Dualisms Denied

‘‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick.’’ So Shake­speare’s Prospero denounces Caliban in The Tempest. Clearly, questions of na­ture and nurture have troubled European culture for some time. Euro-

American ways of understanding how the world works depend heavily on the use of dualisms—pairs of opposing concepts, objects, or belief systems. This book focuses especially on three of these: sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed. We usually employ dualisms in some form of hierarchical argument. Prospero complains that nature controls Caliban’s behavior and that his, Prospero’s, ‘‘pains humanely taken’’ (to civilize Caliban) are to no avail. Human nurture cannot conquer the devil’s nature. In the chapters that follow we will encounter relentless intellectual struggle over which element in any particular pair of dualisms should (or is believed to) dominate. But in virtually all cases, I argue that intellectual questions cannot be resolved nor social progress made by reverting to Prospero’s complaint. Instead, as I con­sider discrete moments in the creation of biological knowledge about human sexuality, I look to cut through the Gordian knot of dualistic thought. I pro­pose to modify Halperin’s bon mot that ‘‘sexuality is not a somatic fact, it is a cultural effect,’’95 arguing instead that sexuality is a somatic fact created by a cultural effect. (See especially this book’s final chapter.)

Why worry about using dualisms to parse the world? I agree with the phi­losopher Val Plumwood, who argues that their use makes invisible the inter­dependencies of each pair. This relationship enables sets of pairs to map onto each other. Consider an extract of Plumwood’s list:

In everyday use, the sets of associations on each side of the list often run to­gether. ‘‘Culture,’’ Plumwood writes, accumulates these dualisms as a store of weapons ‘‘which can be mined, refined and redeployed. Old oppressions stored as dualisms facilitate and break the path for new ones.’’96 For this rea­son, even though my focus is on gender, I do not hesitate to point out occasions in which the constructs and ideology of race intersect with those of gender.

Ultimately, the sex/gender dualism limits feminist analysis. The term gen­der, placed in a dichotomy, necessarily excludes biology. As the feminist theo­rist Elizabeth Wilson writes: ‘‘Feminist critiques of the stomach or hormonal structure. . . have been rendered unthinkable.’’97 (See chapters 6—8 herein for an attempt to remedy the hormone deficiency.) Such critiques remain un­thinkable because of the real/constructed divide (sometimes formulated as a division between nature and culture), in which many map the knowledge of the real onto the domain of science (equating the constructed with the cul­tural). Dichotomous formulations from feminists and nonfeminists alike con­spire to make a sociocultural analysis of the body seem impossible.

Some feminist theorists, especially during the last decade, have tried— with varying degrees of success—to create anondualistic account of the body. Judith Butler, for example, tries to reclaim the material body for feminist thought. Why, she wonders, has the idea of materiality come to signify that which is irreducible, that which can support construction but cannot itself be constructed?98 We have, Butler says (and I agree), to talk about the material body. There are hormones, genes, prostates, uteri, and other body parts and physiologies that we use to differentiate male from female, that become part of the ground from which varieties of sexual experience and desire emerge. Furthermore, variations in each of these aspects of physiology profoundly affect an individual’s experience of gender and sexuality. But every time we try to return to the body as something that exists prior to socialization, prior to discourse about male and female, Butler writes, ‘‘we discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that term can be put.’’99

Western notions of matter and bodily materiality, Butler argues, have been constructed through a ‘‘gendered matrix.’’ That classical philosophers associ­ated femininity with materiality can be seen in the origins of the word itself. ‘‘Matter’’ derived from mater and matrix, referring to the womb and problems of reproduction. In both Greek and Latin, according to Butler, matter was not understood to be a blank slate awaiting the application of external meaning. ‘‘The matrix is a. . . formative principle which inaugurates and informs a development of some organism or object. . . for Aristotle, ‘matter is potenti­ality, form actuality.’ . . . In reproduction women are said to contribute the matter, men the form.’’100 As Butler notes, the title of her book, Bodies That Matter, is a well-thought-out pun. To be material is to speak about the process of materialization. And if viewpoints about sex and sexuality are already em­bedded in our philosophical concepts of how matter forms into bodies, the matter of bodies cannot form a neutral, pre-existing ground from which to understand the origins of sexual difference.101

