The role of the binary Sex vs Gender for Feminist Theory and Activism

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DUELING DUALISMS

yx

Male or Female?

IN THE RUSH AND EXCITEMENT OF LEAVING FOR THE 1988 OLYMPICS, Maria Patiño, Spain’s top woman hurdler, forgot the requisite doctor’s cer- tificate stating, for thebenefitofOlympicofficials,what seemedpatently ob- vious to anyone who looked at her: she was female. But the International OlympicCommittee(IOC)hadanticipatedthepossibility that somecompet- itorswould forget their certificatesof femininity.Patiñohadonly toreport to the ‘‘femininity control head office,’’1 scrape some cells off the side of her cheek, and allwouldbe inorder—or so she thought. A fewhours after thecheek scraping shegot a call. Somethingwaswrong.

Shewent for a second examination, but the doctorsweremum.Then, as she rode to the Olympic stadium to start her first race, track officials broke the news: she had failed the sex test. She may have looked like a woman, had a woman’s strength, and never had reason to suspect that she wasn’t a woman, but the examinations revealed that Patiño’s cells sported a Y chromosome, and that her labia hid testeswithin. Furthermore, shehadneither ovaries nor a uterus.2 According to the IOC’s definition, Patiño was not a woman. She wasbarred fromcompetingonSpain’sOlympic team. Spanish athletic officials told Patiño to fake an injury and withdraw with-

outpublicizing theembarrassing facts.Whensherefused, theEuropeanpress heardabout itandthesecretwasout.WithinmonthsafterreturningtoSpain, Patiño’s life fell apart. Spanish officials stripped her of past titles and barred her from further competition. Her boyfriend deserted her. She was evicted from the national athletic residence, her scholarship was revoked, and sud- denly shehad to struggle tomakea living.Thenationalpresshad afielddayat her expense. As she later said, ‘‘I was erased from the map, as if I had never existed. I gave twelveyears to sports.’’3

In what sense can her/their ideas be said to fit the overall agenda of Feminism, as defined by bell hooks?

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Down but not out, Patiño spent thousands of dollars consulting doctors about her situation. They explained that she had been born with a condition calledandrogen insensitivity.Thismeantthat,althoughshehadaYchromosome andher testesmadeplentyof testosterone, her cells couldn’t detect thismas- culinizing hormone. As a result, her body had never developed male charac- teristics. But at puberty her testes produced estrogen (as do the testes of all men), which, because of her body’s inability to respond to its testosterone, causedherbreaststogrow,herwaisttonarrow,andherhipstowiden.Despite a Y chromosome and testes, she had grown up as a female and developed a female form. Patiño resolved to fight the IOC ruling. ‘‘I knew I was a woman,’’ she in-

sisted to one reporter, ‘‘in the eyes of medicine, God and most of all, in my owneyes.’’4SheenlistedthehelpofAlisonCarlson,a formerStanfordUniver- sitytennisplayerandbiologistopposedtosextesting,andtogethertheybegan to build a case. Patiño underwent examinations in which doctors ‘‘checked out her pelvic structures and shoulders to decide if shewas feminine enough to compete.’’5 After two and a half years the International Amateur Athletic Federation(IAAF)reinstatedher,andby1992PatiñohadrejoinedtheSpanish Olympic squad, going down in history as the first woman ever to challenge sex testing for female athletes. Despite the IAAF’s flexibility, however, the IOC has remained adamant: even if looking for a Y chromosome wasn’t the most scientific approach to sex testing, testingmustbedone. Themembersof the InternationalOlympicCommittee remainconvinced

that amore scientifically advancedmethodof testingwill be able to reveal the true sex of each athlete. But why is the IOC so worried about sex testing? In part, IOC rules reflect cold war political anxieties: during the 1968 Olym- pics, for instance, the IOC instituted ‘‘scientific’’ sex testing in response to rumors that someEasternEuropeancompetitorswere trying towinglory for the Communist cause by cheating—having men masquerade as women to gain unfair advantage. The only known case of a man infiltrating women’s competitionoccurredback in1936whenHermannRatjen, amember of the Nazi Youth, entered the women’s high-jump competition as ‘‘Dora.’’ His maleness didn’t translate into much of an advantage: he made it to the finals, but came in fourth, behind threewomen. Although the IOC didn’t require modern chromosome screening in the

interest of international politics until 1968, it had long policed the sex of Olympic competitors in an effort to mollify those who feared that women’s participationinsports threatenedtoturnthemintomanlycreatures. In1912, Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics (from which women were originally banned), argued that ‘‘women’s sports are all against the law

