The Body of Sexual Difference

Abstract

Chapter 1 of this book described a growing body of feminist theory focused on the “culture of matter,” or what Evelyn Fox Keller terms the “social construction of science” (1989: 34). A short list of such critiques includes (but is certainly not limited to) Women Look at Biology Looking at Women (Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried, 1979), Genes and Gender (Tobach and Rosoff, 1978), Science and Gender (Bleier, 1984), Myths of Gender (Fausto-Sterling, 1992), Nature’s Body (Schiebinger, 1993), Paradoxes of Gender (Lorber, 1994), The Century of the Gene (Keller, 2000), and Peminist Science Studies (Mayberry, Subramaniam, and Weasel, eds 2001). This chapter focuses on critical feminist analyses of what might be termed the “essence” of “sexual difference.” This “essence” consists of bone structure, gonads, hormones, chromosomes, and genes (the list also includes sexual reproduction, the critical analysis of which is so extensive as to merit its own chapter - see Chapter 5). I have derived this list mainly from several years of discussion with students about “sex,” “sexual difference,” and “sexuality,” as well as attending to media accounts of sex “differences.” As Chapter 1 detailed, however successful feminist arguments concerning the social construction of gender have been within academia and the public in general, there remains a persistent and robust recourse to a biological notion of “sexual difference” based upon often cursory notions of testosterone levels or X and Y chromosomes. For this reason, I want to employ feminist theory to critically review each of these “facts” of “sex” with a view to highlighting the mechanisms through which scientific knowledge is constructed.

If I lived in a world with no racism or sexism, and where Catholics weren’t urged to ‘love the sinner and hate the sin’ I might find more compelling the idea that people who are commonly recognized as ‘born that way’ are treated better. If I lived in a world where intersex infants were revered as gifted individuals who remind us of the natural multiplicity of physical sex, I might be happy to allow biologists to define what counts as the ‘truth’ about sexed bodies. If I lived in a world where you could produce easy journalism about the scandal of our kids getting bullied in school (perhaps in the Daily Mail?) as easily as you could about our finger-lengths, I’d be excited about the press coverage. However, I live in this world, so I’m not too jazzed. The issue is not nature vs. nurture. The issue is that we are offered new polished up degeneracy theories as an improvement over irredeemable sin. The version of nature that we are offered always positions us as deviant bodies, hyper-something, or ‘lacking’ in something else (a brain part, a hormone, whatever all the new essence of masculinity or femininity is supposed to be in this decade). The bodies that supposedly produce heterosexual people in these theories are always treated as normative. I’ll get excited about this stuff when heterosexual people start to do the episte- mological work of worrying about how they could have been born that way, or whether it was their parents ‘fault’. Until then (as Freud, for all his faults, recognized) we’re not dealing with an epistemology that can recognize difference (biological or otherwise) without placing people in a hierarchy - and theories like that are not going to go anywhere, politically, or scientifically.

(Hegarty, Lesbian, and Gay psychology mailing list, October 28, 2003)