Gender Systems: Toward a The ory of Human Sexuality

i. Sterling 1934, 1933. A number of scholars took the time to read and critique an earlier draft of this chapter. They of course bear no responsibility for its final condition, but they do deserve my heartfelt thanks: Liz Grosz, John Modell, Cynthia Garcia-Coll, Robert Perlman, Lundy Braun, Peter Tay­lor, Roger Smith, and Susan Oyama.

2 . Sterling 1970.

3. For example, perhaps her genetic makeup synchronized with her envi­ronment, and thus both pushed in the same direction. Or, what if she had wanted to dress in pink and hated the woods? Could any amount of maternal pressure have parted her from her Betsy Wetsy? Then again, what if she had grown up in New York City, born of parents who had little curiosity about how the natural world works? Would her inner scientist have suffered the fate of Shakespeare’s sister, described with such sadness by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own? There is no way to sort out these possibilities, and thus the speculation about origins always remains, as with the corpus callosum debate, as much in the political realm as in the scientific.

4. See, for example, Money and Ehrhardt 1972; Zucker and Bradley 1995.

3. Dewey and Bentley 1949 ,p. 69.

6. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead writes: ‘‘the notion of ‘or­ganism’ has two meanings. . . the microscopic meaning and the macroscopic meaning. The microscopic meaning is concerned with… a process of realiz­ing an individual unity of experience. The macroscopic meaning is concerned with the givenness of the actual world. . . the stubborn fact which at once limits and provides opportunity for the actual occasion. … In our experi­ence we essentially arise out of our bodies which are the stubborn facts of the immediate relevant past’’ (Whitehead 1929, p.129). Like a number of biologists (Waddington 1973; Gottlieb 1997), I find Whitehead’s process phi­losophy the most appropriate way to think about organisms. For more on Whitehead, see Kraus 1979.

7. Hubbard and Wald 1993; Lewontin et al. 1984; Lewontin 1992.

8. Crichton 1990.

9. Hubbard and Wald 1993.

10. Hamer etal. i993,pp. 321, 326. Rice et al. (1999) have been unable to repeat the finding that places it among a large number of genetic claims about complex behavior that continue to be in dispute.

11. Pool 1993,p. 291.

12. Anonymous 1993a; Anonymous 1993b.

13. A workshop of behavioral scientists that focused on the question ‘‘How do genes set up behavior?’’ wrote that future work will lead to the conclusion that ‘‘gene products are but a minute fraction of the total number of behavioral determinants. A second, small fraction will be identifiable as relatively straightforward environmental factors. Most importantly, however, the vast majority of deterministic factors will reside in the multitude of as yet unpredictable interactions between genetic and environmental factors.’’ While this group still uses the language of interactionism, their results and conclusions suggest strongly that dynamic systems will provide the better path to understanding relationships between genes and behavior (Greenspan and Tully 1993, p. 79)-

14. There are four kinds of bases that, when grouped together three at a time, can signal the cell to bring a particular amino acid to a structure called a ribosome, which is itself made up of several proteins and a different kind of gene product called ribosomal RNA. On the ribosome other molecules, RNAs, and proteins cooperate to link different amino acids into linear arrays called proteins. Protein assembly takes place in the cell but outside the nucleus.

13. Cohen and Stewart 1994; Ingber 1998.

16. See Stent 1981.

17. Brent 1999. Developmentalists are only now thinking about how to handle and analyze such complexity. Some have even reached for connec — tionist models! See, for example, Reinitz et al. 1992. Furthermore, geneti­cists have become increasingly aware of the complexity of expression even of genes usually trotted out as examples of a ‘‘pure’’ 1:1 relationship between genetic structure and phenotype (Scriver and Waters 1999).

18. Stent 1981 ,p. 189.

19. The ethical question of whether these children were ‘‘captured’’ or ‘‘rescued’’ is discussed in Noske 1989. See also Singh 1942; Gesell and Singh 1941.