In what sense can her/their ideas be said to fit the overall agenda of Feminism, as defined by bell hooks?

Duel ing Dual i sms 3

of nature.’’6 Ifwomenwere by naturenot athletic competitors, thenwhatwas one to make of the sportswomen who pushed their way onto the Olympic scene? Olympic officials rushed to certify the femininity of the women they let through thedoor, because thevery actof competing seemed to imply that they couldnot be truewomen.7 In the context of genderpolitics, employing sexpolicemade agreat deal of sense.8

Sex or Gender?

Until1968 femaleOlympic competitorswereoften asked toparadenaked in front of a board of examiners. Breasts and a vagina were all one needed to certify one’s femininity. But many women complained that this procedure wasdegrading.Partly because suchcomplaintsmounted, the IOCdecided to makeuseof themodern‘‘scientific’’chromosometest.Theproblem,though, is that this test, and the more sophisticated polymerase chain reaction to de- tect small regions of DNA associated with testes development that the IOC uses today, cannot do thework the IOCwants it todo.Abody’s sex is simply toocomplex.There is noeither/or.Rather, there are shadesof difference. In chapters2–4 I’ll address howscientists,medical professionals, and thewider public have made sense of (or ought to make sense of) bodies that present themselves as neither entirely male nor entirely female. One of the major claims I make in this book is that labeling someone a man or a woman is a socialdecision.Wemayusescientificknowledgetohelpusmakethedecision, but only our beliefs about gender—not science—can define our sex. Fur- thermore, our beliefs about gender affectwhat kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in thefirst place. Over the last few decades, the relation between social expression of mascu-

linity and femininity and theirphysical underpinningshasbeenhotlydebated in scientific and social arenas. In 1972 the sexologists John Money and Anke Ehrhardtpopularizedtheideathat sexandgenderareseparatecategories.Sex, they argued, refers to physical attributes and is anatomically and physiologi- cally determined. Gender they saw as a psychological transformation of the self—the internal conviction that one is either male or female (gender iden- tity) and thebehavioral expressionsof that conviction.9

Meanwhile, the second-wave feministsof the1970s also argued that sex is distinct from gender—that social institutions, themselves designed to per- petuate gender inequality, producemost of the differences betweenmen and women.10 Feminists argued that although men’s and women’s bodies serve differentreproductive functions, fewothersexdifferencescomewiththe ter- ritory,unchangeableby life’s vicissitudes. If girls couldn’t learnmathas easily

4 SEXING THE BODY

as boys, the problem wasn’t built into their brains. The difficulty resulted from gender norms—different expectations and opportunities for boys and girls.Having apenis rather than a vagina is a sexdifference.Boys performing better than girls onmath exams is a genderdifference. Presumably, the latter couldbe changedeven if the former couldnot. Money, Ehrhardt, and feminists set the terms so that sex represented the

body’s anatomy and physiological workings and gender represented social forcesthatmoldedbehavior.11Feministsdidnotquestiontherealmofphysical sex; it was the psychological and cultural meanings of these differences— gender—thatwasat issue.But feministdefinitionsof sexandgender leftopen the possibility that male/female differences in cognitive function and behav- ior12 could result fromsexdifferences, and thus, in somecircles, thematterof sexversusgenderbecameadebate abouthow‘‘hardwired’’ intelligenceanda varietyofbehaviors are in thebrain,13while inothers there seemednochoice but to ignoremanyof thefindingsof contemporaryneurobiology. In ceding the territory of physical sex, feminists left themselves open to

