Grosz postulates innate drives that become organized by physical experience into somatic feelings, which translate into what we call emotions. Taking the innate at face value, however, still leaves us with an unexplained residue of nature.112 Humans are biological and thus in some sense natural beings and social and in some sense artificial—or, if you will, constructed entities. Can we devise a way of seeing ourselves, as we develop from fertilization to old age, as simultaneously natural and unnatural? During the past decade an exciting vision has emerged that I have loosely grouped under the rubric ofdevelop- mental systems theory, or DST.113 What do we gain by choosing DST as an analytic framework?
Developmental systems theorists deny that there are fundamentally two kinds of processes: one guided by genes, hormones, and brain cells (that is, nature), the other by the environment, experience, learning, or inchoate social forces (that is, nurture).114 The pioneer systems theorist, philosopher Susan Oyama promises that DST: ‘‘gives more clarity, more coherence, more consistency and a different way to interpret data; in addition it offers the means for synthesizing the concepts and methods. . . ofgroups that have been working at cross-purposes, or at least talking past each other for decades.’’ Nevertheless, developmental systems theory is no magic bullet. Many will resist its insights because, as Oyama explains, ‘‘ it gives less. . . guidance on fundamental truth’’ and ‘‘fewer conclusions about what is inherently desirable, healthy, natural or inevitable.’’115
How, specifically, can DST help us break away from dualistic thought processes? Consider an example described by systems theorist Peter Taylor, a goat born with no front legs. During its lifetime it managed to hop around on its hind limbs. An anatomist who studied the goat after it died found that it had an S-shaped spine (as do humans), ‘‘thickened bones, modified muscle insertions, and other correlates of moving on two legs.’’116 This (and every goat’s) skeletal system developed as part of its manner of walking. Neither its genes nor its environment determined its anatomy. Only the ensemble had such power. Many developmental physiologists recognize this principle.117 As one biologist writes, ‘‘enstructuring occurs during the enactment of individual life histories.’’118
A few years ago, when the neuroscientist Simon LeVay reported that the brain structures of gay and heterosexual men differed (and that this mirrored a more general sex difference between straight men and women), he became the center of a firestorm.119 Although an instant hero among many gay males, he was at odds with a rather mixed group. On the one hand, feminists such as myself disliked his unquestioning use of gender dichotomies, which have in the past never worked to further equality for women. On the other, members of the Christian right hated his work because they believe that homosexuality is a sin that individuals can choose to reject.120 LeVay’s, and later geneticist Dean Hamer’s, work suggested to them that homosexuality was inborn or innate.121 The language of the public debate soon became polarized. Each side contrasted words such as genetic, biological, inborn, innate, and unchanging with environmental, acquired, constructed, and choice.122
The ease with which such debates evoke the nature/nurture divide is a consequence of the poverty of a nonsystems approach.123 Politically, the nature/nurture framework holds enormous dangers. Although some hope that a belief in the nature side of things will lead to greater tolerance, past history suggests that the opposite is also possible. Even the scientific architects of the nature argument recognize the dangers.124 In an extraordinary passage in the pages of Science, Dean Hamer and his collaborators indicated their concern: ‘‘It would be fundamentally unethical to use such information to try to assess or alter a person’s current or future sexual orientation. Rather, scientists, educators, policy-makers and the public should work together to ensure that such research is used to benefit all members of society.’’125
The feminist psychologist and critical theorist Elisabeth Wilson uses the hubbub over LeVay’s work to make some important points about systems theory.126 Many feminist, queer, and critical theorists work by deliberately displacing biology, hence opening the body to social and cultural shaping.127 This, however, is the wrong move to make. Wilson writes: ‘‘What may be politically and critically contentious in LeVay’s hypothesis is not the conjunction neurology-sexuality per se, but the particular manner in which such a conjunction is enacted.’’128 An effective political response, she continues, doesn’t have to separate the study of sexuality from the neurosciences. Instead, Wilson, who wants us to develop a theory of mind and body—an account of psyche that joins libido to body—suggests that feminists incorporate into their worldview an account of how the brain works that is, broadly speaking, called connectionism.