20. Recent results on humans include Eriksson et al. 1998; Kemperman and Gage 1999. Recent results on other mammals include Barinaga 1998; Johansson et al. 1999; Wade 1999; Gould et al. 1999; Kemperman et al. 1998; and Gould etal. 1997.

21. Barinaga 1996; Yeh et al. 1996; Vaias et al. 1993; Moore et al. 1993. Dramatic examples come from fish that change sex depending on their social setting. See Grober 1997; see also Kolb and Whishaw 1998.

22. Examples of plasticity from nonhuman vertebrates have been accu­mulating for years. See, for example, Crair etal. 1998; Kolb 1993; Kirkwood et al. 1996; Kaas 1993; Singer 1993; Sugita 1996; and Wang et al. 1993. It is imperative to incorporate this work into theories of sexual development. It no longer seems acceptable to me to conclude—even tentatively—from con­sistent patterns emerging from, for example, studies of cognition in adult heterosexual males and females compared to gay male and lesbian adults that ‘‘prenatal sex hormones are critical determinants of a wide range of sex — typical characteristics’’ (Halpern and Crothers i997,p. 197).

23. See White and Fernald 1997.

24. But remember how hard this turns out to be—the same genetic strain of mouse behaves differently in different laboratories (Crabbe et al. 1999).

23. See also Juraska and Meyer 1983. Morphological changes in the shape of individual nerve cells can happen very rapidly (within 30 minutes) after a period of intense activity (Maletic-Savatic et al. 1999; Engert and Bonhoeffer 1999. Longer-term behavioral changes may involve changes in the structure and relationships of so-called neural assemblies—groups of interconnected cells. See Hammer and Menzel 1994.

Consider the dwarf Siberian hamster. Like many animals living in the wild, males develop mature testes and mate during certain seasons, but their gonads shrink and no longer make sperm during their ‘‘down time.’’ While short day length can induce the regression of mature gonads, it can do so only if there are no receptive females and young in the vicinity. Diet can also affect the pattern. Day length, social cues, and diet are all environmental signals that directly affect the hypothalamus, a part of the brain involved in regulating hormonal signals that can affect behavior (Matt 1993). Similar stories can be told for birds, see Ball 1993.

The frequency of sex can also affect the nervous system. The psychologist Marc Breedlove studied spinal cord nerves in rats, focusing on specific nerves involved with erection and ejaculation. Sexually active male rats had smaller nerve cells in certain spinal cord nerves than did celibate ones. This observa­tion is important when trying to interpret information such as that provided by LeVay’s finding that gay and straight men had slightly different cell group­ings in their hypothalamus. We have no way of knowing if the difference caused a behavior or vice versa. Given the complexity of human sexual desire, I suspect the latter is a more likely interpretation (Breedlove 1997; LeVay i99i).

26. Specifically, there was binding in the bed nucleus of the stria termi- nalis, the hippocampus, subiculum, lateral septal nuclei, entorhinal and piri­form cortex, and medial preoptic area and arcuate nucleus of the hypothala­mus. There was a decreased presence of estrogen receptor binding cells in the periventricular gray area of the midbrain (Ehret et al. 1993).

27. Blakeslee 1993; Zuger 1997.

28. Kolata 1998b.

29. Huttenlocher and Dabholkar 1997.

30. Another recent animal example: The neurobiologist Eric Knudsen provided young barn owls with prism glasses, thus distorting their early visual experiences. This led, in turn, to permanent adult changes in the visual fields of the treated owls. He writes that ‘‘the act of learning abnormal associations early in life leaves an enduring trace. . . that enables unusual functional con­nections to be reestablished as needed, in adulthood, even when the associa­tions represented by these connections have not been used for an extended period of time.’’ (Knudsen 1998, p. 1,331).

31. Benes et al. 1993; see also Paus et al. 1999. There are two caveats to this claim. First, the study only goes through the seventh decade of life. I predict that the finding of continued new myelination will be extended as our lifespan increases. Second, Benes et al. studied only one particular region of the brain—a region of the hippocampus. Not all regions of the brain have the same developmental pattern, but I suspect that the general finding that brain development continues throughout life will become more and more sup­ported by future studies on a variety of brain regions.

