I enter the debates about sex and gender as a biologist and a social activist.18 Daily, my life weaves in and out of a web of conflict over the politics of sexuality and the making and using of knowledge about the biology of human behavior. The central tenet of this book is that truths about human sexuality created by scholars in general and by biologists in particular are one component of political, social, and moral struggles about our cultures and economies.19 At the same time, components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being. My intent is to show how these mutually dependent claims work, in part by addressing such issues as how—through their daily lives, experiments, and medical practices—scientists create truths about sexuality; how our bodies incorporate and confirm these truths; and how these truths, sculpted by the social milieu in which biologists practice their trade, in turn refashion our cultural environment.
My take on the problem is idiosyncratic, and for good reason. Intellectually, I inhabit three seemingly incompatible worlds. In my home department I interact with molecular biologists, scientists who examine living beings from the perspective of the molecules from which they are built. They describe a microscopic world in which cause and effect remain mostly inside a single cell. Molecular biologists rarely think about interacting organs within an individual body, and even less often about how a body bounded by skin interacts with the world on the other side of the skin. Their vision of what makes an organism tick is decidedly bottom up, small to large, inside to outside.
I also interact with a virtual community—a group of scholars drawn together by a common interest in sexuality—and connected by something called a listserve. On a listserve, one can pose questions, think out loud, comment on relevant news items, argue about theories of human sexuality, and report the latest research findings. The comments are read by a group of people hooked together via electronic mail. My listserve (which I call ‘‘Loveweb’’) consists of a diverse group of scholars—psychologists, animal behaviorists, hormone biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers. Although many points of view coexist in this group, the vocal majority favor body-based, biological explanations of human sexual behavior. Loveweb members have technical names for preferences they believe to be immutable. In addition to homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual, for example, they speak of hebephilia (attracted primarily to pubescent girls), ephebephilia (aroused by young males in their late teens or early twenties), pedophilia (aroused by children), gynephilia (aroused by adult women), and androphilia (attracted to adult men). Many Loveweb members believe that we acquire our sexual essence before birth and that it unfolds as we grow and develop.20
Unlike molecular biologists and Loveweb members, feminist theorists view the body not as essence, but as a bare scaffolding on which discourse and performance build a completely acculturated being. Feminist theorists write persuasively and often imaginatively about the processes by which culture molds and effectively creates the body. Furthermore, they have an eye on politics (writ large), which neither molecular biologists nor Loveweb participants have. Most feminist scholars concern themselves with real-world power relationships. They have often come to their theoretical work because they want to understand (and change) social, political, and economic inequality. Unlike the inhabitants of my other two worlds, feminist theorists reject what Donna Haraway, a leading feminist theoretician, calls ‘‘the God-trick’’—producing knowledge from above, from a place that denies the individual scholar’s location in a real and troubled world. Instead, they understand that all scholarship adds threads to a web that positions racialized bodies, sexes, genders, and preferences in relationship to one another. New or differently spun threads change our relationships, change how we are in the world.21
Traveling among these varied intellectual worlds produces more than a little discomfort. When I lurk on Loveweb, I put up with gratuitous feministbashing aimed at some mythic feminist who derides biology and seems to have a patently stupid view of how the world works. When I attend feminist conferences, people howl in disbelief at the ideas debated on Loveweb. And the molecular biologists don’t think much of either of the other worlds. The questions asked by feminists and Loveweb participants seem too complicated; studying sex in bacteria or yeast is the only way to go.
To my molecular biology, Loveweb, and feminist colleagues, then, I say the following: as a biologist, I believe in the material world. As a scientist, I believe in building specific knowledge by conducting experiments. But as a feminist Witness (in the Quaker sense of the word) and in recent years as a historian, I also believe that what we call ‘‘facts’’ about the living world are not universal truths. Rather, as Haraway writes, they ‘‘are rooted in specific histories, practices, languages and peoples.’’22 Ever since the field of biology emerged in the United States and Europe at the start of the nineteenth century, it has been bound up in debates over sexual, racial, and national politics.23 And as our social viewpoints have shifted, so has the science of the body.24
Many historians mark the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as periods of great change in our concepts of sex and sexuality.25 During this period a notion of legal equality replaced the feudal exercise of arbitrary and violent power given by divine right. As the historian Michel Foucault saw it, society still required some form of discipline. A growing capitalism needed new methods to control the ‘‘insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.’’26 Foucault divided this power over living bodies (bio-power) into two forms. The first centered on the individual body. The role of many science professionals (including the so-called human sciences—psychology, sociology, and economics) became to optimize and standardize the body’s function.27 In Europe and North America, Foucault’s standardized body has, traditionally, been male and Caucasian. And although this book focuses on gender, I regularly discuss the ways in which the ideas of both race and gender emerge from underlying assumptions about the body’s physical nature.28 Understanding how race and gender work—together and independently—helps us learn more about how the social becomes embodied.