renewed attack on the grounds of biological difference.14 Indeed, feminism has encountered massive resistance from the domains of biology, medicine, and significant components of social science. Despite many positive social changes, the 1970s optimism that women would achieve full economic and social equality once gender inequity was addressed in the social sphere has faded in the face of a seemingly recalcitrant inequality.15 All of which has prompted feminist scholars, on the one hand, to question the notion of sex itself,16 while on the other to deepen their inquiry intowhatwe mightmean by words such as gender, culture, and experience. The anthropologist Henrietta A.Moore, for example, argues against reducing accounts of gender, culture, andexperience to their ‘‘linguistic and cognitive elements.’’ In this book (es- pecially in chapter 9) I argue, as does Moore, that ‘‘what is at issue is the embodiednatureof identities andexperience.Experience . . . is not individ- ual andfixed,but irredeemably social andprocessual.’’17

Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-cut answers about sexual difference. The more we look for a simple physical basis for ‘‘sex,’’ the more itbecomesclear that‘‘sex’’ isnotapurephysicalcategory.Whatbodilysignals and functionswedefineasmaleor femalecomealreadyentangled inour ideas about gender. Consider the problem facing the International Olympic Com- mittee.Committeememberswanttodecidedefinitivelywhoismaleandwho isfemale.Buthow?IfPierredeCoubertinwerestillaround,theanswerwould be simple: anybody who desired to compete could not, by definition, be a female. But those days are past. Could the IOC use muscle strength as some

In what sense can her/their ideas be said to fit the overall agenda of Feminism, as defined by bell hooks?

Duel ing Dual i sms 5

measure of sex? In some cases. But the strengths of men and women, espe- cially highly trained athletes, overlap. (Remember that three women beat HermannRatjen’shigh jump).AndalthoughMariaPatiñofit a commonsense definitionof femininity in termsof looks andstrength, shealsohad testes and aYchromosome.Butwhy should thesebe thedeciding factors? The IOC may use chromosome or DNA tests or inspection of the breasts

andgenitalstoascertainthesexofacompetitor,butdoctors facedwithuncer- taintyaboutachild’s sexusedifferentcriteria.Theyfocusprimarilyonrepro- ductive abilities (in the case of a potential girl) or penis size (in the case of a prospective boy). If a child is born with two X chromosomes, oviducts, ova- ries, and a uterus on the inside, but a penis and scrotum on the outside, for instance, is the child a boy or a girl? Most doctors declare the child a girl, despite the penis, because of her potential to give birth, and intervene using surgery and hormones to carry out the decision. Choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions forwhich scientists canoffernoabsolute guidelines.

Real or Constructed?

I enter the debates about sex and gender as a biologist and a social activist.18

Daily,my lifeweaves inandoutof awebofconflictover thepoliticsof sexual- ityandthemakingandusingofknowledgeabout thebiologyofhumanbehav- ior.Thecentral tenetof thisbookis that truthsabouthumansexualitycreated by scholars in general and by biologists in particular are one component of political, social, and moral struggles about our cultures and economies.19

At the same time, components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being. My intent is to show how these mutually dependent claims work, in part by addressing such issues as how—through their daily lives, experi- ments, and medical practices—scientists create truths about sexuality; how our bodies incorporate and confirm these truths; and how these truths, sculpted by the social milieu in which biologists practice their trade, in turn refashionour cultural environment. My take on the problem is idiosyncratic, and for good reason. Intellectu-

ally, I inhabit three seemingly incompatibleworlds. Inmyhomedepartment I interactwithmolecularbiologists, scientistswhoexamine livingbeings from the perspective of the molecules from which they are built. They describe a microscopic world in which cause and effect remain mostly inside a single cell.Molecularbiologistsrarelythinkabout interactingorganswithinanindi-

In what sense can her/their ideas be said to fit the overall agenda of Feminism, as defined by bell hooks?