The old-fashioned approach to understanding the brain was anatomical. Function could be located in particular parts of the brain. Ultimately function and anatomy were one. This idea underlies the corpus callosum debate (see chapter 5), for example, as well as the uproar over LeVay’s work. Many scientists believe that a structural difference represents the brain location for measured behavioral differences. In contrast, connectionist models129 argue that function emerges from the complexity and strength of many neural connections acting at once.130 The system has some important characteristics: the responses are often nonlinear, the networks can be ‘‘trained’’ to respond in particular ways, the nature of the response is not easily predictable, and information is not located anywhere—rather, it is the net result of the many different connections and their differing strengths.131
The tenets of some connectionist theory provide interesting starting points for understanding human sexual development. Because connectionist networks, for example, are usually nonlinear, small changes can produce large effects. One implication for studying sexuality: we could easily be looking in the wrong places and on the wrong scale for aspects of the environment that shape human development.132 Furthermore, a single behavior may have many underlying causes, events that happen at different times in development. I suspect that our labels of homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and transgender are really not good categories at all, and are best understood only in terms of unique developmental events133 affecting particular individuals. Thus, I agree with those connectionists who argue that ‘‘the developmental process itself lies at the heart of knowledge acquisition. Development is a process of emergence.’’134
In most public and most scientific discussions, sex and nature are thought to be real, while gender and culture are seen as constructed.135 But these are false dichotomies. I start, in chapters 2—4, with the most visible, exterior markers of gender—the genitalia—to illustrate how sex is, literally, constructed. Surgeons remove parts and use plastic to create ‘‘appropriate’’ genitalia for people born with body parts that are not easily identifiable as male or female. Physicians believe that their expertise enables them to ‘‘hear’’ nature telling them the truth about what sex such patients ought to be. Alas, their truths come from the social arena and are reinforced, in part, by the medical tradition of rendering intersexual births invisible.
Our bodies, as well as the world we live in, are certainly made of materials. And we often use scientific investigation to understand the nature of those materials. But such scientific investigation involves a process of knowledge construction. I illustrate this in some detail in chapter 5, which moves us into the body’s interior—the less visible anatomy of the brain. Here I focus on a single scientific controversy: Do men and women have differently shaped corpus callosums (a specific region of the brain)? In this chapter, I show how scientists construct arguments by choosing particular experimental approaches and tools. The entire shape of the debate is socially constrained, and the particular tools chosen to conduct the controversy (for example, a particular form of statistical analysis or using brains from cadavers rather than Magnetic Resonance Image brain scans) have their own historical and technical limitations.136
Under appropriate circumstances, however, even the corpus callosum is visible to the naked eye. What happens, then, when we delve even more deeply—into the body’s invisible chemistry? In chapters 6 and 7, I show how in the period from 1900 to 1940 scientists carved up nature in a particular fashion, creating the category of sex hormones. The hormones themselves became markers of sexual difference. Now, the finding of a sex hormone or its receptor in any part of the body (for example, on bone cells) renders that previously gender-neutral body part sexual. But if one looks, as I do, historically, one can see that steroid hormones need not have been divided into sex and nonsex categories.137 They could, for example, have been considered to be growth hormones affecting a wide swath of tissues, including reproductive organs.
Scientists now agree about the chemical structure ofthe steroid molecules they labeled as sex hormones, even though they are not visible to the naked eye. In chapter 8, I focus in part on how scientists used the newly minted concept of the sex hormone to deepen understanding of genital development in rodents, and in part on their application of knowledge about sex hormones to something even less tangible than body chemistry: sex-related behavior. But, to paraphrase the Bard, the course of true science never did run smooth. Experiments and models depicting the role of hormones in the development of sexual behaviors on rodents formed an eerie parallel with cultural debates about the roles and abilities of men and women. It seems hard to avoid the view that our very real, scientific understandings of hormones, brain development, and sexual behavior are, nevertheless, constructed in and bear the marks of specific historical and social contexts.
This book, then, examines the construction of sexuality, starting with structures visible on the body’s exterior surface and ending with behaviors and motivations—that is with activities and forces that are patently invisible—inferred only from their outcome, but presumed to be located deep within the body’s interior.138 But behaviors are generally social activities, expressed in interaction with distinctly separate objects and beings. Thus, as we move from genitalia on the outside to the invisible psyche, we find ourselves suddenly walking along the surface of a Mobius strip back toward, and beyond, the body’s exterior. In the book’s final chapter, I outline research approaches that can potentially show us how we move from outside to inside and back out again, without ever lifting our feet from the strip’s surface.