What about sex and the body? Early-twentieth-century scientists were definitely not the only ones who struggled with the question of how we can think about female and male bodies. During the second wave of feminism that started in the 1970s, (fe)male bodies were of central concern in many debates, although in a rather peculiar way. Feminist biologists, like myself, were certain that biological determinism had to be rejected. We knew that nature does not determine what we mean when we use terms such as woman, body, femininity. We chose this position to contest those opponents of feminism who suggested that social inequality between women and men is
primarily rooted in biological sex differences. According to this opinion, social changes demanded by feminists are wishful thinking because biology, rather than society, sets constraints on the behavior and abilities of women. Biology is destiny, and feminists simply have to accept this reality.
At this juncture in history, we could have chosen to question this “reality,” particularly the assumption that there exists such a thing as a natural body. We might have questioned the status of the biomedical sciences as providers of objective truth, and their assumed role of objective arbiters in social debates. Whatever else may have happened in these exciting years, feminists did not take up this challenge. The biomedical sciences were not included in the feminist research agenda.
Instead we focused our attention on the social sciences. Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that “women are made, not born” functioned as a paradigm for feminist scholars in sociology, anthropology, and psychology seeking to analyze the social and cultural contexts of sexual inequality.1 In the course of the 1970s, feminists introduced the concept of gender—as distinct from sex—into the discourse on women. In Sex, Gender and Society (1972), the British sociologist Ann Oakley emphasized the relevance of making a distinction between “biological, innate sex differences” and “gender attributes that are acquired by socialization.”2 In 1975, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin extended the concept of gender from sociology to anthropology. Rubin included the concept of gender in her influential theory of the sex-gender system to describe the cultural and social structures in which women become excluded from tasks and qualities considered as masculine (Rubin 1975). In this approach, the use of the concept of sex became restricted to biological sex, implicitly or explicitly specified in terms of anatomical, hormonal or chromosomal criteria. Gender is used to refer to all other “socially constructed characteristics” attributed to women and men, such as specific psychological and behavioral characteristics, social roles, and particular types ofjobs.
What actually happened was that feminists, by introducing the sex-gender distinction, reproduced the traditional task division between the social sciences and the biomedical sciences. Feminists assigned the study of sex to the domain of the biomedical sciences, and defined the study of gender as the exclusive domain of the social sciences.3 My point here is not to deny the productivity of the introduction of the sex-gender distinction. The 1970s witnessed the publication of numerous gender studies that revealed the social, cultural, and psychological conditions in which girls and women acquire a feminine role and identity. My argument is that the sex-gender distinction did not challenge the notion of a natural body. Although the concept of gender was developed to contest the naturalization of femininity, the opposite has happened. Feminist theories of socialization did not question the biological sex of those subjects that become socialized as woman; they took sex and the body for granted as unchanging biological realities that needed no further explanation (Duden 1991c:vi, vii,3; Moll 1988). In these studies, the concept of sex maintained its status as an ahistorical attribute of the human body and the body remained excluded from feminist analysis.
It was in the late 1970s and early 1980s that the body made its first appearance in feminist writings. Historians proposed to include the female body in feminist research. In “La Storia delle Donna”, Gianna Pomata challenged the assumption that the female body has a universal, transhistorical essence (Pomata 1983). In the tradition of Pomata, women’s history now focused on the particular historicity of women’s experiences with their bodies. These studies showed most powerfully how our perceptions of the female body are always subject to historical change. “We cannot speak of the female body as if it were an invariant presence through history. There is no fixed, experiental base which provides continuity across the centuries” (Jacobus et al. 1990:4).
In addition to historians, anthropologists also came under the spell of the body. Anthropologists brought the awareness that perceptions of one’s body are bound by culture and stressed the cross-cultural diversity of bodily experiences. Each culture attributes different meanings to the female body. Emily Martin’s book The Woman in the Body extended the anthropological approach to the experiences of women in contemporary American culture. Martin showed how women’s imaging of their bodies vary even within one culture, due to differences in social and economic backgrounds (Martin 1987).
Anthropologists and historians provided very powerful insights that challenged the notion of a natural body. However, they went only halfway. These studies focused on experiences with the body and on how these experiences are molded by time and culture. This still leaves room for the argument that, despite differences in bodily experiences, these experiences do refer to a universal, physiological reality, “a non-historical biological matter” (Duden 1991c:6). In the experiental approach the facticity and selfevidence of “biological facts” about the body remained unchallenged.4
Feminist biologists and historians of science did not hesitate to make this crucial move in exposing the myth of the natural body. Ruth Bleier, Ruth Hubbard, Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino suggested that anatomical, endocrinological or immunological “facts” are anything but self-evident.5 From these feminist scholars I adopted the intellectually challenging and politically relevant notion that there does not exist an unmediated natural truth of the body. Our perceptions and interpretations of the body are mediated through language and, in our society, the biomedical sciences function as a major provider of this language.6 This view of the body is linked to a critical reappraisal of the status of biomedical knowledge. If understanding the body is mediated by language, scientists are bound by language as well. Consequently, the assump-tion that the biomedical sciences are the providers of objective knowledge about the “true nature” of the body could be rejected. This really changed my view of science and the world. What is science all about if scientists are not discovering reality? In search of an answer to this question I was inspired by the literature of the emerging field of social studies of science that introduced the powerful idea that scientific facts are not objectively given, but collectively created.7 This implies a totally different perspective on what scientists are doing: scientists are actively constructing reality, rather than discovering reality. For the debate about the body, this means that the naturalistic reality of the body as such does not exist, it is created by scientists as the object of scientific investigation (Duden 1991c:22). The social constructivist approach opened up a whole new line of research exposing the multiple ways in which the biomedical sciences as discursive technologies (re)construct and reflect our understanding of the body.8 The body, in all its complexities, thus achieved an important position on the feminist research agenda.