6 SEXING THE BODY

vidual body, and even less often about how a body bounded by skin interacts with the world on the other side of the skin. Their vision of what makes an organismtick is decidedlybottomup, small to large, inside tooutside. I also interact with a virtual community—a group of scholars drawn to-

gether by a common interest in sexuality—and connected by something calleda listserve.Onalistserve,onecanposequestions, thinkout loud,com- ment on relevant news items, argue about theories of human sexuality, and report the latest research findings. The comments are read by a group of people hooked together via electronic mail. My listserve (which I call ‘‘Loveweb’’) consists of a diverse group of scholars—psychologists, animal behaviorists, hormone biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philoso- phers.Althoughmanypointsofviewcoexist in this group, thevocalmajority favorbody-based,biologicalexplanationsofhumansexualbehavior.Loveweb members have technical names forpreferences theybelieve tobe immutable. In addition to homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual, for example, they speak of hebephilia (attracted primarily to pubescent girls), ephebephilia (aroused by young males in their late teens or early twenties), pedophilia (aroused by children), gynephilia (aroused by adult women), and androphilia (attractedtoadultmen).ManyLovewebmembersbelievethatweacquireour sexual essencebeforebirth and that it unfolds aswegrowanddevelop.20

Unlike molecular biologists and Loveweb members, feminist theorists viewthebodynot asessence,but as abare scaffoldingonwhichdiscourse and performance build a completely acculturated being. Feminist theorists write persuasively and often imaginatively about the processes by which culture moldsandeffectivelycreates thebody.Furthermore, theyhaveaneyeonpoli- tics(writ large),whichneithermolecularbiologistsnorLovewebparticipants have.Most feminist scholars concern themselveswith real-worldpower rela- tionships.They have often come to their theoreticalworkbecause theywant tounderstand(andchange) social,political, andeconomic inequality.Unlike the inhabitants ofmyother twoworlds, feminist theorists rejectwhatDonna Haraway, a leading feminist theoretician, calls ‘‘the God-trick’’—producing knowledge fromabove, fromaplace that denies the individual scholar’s loca- tion inareal andtroubledworld. Instead, theyunderstandthatall scholarship adds threads to a web that positions racialized bodies, sexes, genders, and preferences in relationship to one another. New or differently spun threads changeour relationships, changehowweare in theworld.21

Traveling among these varied intellectual worlds produces more than a littlediscomfort.When I lurkonLoveweb, Iputupwithgratuitous feminist- bashing aimed at some mythic feminist who derides biology and seems to have a patently stupid view of how the world works. When I attend feminist

Duel ing Dual i sms 7

conferences, people howl in disbelief at the ideas debated on Loveweb. And the molecular biologists don’t think much of either of the other worlds. The questionsaskedbyfeministsandLovewebparticipants seemtoocomplicated; studying sex inbacteria or yeast is theonlyway togo. To my molecular biology, Loveweb, and feminist colleagues, then, I say

the following: as a biologist, I believe in the material world. As a scientist, I believe in building specific knowledge by conducting experiments. But as a feminist Witness (in the Quaker sense of the word) and in recent years as a historian, I also believe that what we call ‘‘facts’’ about the living world are not universal truths. Rather, as Haraway writes, they ‘‘are rooted in specific histories, practices, languages and peoples.’’22 Ever since the field of biology emerged in the United States and Europe at the start of the nineteenth cen- tury, it has been bound up in debates over sexual, racial, and national poli- tics.23 And as our social viewpoints have shifted, so has the science of the body.24

Manyhistoriansmark the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries as periods of great change in our concepts of sex and sexuality.25 During this period a notion of legal equality replaced the feudal exercise of arbitrary and violent power given by divine right. As the historian Michel Foucault saw it, society still required some form of discipline. A growing capitalism needed new methods tocontrol the ‘‘insertionofbodies into themachineryofproduction andtheadjustmentof thephenomenaofpopulationtoeconomicprocesses.’’26

