice — A Non-Binary Guide to Embodying One’s Embryonic Gonads

Ben Spatz

By Nicole Bindler

This audio recording explores the development of the gonads, which are embryonic, unsexed ovaries, testis, or nonbinary variations. Through sensing or imagining our undifferentiated embryonic origins, and potential variations in our adult bodies, we can explore an underlying biological explanation for sex and gender fluidity, broaden and complexify our understanding of human sex and gender expression, and repattern any fixed, binary notions of sex and gender that we hold in our bodies or minds.

 

Nicole Bindler also wrote a blog for the Somatics Toolkit, on Palestinian Dance and the Obfuscation of Source Material, which you can access here.

 

Further Reading

Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2012) Sex/Gender: biology in a social world. New York and London: Routledge.

Netter, Frank H. (2019) Atlas of Human Anatomy. Philadelphia: Elsevier.

Cochard, Larry R. (2012) Netter’s Atlas of Human Embryology. Philadelphia: Elsevier.