Studies since the early 1980s provide a fascinating view of the richness and complexity of biomedical discourses concerning the body through the centuries. One of the most conspicuous ideas emerging from these studies is that the biomedical sciences have led to a fragmentation of the body. However contradictory it may seem, the body as a unity, the object of biomedical research par excellence, gradually disappeared from biomedical discourse. The practices of eighteenth-century anatomy transformed the body into detachable pieces. Medical men dissected the body into smaller units that were subsequently renamed and classified. These “organs without bodies,” to use the words of Rosi Braidotti, came to replace the body as a unity (Braidotti 1989). Since the late nineteenth century, medical research has gone well beyond the organs. Research in histology, molecular biology, biochemistry, endocrinology and neurobiology focuses on tissues, cells, micro-organisms, hormones and neuro-transmitters (Braidotti 1991:362). Thanks to transplantation science and reproductive technologies parts of our bodies can now be transferred from person to person. Hearts, kidneys, eyes, tissues, eggs, sperm and embryos are moved from body to body (Martin 1987).
Another thread that runs through the history of the biomedical sciences is their power to visualize the “secrets” of the body. Modern science made the invisible visible. The dissection practices of eighteenth-century anatomy literally opened the body to the scrutiny of medical scientists and shifted the medical gaze from the superficial contours of the body to its insides (Braidotti 1991:361; T. Laqueur 1990). Anatomy opened up new, unexplored spaces in the body. Modern visualization techniques have further extended this tradition and enabled medical scientists to penetrate into places that remained hidden to their colleagues in earlier centuries. Nineteenth-century X-rays made visible parts of the body that could not be studied with the dissection techniques of anatomists: chests and lungs in motion, in bodies that were still alive (Pasveer 1992). Since the mid-twentieth century, ultra-sound technologies have made possible the visualization of every imaginable part of the body, depicting even the fetus in the womb (Blume 1992; Duden 1991b).
With the rise of modern science, bodies have thus become transformed into objects that can be manipulated with an ever growing number of tools and techniques. Bodies in biomedical discourse are “useful, purposeful bodies that can produce knowledge” (Braidotti 1991:361). Medical technologies have transformed our understanding of “the natural body.” Biomedical discourses, however, not only are shaped by technological developments, but also shift in response to changes in society. The very words used to capture the complexities of the body show a changing set of metaphors that reflect the values of a specific historical period: bodies in scientific texts are “woven from the same materials of the social imagination that go into the making of a new society” (Duden 1991c: 26). Medical men seem to have been particularly prone to describe bodily processes in terms of economical modes of thinking. Metaphors reflecting the specific economical organizations of society are abundant in medical representations of the body. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the body was described as a small business trying to spend, save or balance its accounts, thus mirroring the values of early capitalism. Spending-saving metaphors dominated the description of physiological processes and diseases. Processes in the cell were, for instance, described as processes of income and expenditure that must be kept in balance (Martin 1987:32). In the early twentieth century the body came to be represented as a model of an industrial society, with the cell as a factory (Martin 1987: 36-37). In the 1950s, bodies became complex technological communication systems, an imagery of the body that is still dominant in the 1990s. Fields such as endocrinology, immunology and the neurosciences described bodily processes in terms of complicated communication systems between organs and entities such as hormones and neurotransmitters (Haraway 1989b: 16). Most importantly, the use of metaphors is not just a game with words. Metaphors entail specific meanings and values that may contribute to a positive or negative attitude toward the body. The representation of menstruation in terms of failed production, for instance, seems to facilitate a rather negative view of it (Martin 1987:45).
In summary, feminist studies of the biomedical sciences have shown us how at crucial points medical technologies have shaped what we consider as our bodies.9 The technology of childbirth has fundamentally shifted our understanding of birth itself: the role of the mother has been written out of the process of birth which is transformed into an interaction between doctor and fetus (Treichler 1990). Contraceptive technologies have revolutionized sexual experiences, separating sexuality from reproduction, whereas in vitro fertilization techniques have drastically changed our perceptions of motherhood by introducing categories such as “gestational mother” and “genetic mother.”