32. The study of neuroplasticity, especially in adult humans, is in its early days. I expect that additional mechanisms of neural plasticity will be found as studies continue. For arecent example, see Byrne 1997.

33. Kirkwood et al. i996;Wangetal. 1993; Singer 1993; Sugita 1996.

34. This finding fits nicely with work showing a change in cortical repre­sentation of monkeys trained to repeatedly use the middle finger of one hand (Travis 1992; Elbert et al. 1993).

33. Cohen etal. 1997; Sterr et al. 1998.

36. Pons 1996; Sadatoetal. 1996.

37. Baharloo et al. related the development of perfect pitch in musicians to early musical training (Baharloo et al. 1998).

38. For a discussion of how earlier physiologists interpreted the phenom­enon, see Grosz 1994.

39. Agliotietal. i994;Yangetal. 1994; Elbert et al. 1997.

40. Elbertetal. 1994; Kaas 1998. The explanations of phantom limb pain are complicated. See Flor et al. 1993; Knecht et al. 1996; Montoya et al. I997.

41. Such knowledge has stimulated the development of training programs for those who have lost the use of limbs due to stroke. Some programs include verbal as well as physical interventions, again suggesting that the world out­side the body can help shape the body’s interior (Taub et al. 1993; Taub et al. I994).

42. Arnstein i997,p. 179.

43. For analyses of embodiment during pregnancy and of the effects of new technologies of fetal visualization on the embodiment of pregnancy, see Young 1990, chapter 9, and Rapp 1997.

44. Elmanetal. 1996, pp. 334, 363.

43. Elman and colleagues acknowledge their intellectual debt to other systems theorists. Clearly, thought has converged from many intellectual loca­tions toward the idea of dynamic systems development.

These days some psychologists and many neurobiologists have collapsed the distinction between body and mind. One contributor to Loveweb writes: ‘‘The only reason we use psychological language intentions, goals, motives, plans) at all is that we don’t know how to talk about these states in neurophysi­ological terms. . . Environmentalists and interactionists who believe that so- cial/cultural/contextual influences cannot, in principle, be reduced to bio­logical influences are using discourse that is incommensurate with science.’’ Other psychologists disagree with such bio-imperialism. One respondent to this entry writes: ‘‘The key point about ‘psychological language’ is that it for­malizes the way in which conscious humans have evolved to carve up the firm realities of the world of inner personal awareness and its imperfect) social exchange. . . . What we call objective ‘scientific’ observation and thought are parasitic on the capacity to share subjective experiences. . . . And it’s only because we can eventually and appreciably relate physical descriptions of brains, genes, etc. back to experiential accounts that the former can tell us anything with human usefulness.’’ For a feminist analysis of mind, body, and cognitive psychology, see Wilson 1998. In this chapter I use the words psyche and mind interchangeably. Traditionally, according to the OED (online), psyche has meant ‘‘the animating principle in man and other living beings. . . in distinction from its material vehicle, the soma or body’’; in psychology the word has meant ‘‘the conscious and unconscious mind and emotion, esp. as influencing the whole person.’’

46. West and Fenster maker i995,p. 21.

47. West and Zimmerman 1987.

48. West and Fenstermaker 1995; Alarconetal. 1998; Akibaetal. 1999; Hammonds 1994.

49. The study of human development over the entire life cycle has come into its own in the past twenty or so years. For a thorough review, see Elder I998.

50. For more on the psychoanalytic approach, see Fast 1993; Magee and Miller 1997.

51. Jacklin and Reynolds 1993. Lott andMaluso write: ‘‘What appears to be central to all social learning perspectives, and the unifying factor in other­wise differing approaches, is the use of general learning principles to explain human social behavior’’ (Lott and Maluso i993,p. 100). For a theory combin­ing learning and cognitive approaches as well as emphasizing gender as a life­long accomplishment, see Bussey and Bandura 1998.

