While historians have looked to the past for evidence of whether human sexuality is inborn or socially constructed, anthropologists have pursued the same questions in their studies of sexual behaviors, roles, and expressions found in contemporary cultures around the globe. Those examining data from a wide variety of non-Western cultures have discerned two general patterns.74 Some cultures, like our own, define a permanent role for those who engage in same — sex coupling—‘‘institutionalized homosexuality,’’ in Mary McIntosh’s terminology.75
In contrast are those societies in which all adolescent boys, as part of an expected growth process, engage in genital acts with older men. These associations may be brief and highly ritualized or may last for several years. Here oral-genital contact between two males does not signify a permanent condition or special category of being. What defines sexual expression in such cultures is not so much the sex of one’s partner as the age and status of the person with whom one couples.76
Anthropologists study vastly differing peoples and cultures with two goals in mind. First, they want to understand human variation—the diverse ways in which human beings organize society in order to eat and reproduce. Second, many anthropologists look for human universals. Like historians, anthropologists are divided about what information drawn from any one culture can tell them about another, or whether underlying differences in the expression of sexuality matter more or less than apparent commonalities.77 In the midst of such disagreements, anthropological data are, nevertheless, often deployed in arguments about the nature of human sexual behavior.78
The anthropologist Carol Vance writes that the field of anthropology today reflects two contradictory strains of thought. The first she refers to as the
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figure і. 2 : Model A: Reading essentialism from the historical record. A person with inborn homosexual tendencies would be homosexual, no matter what historical era. Model B: Reading constructionism from the historical record. A person of a particular genetic make-up might or might not become homosexual, depending on the culture and historical period in which he or she was raised. (Source: Alyce Santoro, for the author)
‘‘cultural influences model of sexuality,’’ which, even as it emphasizes the importance of culture and learning in the molding of sexual behavior, nevertheless assumes ‘‘the bedrock of sexuality… to be universal and biologically determined; in the literature it appears as the ‘sex drive’ or ‘impulse.’ ’’79 The second approach, Vance says, is to interpret sexuality entirely in terms of social construction. A moderate social constructionist might argue that the same physical act can carry different social meanings in different cultures,80 while a more radical constructionist might argue that ‘‘sexual desire is itself constructed by culture and history from the energies and capacities of the body.’’81
Some social constructionists are interested in uncovering cross-cultural similarities. For instance, the anthropologist Gil Herdt, a moderate constructionist, catalogs four primary cultural approaches to the organization of human sexuality. Age-structured homosexuality, such as that found in ancient Greece, also appears in some modern cultures in which adolescent boys go through a developmental period in which they are isolated with older males and perform fellatio on a regular basis. Such acts are understood to be part of the normal process of becoming an adult heterosexual. In gender-reversed homosexuality, ‘‘same-sex activity involves a reversal of normative sex-role comportment: males dress and act as females, and females dress and behave as males.’’82 Herdt used the concept of role-specialized homosexuality for cultures that sanction same-sex activity only for people who play a particular social role, such as a shaman. Role-specialized homosexuality contrasts sharply with our own cultural creation: the modern gay movement. To declare oneself ‘‘gay’’ in the United States is to adopt an identity and to join a social and sometimes political movement.