Foucault’s second form of bio-power—‘‘a biopolitics of the population”29— emerged during the early nineteenth century as pioneer social scientists began to develop the survey and statistical methods needed to supervise and manage ‘‘births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity.’’30 For Foucault, ‘‘discipline’’ had a double meaning. On the one hand, it implied a form of control or punishment; on the other, it referred to an academic body of knowledge—the discipline of history or biology. The disciplinary knowledge developed in the fields of embryology, endocrinology, surgery, psychology, and biochemistry have encouraged physicians to attempt to control the very gender of the body—including ‘‘its capacities, gestures, movements, location and behaviors.’’31
By helping the normal take precedence over the natural, physicians have also contributed to populational biopolitics. We have become, Foucault writes, ‘‘a society of normalization.’’32 One important mid-twentieth-century sexologist went so far as to name the male and female models in his anatomy text Norma and Normman (sic).33 Today we see the notion of pathology applied in many settings—from the sick, diseased, or different body,34 to the single-parent family in the urban ghetto.35 But imposing a gender norm is socially, not scientifically, driven. The lack of research into the normal distributions of genital anatomy, as well as many surgeons’ lack of interest in using such data when they do exist (discussed in chapters 3 and 4), clearly illustrate this claim. From the viewpoint of medical practitioners, progress in the handling of intersexuality involves maintaining the normal. Accordingly, there ought to be only two boxes: male and female. The knowledge developed by the medical disciplines empowers doctors to maintain a mythology of the normal by changing the intersexual body to fit, as nearly as possible, into one or the other cubbyhole.
One person’s medical progress, however, can be another’s discipline and control. Intersexuals such as Maria Patino have unruly—even heretical— bodies. They do not fall naturally into a binary classification; only a surgical shoehorn can put them there. But why should we care if a ‘‘woman’’ (defined as having breasts, a vagina, uterus, ovaries, and menstruation) has a ‘‘clitoris’’ large enough to penetrate the vagina of another woman? Why should we care if there are individuals whose ‘‘natural biological equipment’’ enables them to have sex ‘‘naturally’’ with both men and women? Why must we amputate or surgically hide that ‘‘offending shaft’’ found on an especially large clitoris? The answer: to maintain gender divisions, we must control those bodies that are so unruly as to blur the borders. Since intersexuals quite literally embody both sexes, they weaken claims about sexual difference.
This book reflects a shifting politics of science and of the body. I am deeply committed to the ideas of the modern movements of gay and women’s liberation, which argue that the way we traditionally conceptualize gender and sexual identity narrows life’s possibilities while perpetuating gender inequality. In order to shift the politics of the body, one must change the politics of science itself. Feminists (and others) who study how scientists create empirical knowledge have begun to reconceptualize the very nature of the scientific process.36 As with other social arenas, such scholars understand practical, empirical knowledge to be imbued with the social and political issues of its time. I stand at the intersection of these several traditions. On the one hand, scientific and popular debates about intersexuals and homosexuals—bodies that defy the norms of our two-sex system—are deeply intertwined. On the other, beneath the debates about what these bodies mean and how to treat them lie struggles over the meaning of objectivity and the timeless nature of scientific knowledge.
Perhaps nowhere are these struggles more visible than in the biological accounts of what we would today call sexual orientation or sexual preference. Consider, for instance, a television newsmagazine segment about married women who ‘‘discovered,’’ often in their forties, that they were lesbian. The show framed the discussion around the idea that a woman who has sex with men must be heterosexual, while a woman who falls in love with another woman must be lesbian.37 On this show there seemed to be only these two possibilities. Even though the women interviewed had had active and satisfying sex lives with their husbands and produced and raised families, they knew that they must ‘‘be’’ lesbian the minute they found themselves attracted to a woman. Furthermore, they felt it likely that they must always have been lesbian without knowing it.