52. Kessler and McKenna 1978.

53. One exception is the visionary work of Kessler and McKenna (1978), who provided a mature theory of gender construction at a time when thinking about the social construction of gender was in its infancy. See also Beall and Sternberg 1993; Gergen and Davis 1997.

54. Magee and Miller i997,p. xiv.

55. The several process or systems approaches to the study ofhuman de­velopment differ in detail, but none address gender at much length. See Gro — tevant 1987; Wapner and Demick 1998; and Gottlieb et al. 1998.

56. Fogel and Thelen i987,p. 756.

57. Ibid., p. 757.

58. Ibid.

59. The psychologist Esther Thelen and her colleagues have applied these ideas to the development of basic motor skills in infants. Traditionally, psy­chologists believe that infants develop through a series of stages, in which

neuromuscular development precedes the acquisition of new abilities such as crawling or walking. Traditionalists presume that neuromuscular develop­ment proceeds according to a gene-driven developmental plan. In contrast, Thelen offers evidence that neuromuscular connections needed for walking are present at birth, but that infants don’t walk because other aspects of their support structure—bone and muscle strength, for example—are not devel­oped enough to support the body’s weight. Infant crawling, for example, is not ‘‘an inevitable human stage’’ but ‘‘an ad hoc solution to the problem of getting desired distant objects discovered by individual infants, given a partic­ular level of strength and postural control’’ (Thelen i995,p. 91). Thelen does not find the emphasis on individuality at odds with species similarities. She writes: ‘‘Because humans also share anatomy and common biomechanical. . . constraints, solutions to common motor problems also converge. We all dis­cover walking rather than hopping (although our gait styles are individual and unique)’’ (p. 91). These latter particularities have developed as part of the child’s prior movements in interaction with the environment.

Thelen and her colleagues see developmental change ‘‘as a series of states of stability, instability and phase shifts’’ (p. 84). Knowing when such phase shifts or periods of instability are under way can be important for both physi­cal and mental therapy, since these are periods when behaviors have a greater possibility of change. The technical term for such stabilization is canalization, a word C. H. Waddington first applied to embryological development, but a number of developmental psychologists now apply it to the development of behavior. Thelen uses a Waddington-style diagram of canalization to illustrate her point. See also Gottlieb 1991, 1997; Gottlieb et al. 1998; and Wad­dington 1957. Change can occur throughout a lifetime and is always accompa­nied by the destabilization of a current system, followed by a period of insta — bility—a phase of exploration—and ultimately the settling in of a new pattern.

The infant lives in a rich environment, absorbing information from sight, sound, touch, taste, and muscle, joint, and skin receptors that register the constant changes imbibed by an active body. Along with a growing number of developmental psychologists, Thelen rejects a dualism between structure and function. Instead, ‘‘repeated cycles of perception and action give rise to new forms of behavior without preexisting mental or genetic structures’’ (p. 93). Thelen lists six goals for a developmental theory: ‘‘i. To understand the origins of novelty. 2. To reconcile global regularities with local variability, complexity, and context-specificity. 3. To integrate developmental data at many levels of explanation. 4. To provide a biologically plausible yet nonre­ductionist account of the development of behavior. 5. To understand how local processes lead to global outcomes. 6. To establish a theoretical basis for gener­ating and interpreting empirical research’’ (Thelen and Smith 1994, p. xviii).