Many scholars embraced Herdt’s work for providing new ways to think about the status of homosexuality in Europe and America. But although he has provided useful new typologies for the cross-cultural study of sexuality, others argue that Herdt carries with him assumptions that reflect his own culture.83 The anthropologist Deborah Elliston, for instance, believes that using the term homosexuality to describe practices of semen exchange in Melanesian societies ‘‘imputes a Western model of sexuality. . . that relies on Western ideas about gender, erotics and personhood, and that ultimately obscures the meanings that hold for these practices in Melanesia.’’ Elliston complains that Herdt’s concept of age-structured sexuality obscures the composition of the category ‘‘sexual,’’ and that it is precisely this category that requires clarification to begin with.84
When they turn their attention more generally to the relationships between gender and systems of social power, anthropologists face the same sorts of intellectual difficulties when studying ‘‘third’’ genders in other cultures. During the 1970s European and North American feminist activists hoped that anthropologists could provide empirical data to support their political arguments for gender equality. If, somewhere in the world, egalitarian societies existed, wouldn’t that imply that our own social structures were not inevitable? Alternatively, what if women in every culture known to humankind had a subordinate status? Didn’t such cross-cultural similarity mean, as more than one writer suggested, that women’s secondary standing must be biologically ordained?85
When feminist anthropologists traveled around the world in search of cultures sporting the banner of equity, they did not return with happy tidings. Most thought, as the feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner writes, ‘‘that men were in some way or other ‘the first sex.’ ’’86 But critiques of these early crosscultural analyses mounted, and in the 1990s some prominent feminist anthropologists reassessed the issue. The same problem encountered with collecting information by survey emerges in cross-cultural comparisons of social structures. Simply put, anthropologists must invent categories into which they can sort collected information. Inevitably, some of the invented categories involve the anthropologists’ own unquestioned axioms of life, what some scholars call ‘‘incorrigible propositions.’’ The idea that there are only two sexes is an incorrigible proposition,87 and so too is the idea that anthropologists would know sexual equality when they saw it.
Ortner thinks that argument about the universality of sexual inequality has continued for more than two decades because anthropologists assumed that each society would be internally consistent, an expectation she now believes to be unreasonable: ‘‘no society or culture is totally consistent. Every society/culture has some axes of male prestige and some of female, some of gender equality, and some (sometimes many) axes of prestige that have nothing to do with gender. The problem in the past has been that all of us. . . were trying to pigeonhole each case.’’ Now she argues instead that ‘‘the most interesting things about any given case is precisely the multiplicity of logics operating, of discourses being spoken, of practices of prestige and power in play.’’88 If one attends to the dynamics, the contradictions, and minor themes, Ortner believes, it becomes possible to see both the currently dominant system and the potential for minor themes to become major ones.89
But feminists, too, have incorrigible propositions, and a central one has been that all cultures, as the Nigerian anthropologist Oyeronke Oyewumi writes, ‘‘organize their social world through a perception of human bodies’’ as male or female.90 In taking European and North American feminists to task over this proposition, Oyewumi shows how the imposition of a system of gender—in this case, through colonialism followed by scholarly imperialism—can alter our understandings of ethnic and racial difference. In her own detailed analysis of Yoruba culture, Oyewumi finds that relative age is a far more significant social organizer. Yoruba pronouns, for example, do not indicate sex, but rather who is older or younger than the speaker. What they think about how the world works shapes the knowledge that scholars produce about the world. That knowledge, in turn, affects the world at work.
If Yoruba intellectuals had constructed the original scholarship on Yoruba — land, Oyewumi thinks that ‘‘seniority would have been privileged over gender.’’91 Seeing Yoruba society through the lens of seniority rather than that of gender would have two important effects. First, if Euro-American scholars learned about Nigeria from Yoruba anthropologists, our own belief systems about the universality of gender might change. Eventually, such knowledge might alter our own gender constructs. Second, the articulation of a seniority-based vision of social organization among the Yoruba would, presumably, reinforce such social structures. Oyewumi finds, however, that African scholarship often imports European gender categories. And ‘‘by writing about any society through a gendered perspective, scholars necessarily write gender into that society. . . . Thus scholarship is implicated in the process of gender-formation.’’92
Thus historians and anthropologists disagree about how to interpret human sexuality across cultures and history. Philosophers even dispute the validity of the words homosexual and heterosexual—the very terms of the argument.93 But wherever they fall along the social constructionist spectrum, most argue from the assumption that there is a fundamental split between nature and culture, between ‘‘real bodies’’ and their cultural interpretations. I take seriously the ideas of Foucault, Haraway, Scott, and others that our bodily experiences are brought into being by our development in particular cultures and historical periods. But especially as a biologist, I want to make the argument more specific.94 As we grow and develop, we literally, not just ‘‘discursively’’ (that is, through language and cultural practices), construct our bodies, incorporating experience into our very flesh. To understand this claim, we must erode the distinctions between the physical and the social body.