Since matter already contains notions of gender and sexuality, it cannot be a neutral recourse on which to build ‘‘scientific’’ or ‘‘objective’’ theories of sexual development and differentiation. At the same time, we have to ac­knowledge and use aspects of materiality ‘‘that pertain to the body.’’ ‘‘The domains of biology, anatomy, physiology, hormonal and chemical composi­tion, illness, age, weight, metabolism, life and death’’ cannot ‘‘be denied.’’102 The critical theorist Bernice Hausman concretizes this point in her discussion of surgical technologies available for creating male-to-female versus female- to-male transsexual bodies. ‘‘The differences,’’ she writes, ‘‘between vagina and penis are not merely ideological. Any attempt to engage and decode the semiotics of sex. . . must acknowledge that these physiological signifiers have functions in the real that will escape. . . their function in the symbolic system.’’103

To talk about human sexuality requires a notion of the material. Yet the idea of the material comes to us already tainted, containing within it pre­existing ideas about sexual difference. Butler suggests that we look at the body as a system that simultaneously produces and is produced by social meanings, just as any biological organism always results from the combined and simulta­neous actions of nature and nurture.

Unlike Butler, the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz allows some bio­logical processes a status that pre-exists their meaning. She believes that bio­logical instincts or drives provide a kind of raw material for the development of sexuality. But raw materials are never enough. They must be provided with a set of meanings, ‘‘a network of desires’’104 that organize the meanings and consciousness of the child’s bodily functions. This claim becomes clear if one follows the stories of so-called wild children raised without human con­straints or the inculcation ofmeaning. Such children acquire neither language nor sexual drive. While their bodies provided the raw materials, without a human social setting the clay could not be molded into recognizable psychic form. Without human sociality, human sexuality cannot develop.105 Grosz tries to understand how human sociality and meaning that clearly originate outside the body end up incorporated into its physiological demeanor and both unconscious and conscious behaviors.

Some concrete examples will help illustrate. A tiny gray-haired woman, well into her ninth decade, peers into the mirror at her wrinkled face. ‘‘Who is that woman?’’ she wonders. Her mind’s image of her body does not synchro­nize with the mirror’s reflection. Her daughter, now in her mid-fifties, tries to remember that unless she thinks about using her leg muscles instead of her knee joint, going up and down the stairs will be painful. (Eventually she will acquire a new kinesic habit and dispense with conscious thought about the matter.) Both women are readjusting the visual and kinesic components of their body image, formed on the basis ofpast information, but always a bit out of date with the current physical body.106 How do such readjustments occur,

and how do our earliest body images form in the first place? Here we need the concept of the psyche, a place where two-way translations between the mind and the body take place—a United Nations, as it were, of bodies and expe-

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riences.

In Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz considers how the body and the mind come into being together. To facilitate her project, she invokes the image of a Mobius strip as a metaphor for the psyche. The Mobius strip is a topological puzzle (figure і.3), a flat ribbon twisted once and then attached end to end to form a circular twisted surface. One can trace the surface, for example, by imagining an ant walking along it. At the beginning of the circular journey, the ant is clearly on the outside. But as it traverses the twisted ribbon, without ever lifting its legs from the plane, it ends up on the inside surface. Grosz proposes that we think of the body—the brain, muscles, sex organs, hor­mones, and more—as composing the inside of the Mobius strip. Culture and experience would constitute the outside surface. But, as the image suggests, the inside and outside are continuous and one can move from one to the other without ever lifting one’s feet off the ground.

As Grosz recounts, psychoanalysts and phenomenologists describe the body in terms of feelings.108 The mind translates physiology into an interior sense of self. Oral sexuality, for example, is a physical feeling that a child and later an adult translates into psychosexual meaning. This translation takes place on the inside of the Mobius surface. But as one traces the surface toward the outside, one begins to speak in terms of connections to other bodies and objects—things that are clearly not-self. Grosz writes, ‘‘Instead of describing the oral drive in terms of what it feels like. . . orality can be understood in

terms of what it does: creating linkages. The child’s lips, for example, form connections. . . with the breast or bottle, possibly accompanied by the hand in conjunction with an ear, each system in perpetual motion and in mutual in­terrelation.’’109

Continuing with the Mobius analogy, Grosz envisions that bodies create psyches by using the libido as a marker pen to trace a path from biological processes to an interior structure of desire. It falls to a different arena of schol­arship to study the ‘‘outside’’ of the strip, a more obviously social surface marked by ‘‘pedagogical, juridical, medical, and economic texts, laws, and practices’’ in order to ‘‘carve out a social subject. . . capable of labor, or production and manipulation, a subject capable of acting as a subject.’’110 Thus Grosz also rejects a nature versus nurture model of human development. While acknowledging that we do not understand the range and limits of the body’s pliability, she insists that we cannot merely ‘‘subtract the environment, culture, history’’ and end up with ‘‘nature or biology.’’111