60. For an in-depth treatment, see Fogel et al. 1997. Other studies fit well into Fogel’s theories, theories that attract me because emotion can be seen to develop as a system that is at the same time physiological and rela­tional. See, for example, Dawsonetal. 1992. Jerome Kagan and his colleagues correlated individual differences in temperament found in very young infants with the subsequent development of childhood and adult personality traits. In their view, temperament emerges as a component of nervous activity that, just as with smile development, the child and its environment transform into a recognizable pattern of behavior. For example, Kagan proposes the tempera­mental category inhibited, which develops from ‘‘very low motor activity and minimal crying in response to unfamiliar events at four months and sociable, fearless behavior in response to discrepant events at one and two years of age’’ (Kagan 1994, p. 49). He believes that the motor activity of newborns is the product of complex genetic and environmental interactions. The terminology used here can very confusing. Researchers, reporters, and laypeople often confuse terms such as genetic, biological, and inborn. Technically, a genetic cause would be one form of biological difference. Something inborn could be inher­ited in the DNA, or it could result from something that affected the fetus in utero. The term environment could also refer to events in utero. For example, infection with the German measles virus can cause permanent damage to a developing fetus. This damage is environmental rather than genetic, but it is also biological, because it interferes with embryonic development. The term environment can also refer to postbirth effects resulting from parental rein­forcement or modeling, peer interactions, and the like. ‘‘Development,’’ he suggests, ‘‘is a cooperative mission, and no behavior is a first-order, direct product of genes’’ (Kagan i994,p. 37).

Kagan offers a systematic account to what every mother claims to know: Children have different temperaments from the moment of birth. Individual personality traits develop and refine over the life cycle. Herein lie two impor­tant contributions to the study of human sexuality. First, individual variability is at least as important as belonging to a particular category such as male or female; and second, behavioral profiles (personalities) develop over the entire life cycle. A particular early pattern does not necessarily become a specific later one. The vast majority of researchers in this field study group differences; those critical of such an approach argue that group difference studies erase variability within groups, variability that is often as great or greater than between-group difference. Furthermore, such an approach fixes the cate­gories. For example, the idea of ‘‘the woman’’ emerges rather than more differentiated categories, such as ‘‘the white, middle class woman in her fifth decade.’’ See discussions by Lewis 1973; Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1994; Kit — zinger 1994; James 1997; and Chodorow 1993. Lott and Maluso note that gender is a complex category because it is always part of a complex that in­cludes race, class, and individual experiences (family, sibling order, etc.). This makes gender a fairly unreliable predictor of behavior. They write: ‘‘our gen­der prophecies based on stereotyped expressions often fail, particularly in situations/contexts where other social categories or personal attributes are more salient or relevant. Our social institutions continue, nevertheless, to strongly support the stereotypes and to generalize behavior, thereby main­taining gender inequities in power and privilege’’ (Lott and Maluso 1993, p. 100). See also Valsiner 1987 for a detailed evaluation of theories in develop­mental psychology.

Kagan does examine sex differences. He reported that about 13 percent of girls who were inhibited at nine and fourteen months became very fearful by twenty-one months of age, while very few low-reactive boys became more timid with time. He presumes (with some evidence) that minimal sex differ­ences in personality became exaggerated over time because ‘‘parents uncon­sciously treat sons and daughters in different ways and produce the larger number of older fearful girls’’ (Kagan i994,p. 263).

61. Of the psychologists cited in the coming paragraphs, Sandra Bem and Barrie Thorne are outspoken feminists. I do not know the political outlook of the other scholars whose work I use here.

62. Fagotetal. 1986.

63 . Infants as young as nine months can perceive the difference between adult male and female faces, but their ability to label others or self does not develop until some time later (Fagot and Leinbach 1993). Fagot and Leinbach rated behaviors according to types of toys chosen (e. g., dolls vs. transporta­tion toys), communication with adults, and levels of aggression. By the time the child reached 2.23 years, the parents of early and late labelers no longer differed in the frequency ofpositive and negative responses to sex-stereotyped play (Fagot and Leinbach 1989, p. 663). On sex-stereotyped parental re­sponses to newborn children, see Karraker et al. 1993.

64. Fagot and Leinbach 1989, p. 672. Levy (1989) found that certain types of parental interactions correlated with greater gender schematization in children; girls with mothers who worked outside the home had greater gender flexibility, as did children with fewer siblings. Boys who watched en­tertainment TV had a greater knowledge ofsex roles, while girls who watched educational television had greater gender role flexibility. Thus many factors contribute to the strength and rigidity of gender role schemas in young chil­dren aged 2.8 to 3 years old.