The show portrayed sexual identity as a fundamental reality: a woman is either inherently heterosexual or inherently lesbian. And the act of coming out as a lesbian can negate an entire lifetime of heterosexual activity! Put this way, the show’s depiction of sexuality sounds absurdly oversimplified. And yet, it reflects some of our most deeply held beliefs—so deeply held, in fact, that a great deal of scientific research (on animals as well as humans) is designed around this dichotomous formulation (as I discuss in some detail in chapters 6—8).38
Many scholars mark the start of modern scientific studies of human homosexuality with the work of Alfred C. Kinsey and colleagues, first published in 1948. Their surveys of sexual behavior in men and women provided modern sex researchers with a set of categories useful for measuring and analyzing sexual behaviors.39 For both men and women, they used a rating scale of о to 6, with о being іоо percent heterosexual, 6 being іоо percent homosexual. (An eighth category—‘‘X’’—was for individuals who experienced no erotic attractions or activities.) Although they designed a scale with discrete categories, Kinsey and co-workers stressed that ‘‘the reality includes individuals of every intermediate type, lying in a continuum between the two extremes and between each and every category on the scale.’’40
The Kinsey studies offered new categories defined in terms of sexual arousal—especially orgasm—rather than allowing terms such as affection, marriage, or relationship to contribute to definitions of human sexuality.41 Sexuality remained an individual characteristic, not something produced within relationships in particular social settings. Exemplifying my claim that with the very act of measuring, scientists can change the social reality they set out to quantify, I note that today Kinsey’s categories have taken on a life of their own. Not only do sophisticated gays and lesbians occasionally refer to themselves by a Kinsey number (such as in a personal ad that might begin ‘‘tall, muscular Kinsey 6 seeks. . . ’’), but many scientific studies use the Kinsey scale to define their study population.42
Although many social scientists understand the inadequacy of using the single word homosexual to describe same-sex desire, identity, and practice, the linear Kinsey scale still reigns supreme in scholarly work. In studies that search for genetic links to homosexuality, for example, the middle of the Kinsey scale disappears; researchers seek to compare the extreme ends of the spectrum in hopes of maximizing the chance that they will find something of interest.43 Multidimensional models of homosexuality exist. Fritz Klein, for example, created a grid with seven variables (sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, selfidentification, hetero/homo lifestyle) superimposed on a time scale (past, present, future).44 Nevertheless, one research team, reporting on 144 studies of sexual orientation published in the Journal of Homosexuality from 1974 to 1993, found that only 10 percent of these studies used a multidimensional scale to assess homosexuality. About 13 percent used a single scale, usually some version of the Kinsey numbers, while the rest used self-identification (33 percent), sexual preference (4 percent), behavior (9 percent), or, most shockingly for an academic publication, never clearly described their methods (31 percent).45
Just as these examples from contemporary sociology show that the categories used to define, measure, and analyze human sexual behavior change with time, so too has a recent explosion of scholarship on the social history of human sexuality shown that the social organization and expression of human sexuality are neither timeless nor universal. Historians are just beginning to pry loose information from the historical record, and any new overviews written are sure to differ,46 but I offer a cartoon summary of some of this work in figure і. і.
As historians gather information, they also argue about the nature of history itself. The historian David Halperin writes: ‘‘The real issue confronting any cultural historian of antiquity, and any critic of contemporary culture, is. . . how to recover the terms in which the experiences of individuals belonging to past societies were actually constituted.’’47 The feminist historian Joan Scott makes a similar argument, suggesting that historians must not assume
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FIGURE і. і : A cartoon history of sex and gender. (Source: Diane DiMassa, for the author) |
that the term experience contains a self-evident meaning. Instead, they must try to understand the workings of the complex and changing processes ‘‘by which identities are ascribed, resisted, or embraced and ‘to note’ which processes themselves are unremarked and indeed achieve their effect because they are not noticed.’’48
For example, in her book The Woman Beneath the Skin, the historian of science Barbara Duden describes coming upon an eight-volume medical text.