Foucaultdividedthispowerover livingbodies (bio-power) intotwoforms.The first centered on the individual body. The role of many science professionals (including the so-called human sciences—psychology, sociology, and eco- nomics)becametooptimizeandstandardize thebody’s function.27 InEurope and North America, Foucault’s standardized body has, traditionally, been male and Caucasian. And although this book focuses on gender, I regularly discuss the ways in which the ideas of both race and gender emerge from underlying assumptions about the body’s physical nature.28 Understanding how race and gender work—together and independently—helps us learn more abouthowthe social becomesembodied. Foucault’s second formof bio-power—‘‘a biopolitics of the population’’29—

emergedduringtheearlynineteenthcenturyaspioneersocialscientistsbegan todevelopthe surveyandstatisticalmethodsneeded to superviseandmanage ‘‘births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity.’’30

ForFoucault, ‘‘discipline’’hadadoublemeaning.Ontheonehand, it implied a form of control or punishment; on the other, it referred to an academic body of knowledge—the discipline of history or biology. The disciplinary knowledge developed in the fields of embryology, endocrinology, surgery,

In what sense can her/their ideas be said to fit the overall agenda of Feminism, as defined by bell hooks?

8 SEXING THE BODY

psychology, and biochemistry have encouraged physicians to attempt to con- trol the very gender of the body—including ‘‘its capacities, gestures, move- ments, location andbehaviors.’’31

By helping the normal take precedence over the natural, physicians have also contributed to populational biopolitics. We have become, Foucault writes, ‘‘a society of normalization.’’32 One important mid-twentieth-cen- tury sexologist went so far as to name the male and female models in his anatomytextNormaandNormman(sic).33Todayweseethenotionofpathol- ogyapplied inmany settings—fromthe sick,diseased,ordifferentbody,34 to the single-parent family in theurbanghetto.35 But imposing a gendernorm is socially,not scientifically,driven.The lackof research into thenormaldistri- butions of genital anatomy, aswell asmany surgeons’ lackof interest in using suchdatawhen theydoexist (discussed inchapters3 and4), clearly illustrate this claim.Fromtheviewpointofmedical practitioners, progress in the han- dling of intersexuality involves maintaining the normal. Accordingly, there ought to be only two boxes: male and female. The knowledge developed by the medical disciplines empowers doctors to maintain a mythology of the normal by changing the intersexual body tofit, as nearly as possible, intoone or theother cubbyhole. One person’s medical progress, however, can be another’s discipline and

control. Intersexuals such as Maria Patiño have unruly—even heretical— bodies. They do not fall naturally into a binary classification; only a surgical shoehorn canput themthere.Butwhy shouldwecare if a ‘‘woman’’ (defined ashavingbreasts, avagina,uterus,ovaries, andmenstruation)has a ‘‘clitoris’’ large enough topenetrate thevaginaof anotherwoman?Why shouldwecare if there are individuals whose ‘‘natural biological equipment’’ enables them to have sex ‘‘naturally’’ with both men and women? Why must we amputate or surgically hide that ‘‘offending shaft’’ foundon an especially large clitoris? The answer: to maintain gender divisions,wemust control those bodies that are sounruly as toblur theborders. Since intersexualsquite literally embody both sexes, theyweakenclaims about sexual difference. Thisbookreflects a shiftingpoliticsof scienceandof thebody. I amdeeply

committed to the ideasof themodernmovementsof gay andwomen’s libera- tion,whichargue that thewaywetraditionallyconceptualizegenderandsex- ual identity narrows life’s possibilities while perpetuating gender inequality. In order to shift the politics of the body, one must change the politics of sci- ence itself. Feminists (and others)who study how scientists create empirical knowledge have begun to reconceptualize the very nature of the scientific process.36 As with other social arenas, such scholars understand practical, empirical knowledge to be imbued with the social and political issues of its,The role of the binary Sex vs Gender for Feminist Theory and Activism

Global Social Theory INTL 30500

Instructor: Dora Suárez

Anne Fausto-Sterling + Judith Butler=