63. Developmental psychologists use the term gender constancy to describe a child’s ability to tell a person’s sex regardless of clues such as dress or hair­style. There is dispute about when and how such gender constancy develops (Bem 1989).

66. Bem (1989) used photos of children with short hair, but gave them gender-appropriate wigs when she created the gender-typical photos. See also de Marneffe 1997.

67. Martin and Little i99o, pp. 1,436, i,437;Martin 1994.

68. Martin et al. 1990. For additional interactions between cognitive maturation and socialization experiences in middle childhood, see Serbin et

al. 1993.

69. Thorne 1993, pp. 3—4. In 1998, Judith Rich Harris’s book caused a big media flap because she argued the importance of peer socialization. She makes an extreme statement of what Thorne and many other psychologists have known for years. See Harris 1998. The September 7, 1998, issueof News­week devoted its cover story to the book. For recent research on intrafamilial effects of sibling order, gender, and parental attitudes, see McHale et al. 1999.

70. Thorne is far from alone in questioning the utility of continued re­search on difference. See, e. g., James 1997.

71. Garcia-Coll et al. (1997) suggest seven new research approaches: 1) ‘‘Focus on the social and psychological processes that become packaged as ‘race,’ ethnicity, social class and/or gender;’’ 2) ‘‘Examine how contexts shape children’s understandings of social categories;’’ 3) ‘‘Examine the inter­section and boundaries of social categories in children’s lives;’’ 4) ‘‘Examine how children participate in constructing, using, and resisting social cate­gories;’’ 5) ‘‘Examine how social identities influence children’s goals, values, self-concepts, and behavioral engagement;’’ 6) ‘‘Study ‘race,’ ethnicity, social class and gender as developmental phenomena;’’ 7) ‘‘Study the categories themselves.’’

72. Lorber 1994, p. 32; emphasis in original. Lorber is also careful to point out that gender is not the only socially produced dichotomy; she focuses additionally on race and class. Presumably, subjective identities are not ac­quired additively, but gender comes to mean different things within the added matrices of race and class. Psychologists and sociologists concentrate on gen­der for two positive reasons: The gender dichotomy becomes established very early on, and it is a major component of the way many, if not all, cultures produce social organization. There are, of course, also negative reasons— racism and classism—for the relative lack of study of the development of race and class dichotomy in a society in which these aspects of human existence also loom large. See also West and Fenstermaker 1995.

73. See, for example, Epstein 1997; Lott 1997.

74. Lorber 1994; Fiske 1991; Bem 1993; Halley 1994; Jacklin 1989.

75. In a debate among feminist theorists, the political scientist Mary Hawkesworth wrote that ‘‘discussions of gender in history, language, litera­ture and the arts, education, the media, politics, psychology, religion, medi­cine and science, society, law and the workplace have become staples of con­temporary feminist scholarship’’ (Hawkesworth 1997). I agree that all of these intellectual arenas have the potential to contribute to the project of un­derstanding the body as a biosociocultural system. Here I draw examples from the fields of sociology and history.

76. From Katherine B. Davis’s work on women in prison (see chapter 6), to present-day studies on the frequency of homosexual interactions in urban and rural settings, social scientists have wanted information with which to guide important social policy decisions. Are crime and sex related? Can we obtain realistic models of sexual activities and networks that can help us stop the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases? Is teenage preg­nancy really on the rise, and if so, why? Getting answers to these questions is not easy, and whatever conclusions we can reach are always qualified by the limits on information gained through mass survey methods (di Mauro 1995, Ericksen 1999).

77. Hacking 1986.

78. Delaney 1991. Or what about men who will not use the word sex to describe homosexual encounters? Instead they have sex with their wives and ‘‘fool around’’ with men (Cotton 1994).

79. Garber (1995) discusses bisexuality. Other discussions of problems with using oversimplified categories of sexual preference may be found in (Rothblatt 1995; Burke 1996).