Written in the eighteenth century by a practicing physician, the books describe over i,800 cases involving diseases of women. Duden found herself unable to use twentieth-century medical terms to reconstruct what illnesses these women had. Instead she noticed ‘‘bits and pieces of medical theories that would have been circulating, combined with elements from popular culture; self-evident bodily perceptions appear alongside things that struck [her] as utterly improbable.’’ Duden describes her intellectual anguish as she became more and more determined to understand these eighteenth-century German female bodies on their own terms:
To gain access to the inner, invisible bodily existence of these ailing women, I had to venture across the boundary that separates. . . the inner body beneath the skin, from the world around it. . . the body and its environment have been consigned to opposing realms: on the one side are the body, nature, and biology, stable and unchanging phenomena; on the other side are the social environment and history, realms of constant change. With the drawing of this boundary the body was expelled from history.49
In contrast to Duden’s anguish, many historians of sexuality have leaped enthusiastically into their new field, debating with one another as they dug into their freshly discovered resources. They delighted in shocking the reader with sentences such as: ‘‘The year 1992 marked the 100th anniversary of heterosexuality in America’’50 and ‘‘From 1700—1900 the citizens of London made a transition from three sexes to four genders.’’51 What do historians mean by such statements? Their essential point is that for as far back as one can gather historical evidence (from primitive artwork to the written word), humans have engaged in a variety of sexual practices, but that this sexual activity is bound to historical contexts. That is, sexual practices and societal understandings of them vary not only across cultures but over time as well.
The social scientist Mary McIntosh’s 1968 article, ‘‘The Homosexual Role,’’ provided the touchstone that pushed scholars to consider sexuality as a historical phenomenon.52 Most Westerners, she pointed out, assumed that people’s sexuality could be classified two or three ways: homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual.53 McIntosh argued that this perspective wasn’t very informative. A static view of homosexuality as a timeless, physical trait, for instance, didn’t tell us much about why different cultures defined homosexuality differently, or why homosexuality seemed more acceptable in certain times and places than in others.54 An important corollary to McIntosh’s insistence on a history of homosexuality is that heterosexuality, and indeed all forms of human sexuality, have a history.
Many scholars embraced McIntosh’s challenge to give human sexual expression a past. But disagreement about the implications of this past abounds.55 The authors of books such as Gay American History and Surpassing the Love of Men eagerly searched the past for role models that could offer psychological affirmation to members of the nascent gay liberation movement.56 Just as with the initial impulses of the women’s movement to find heroines worthy of emulation, early ‘‘gay’’ histories looked to the past in order to make a case for social change in the present. Homosexuality, they argued, has always been with us; we should finally bring it into the cultural mainstream.
The initial euphoria induced by these scholars’ discovery of a gay past was soon complicated by heated debates about the meanings and functions of history. Were our contemporary categories of sexuality inappropriate for analyzing different times and places? If gay people, in the present-day sense, had always existed, did that mean that the condition is inherited in some portion of the population? Could the fact that historians found evidence of homosexuality in whatever era they studied be seen as evidence that homosexuality is a biologically determined trait? Or could history only show us how cultures organize sexual expression differently in particular times and places?57 Some found the latter possibility liberating. They maintained that behaviors that might seem to be constant actually had totally different meanings in different times and places. Could the apparent fact that in ancient Greece, love between older and younger men was an expected component of the development of free male citizens mean that biology had nothing to do with human sexual expression?58 If history helped prove that sexuality was a social construction, it could also show how we had arrived at our present arrangements and, most important, offer insights into how to achieve the social and political change for which the gay liberation movement was battling.
Many historians believe that our modern concepts of sex and desire first made their appearance in the nineteenth century. Some point symbolically to the year 1869, when a German legal reformer seeking to change antisodomy laws first publicly used the word homosexuality.59 Merely coining a new term did not magically create twentieth-century categories of sexuality, but the moment does seem to mark the beginning of their gradual emergence. It was during those years that physicians began to publish case reports of homosexuality—the first in 1869 in a German publication specializing in psychiatric and nervous illness.60 As the scientific literature grew, specialists emerged to collect and systematize the narratives. The now-classic works of Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis completed the transfer of homosexual behaviors from publicly accessible activities to ones managed at least in part by medicine.61
The emerging definitions of homo — and heterosexuality were built on a two-sex model of masculinity and femininity.62 The Victorians, for example, contrasted the sexually aggressive male with the sexually indifferent female. But this created a mystery. If only men felt active desire, how could two women develop a mutual sexual interest? The answer: one of the women had to be an invert, someone with markedly masculine attributes. This same logic applied to male homosexuals, who were seen as more effeminate than heterosexual men.63 As we will see in chapter 8, these concepts linger in late- twentieth-century studies of homosexual behaviors in rodents. A lesbian rat is she who mounts; a gay male rat is he who responds to being mounted.64
In ancient Greece, males who engaged in same-sex acts changed, as they aged, from feminine to masculine roles.65 In contrast, by the early part of the twentieth century, someone engaging in homosexual acts was, like the married lesbians on the TV news show, a homosexual, a person constitutionally disposed to homosexuality. Historians attribute the emergence of this new homosexual body to widespread social, demographic, and economic changes occurring in the nineteenth century. In America, many men and eventually some women who had in previous generations remained on the family farm found urban spaces in which to gather. Away from the family’s eyes, they were freer to pursue their sexual interests. Men seeking same-sex interactions gathered in bars or in particular outdoor spots; as their presence became more obvious, so too did attempts to control their behavior. In response to police and moral reformers, self-consciousness about their sexual behaviors emerged—a budding sense of identity.66
This forming identity contributed to its own medical rendering. Men (and later women) who identified themselves as homosexual now sought medical help and understanding. And as medical reports proliferated, homosexuals used them to paint their own self-descriptions. ‘‘By helping to give large numbers of people an identity and a name, medicine also helped to shape these people’s experience and change their behavior, creating not just a new disease, but a new species of person, ‘the modern homosexual.’ ’’67
Homosexuality may have been born in 1869, but the modern heterosexual required another decade of gestation. In Germany in 1880 the word heterosexual made its public debut in a work defending homosexuality.68 In 1892, heterosexuality crossed the ocean to America, where, after some period of debate, a consensus developed among medical men that ‘‘heterosexual referred to a normal ‘other-sex’ Eros. [The doctors] proclaimed a new heterosexual separatism—an erotic apartheid that forcefully segregated the sex normals from the sex perverts.’’69
Through the 1930s the concept of heterosexuality fought its way into the public consciousness, and by World War II, heterosexuality seemed a permanent feature of the sexual landscape. Now, the concept has come under heavy fire. Feminists daily challenge the two-sex model, while a strongly self — identified gay and lesbian community demands the right to be thoroughly normal. Transsexuals, transgendered people, and, as we shall see in the next three chapters, a blossoming organization of intersexuals all have formed social movements to include diverse sexual beings under the umbrella of normality.
The historians whose work I’ve just recounted emphasize discontinuity. They believe that looking ‘‘for general laws about sexuality and its historical evolution will be defeated by the sheer variety of past thought and behavior.’’70 But some disagree. The historian John Boswell, for instance, applies Kinsey’s classification scheme to ancient Greece. How the Greeks interpreted the molle (feminine man) or the tribade (masculine woman), in Boswell’s view, did not necessarily matter. The existence of these two categories, which Boswell might consider to be Kinsey 6s, shows that homosexual bodies or essences have existed across the centuries. Boswell acknowledges that humans organized and interpreted sexual behaviors differently in different historical eras. But he suggests that a similar range of bodies predisposed to particular sexual activities existed then and now. ‘‘Constructions and context shape the articulation of sexuality,’’ he insists, ‘‘but they do not efface recognition of erotic preference as a potential category.’’71 Boswell regards sexuality as ‘‘real’’ rather than ‘‘socially constructed.’’ While Halperin sees desire as a product of cultural norms, Boswell implies we are quite possibly born with particular sexual inclinations wired into our bodies. Growth, development, and the acquisition of culture show us how to express our inborn desires, he argues, but do not wholly create them.
Scholars have yet to resolve the debate about the implications of a history of sexuality. The historian Robert Nye compares historians to anthropologists. Both groups catalogue ‘‘curious habits and beliefs’’ and try, Nye writes, ‘‘to find in them some common pattern of resemblance.’’72 But what we conclude about people’s past experiences depends to a large extent on how much we believe that our categories of analysis transcend time and place. Suppose for a minute that we had a few time-traveling clones—genetically identical humans living in ancient Greece, in seventeenth-century Europe, and in the contemporary United States. Boswell would say that if a particular clone was homosexual in ancient Greece, he would also be homosexual in the seventeenth century or today (figure 1.2, Model A). The fact that gender structures differ in different times and places might shape the invert’s defiance, but would not create it. Halperin, however, would argue that there is no guarantee that the modern clone of an ancient Greek heterosexual would also be heterosexual (figure 1.2, Model B). The identical body might express different forms of desire in different eras.
There is no way to decide whose interpretation is right. Despite surface similarities, we cannot know whether yesterday’s tribade is today’s butch or whether the middle-aged Greek male lover is today’s pedophile.73