80. Diamond 1993, p. 298. Such homosexuality is not necessarily ‘‘dis­placement activity.’’ One need only read in the genre of prison biography to find men who genuinely fall in love in prison, but who have a heterosexual love life on the outside. For a moving account of falling in love with other men in prison, see Berkman 1912. Berkman, Emma Goldman’s longtime lover, writes of his deep feelings developed on two occasions while in prison. It is hard to interpret these as merely a sexual outlet. For a more modern account, see Puig 1991.

81. The fear that naming categories and asking people whether they fit in them will actually create the behaviors in question lies at the root of the politi­cal difficulties that sexologists (here I speak primarily of sociologists and psy­chologists who study human sexual behavior) encounter in obtaining funding to do such studies (Fausto-Sterling 1992a; Laumann, Michael, et al. 1994). Mainstream scholars as well as politicians view the study of human sexual behavior with more than a little suspicion. In the 1960s no academic journal would publish Masters and Johnson’s original work on the physiology of the human sexual response (Masters and Johnson 1966). More recently, Cynthia Jayne, a clinical psychologist in private practice, could not convince a major psychology journal to accept her study on female orgasm and sexual satisfac­tion although a sexology journal took it right away. Since their work is often attacked as scandalous, sex researchers have adopted a defensive posture. This fact has contributed significantly to the intellectual shape of the field. As Jayne writes: ‘‘There then exists a narrow path which sex researchers must navigate between responding to inappropriate criticism and generating the critiques that ensure the health and continued professional growth of the field’’ ( Jayne 1986, p. 2). See also Irvine 1990a, 1990b.

82. Elder i998,p. 969.

83. Weeks 1981b. Weeks does not claim these as the only categories, but thinks of them more as a set of guidelines.

84. Evans (1993) writes that ‘‘state penetration of civil society in con­sumer capitalism means that instead of capital domination being grounded in a civil society colonised to the ends of reproducing labour, now civil society is colonised by the state to the ends of reproducing consumers, ‘men and women whose needs are permanently redirected to fit the needs of the mar­ket’, in their obsessive pursuit of sexuality, ‘the medium through which they seek to define their personalities and to be conscious of themselves’’ (p. 64).

83. Weeks 1981b, p. 14.

86. For a detailed historical account of the making of gay male private spaces and culture in New York City, see Chauncey 1994.

87. See, for example, Kates 1993. Leslie Feinberg presents a fascinating history of people who cross-dressed and assumed cross-gendered identities, pointing out that in more than a few cases, individuals who transgressed gen­der divides also engaged in other revolutionary actions: peasant revolts, reli­gious rebellions, and more. Her book breaks new ground, painstakingly stitching together fragments of history. Although in the genre of ‘‘recovered history’’ typical of the beginning of new social movements, it presents a chal­lenge to historians to look more deeply into the cases she brings to light (Feinberg 1996).

88. For the importance oftechnology in the emergence oftranssexualism and contemporary definitions of gender, see Hausman 1993. For the history of cosmetic surgery more generally, consult Haiken 1997. Both books illus­trate the importance of technology in the processes of producing sex and gender.

89. The medical anthropologist Margaret Lock concurs with this point when she writes that most accounts of the body in culture do not ‘‘take into account the powerful transformations of the material brought about by tech­noscience or consider the impact this has on subjectivity, representation and the politics of everyday life’’ (Lock 1997, p. 269).

90. My attempt to provide a visual map of systems of human sexual devel­opment was inspired by the work of the science studies scholar Peter J. Taylor. The first working principle is that social and natural processes cannot be sepa­rated. The second is that quite different modes of inquiry offer important insight into complex puzzles. Taylor applies a systems approach to two differ­ent examples, one involving ecosystems and the other a mental illness—se­vere depression. Consider the process of soil erosion in a Mexican village. Taylor says it can be understood only by the simultaneous consideration of the region’s social and political history, the character of agriculture and ecology (‘‘natural’’ factors such as rainfall, soil structure, etc.), the nature of local social and economic institutions, and regional demographic changes. Tradi­tionally, scholars study each of these factors as if they were independent enti­ties. Taylor, however, represents them as horizontal parallel lines crisscrossed by vertical hen tracks. The hen tracks represent events such as regulation of goat grazing or the use of terracing, which change the nature of the parallel lines. An accurate picture of the current situation can be grasped only by looking at all four lines and their interconnections (Taylor 1995, 1997, 1998, and 1999).

91. Although he did not use the stacking-doll metaphor, many years ago the embryologist Paul Weiss used a diagram of development that resembles a cross section of a Russian doll. He included more of the organismal layers than I do, but the idea is quite similar (Weiss 1959). Others have used more com­plex diagrams to visualize human development. See, for example, Wapner and Demick 1998, fig. 13.1. They use Dewey and Bentley’s notion of transac­tion to describe the ‘‘organism in environment’’ system, which they charac­terize in terms of levels of integration. These range from activities within the individual organism to what Wapner and Demick call the ‘‘person in the world system’’ (p. 767).

92. Dewey and Bentley use the words extradermal and intradermal to com­municate this idea. They also are very wary of the idea of ‘‘the mind.’’ They write: ‘‘The ‘mind’ as ‘actor,’ still in use in present-day psychologies and so­ciologies, is the old self-acting ‘soul’ with its immortality stripped off, grown dessicated and crotchety. ‘Mind’ or ‘mental’ as a preliminary word in casual phrasing is a sound word to indicate a region or at least a general locality in need of investigation; as such it is unobjectionable. ‘Mind,’ ‘faculty,’ ‘I. Q.’ or what not as an actor in charge of behavior is a charlatan, and ‘brain’ as a substi­tute for such a ‘mind’ is worse. Such words insert a name in place of a prob­lem’’ (Dewey and Bentley 1949, pp. 131—32). I use the idea of mind or psyche as a placeholder for processes we can examine, but not as descriptions of a mechanism.

93. Of course there are smaller units within the cells—organelles, mole­cules, etc. But the cell is the last of the independently functioning unit sys­tems. A nucleus and its genes cannot create an organism outside a cell.

94. Harding 1995.

95. This is a paraphrase of‘‘Primatology Is Politics by Other Means,’’ Har — away 1986, p. 77.

[1] will try to use it when it is historically proper. Since the word intersexual is a modern one, I will not use it when writing about the past.

* Members of the present-day Intersexual Movement eschew the use of the word hermaphrodite.

[3] are married; “were h

entirely feminine in their outlook and ways” (p. 2Ss)

(continued)

g. Bloch defined 14 areas of sexological investigation, including sexual anatomy and physiology (hormones); the physiology of sexual performance; the psychology and evolution of sex; the comparative biology of sex; sexual hygiene; sexual politics, including legislation; sexual ethics; sexual ethnology; and sexual pathology.

h. Carpenter 1909. Carpenter (1844—1929) was himself a member of what he called the ‘‘intermediate sex.’’ He believed in biological differences between the sexes, but thought that the existing social distance was harmful. For more on Carpenter, see Porter and Hall 1993, pp. 138—60.

[5] Marshall 1910. This book established the forming field of reproductive biology by uniting in a single text contributions from embryology, anatomy, physiology, and gynecology. For more on Marshall, see Clarke 1990a, 1990b, 1998).

j. Corner 1963.

k. Heape 1913. Heape argued that men and women have fundamentally different evolutionary interests and that sex antagonism is a biological problem. In discussing what he calls ‘‘the unrest among women,’’ he writes that ‘‘it is primarily a biological problem we are dealing with, that the violation of physiological principles has long preceded that of economic law, and that existing conditions cannot be clearly understood and satisfactorily dealt with until this fact is clearly recognized’’ (pp. 11-12). For additional discussion in relation to sex hormones, see Oudshoorn 1994 and Clarke 1998.

[6] . An instructional tape for surgical trainees produced by the American College of Surgeons opens with the surgeon Richard S. Hurwitz saying, ‘‘The finding of ambiguous genitalia in the newborn is a medical and social emer-

Updated: 16.11.2015 — 23:36