Anne Fausto-Sterling--Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000)

Fausto-Sterling’s primary claim is that “labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision.  We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender—not science—can define our sex.  Furthermore, our believes about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place.”  Rather, she claims that “Our bodies are too complex to provide clear-cut answers about sexual difference.  The more we look for a simple physical basis for ‘sex,’ the more it becomes clear that ‘sex’ is not a purely physical category.  What bodily signals and functions we define as male or female come already entangled in our ideas about gender.”  She notes that it wasn’t until the 1970s that sex and gender were posited as separate categories by sexologists, while second-wave feminists argued that gender differences were primarily the result of social institutions “designed to perpetuate gender inequality.”  However, because feminists left the physical differences of sex unquestioned, they left open the possibilities of “hardwired” differences between the sexes.

Importantly, Fausto-Sterling claims 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.  At the same time, components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being.  (location 129)

More specifically, she acknowledges that “Understanding how race and gender work—together and independently—helps us learn more about how the social becomes embodied.”  And it is this process of the social becoming embodied in which I am interested.  In particular, Fausto-Sterling points to the lack of data collection on the “normal distribution of genital anatomy,” which demonstrates that “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.”

Fausto-Sterling observes that a similarly policed binary exists in general understandings of sexuality—one is either inherently heterosexual, or inherently a lesbian.  Further, even using the Kinsey scale, which acknowledges a more continuum-like understanding of sexual-object desire, is still a linear, two-dimensional scale.  She does acknowledge the existence of more complicated scales, such as that by Fritz Klein (which uses seven variables: sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, self-identification, hetero/homo lifestyle along with a time scale).  Further, the work of feminist and gay theorists which revealed the social constructed nature of sexuality encouraged the idea that sexual expression was not biologically grounded.  Responding to Halperin’s claim that “sexuality is not a somatic fact, it is a cultural effect,” Fausto-Sterling instead posits that “sexuality is a somatic fact created by a cultural effect.”  Comparing Butler’s idea that the body is completely constructed through discourse with that of Grosz, who thinks there are some biological processes which “precede meaning,” Fausto-Sterling posits that “we need the concept of the psyche, a place where two-way translations between the mind and the body take place.”

Working against this is a deeply entrenched commitment to the idea of only two, discrete sexes: “Reconceptualizing the category of ‘sex’ challenges cherished aspects of European and American social organization.”  Fausto-Sterling gives a detailed account of the development of our understanding of sex and sexuality, primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and shows in painstaking detail how political events and cultural norms of the times shaped scientific inquiry and understanding.  Ultimately, she does denounce her earlier proposed five-sex model, but instead advocates for a much more nuanced understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality, one which takes the idea of systemic interaction into much greater account.  Using a really useful example of the evolution of smiling as one which begins as a somatically neutral, muscularly simple action to one which, over the course of maturation and interaction, becomes a much more emotionally-connected and muscularly complex action, Fausto-Sterling argues that sex, gender, and sexuality need to be analyzed as similarly systems-oriented behaviors.

Sigmund Freud--Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

Freud makes a number of significant and surprisingly progressive points in this work.  Building on and responding to the work of sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing and Ulrich.  In the first essay, “The Sexual Aberrations,” Freud addresses inversion, fetishes, and other “aberrations.”  Significantly, he observes that sexual inversion varies: while some are only attracted to those of the same sex, others can be attracted to both sexes, and even others engaged in sexual activity with those of the same sex under specific circumstances (location 123).  Some have always had feelings for the same sex, while some can point to specific incidents which acted as a catalyst for these feelings (location 160).  Further, many “inverts” are attracted to very feminine men, for example, which complicates the general understanding of inversion as a woman’s mind trapped in a man’s body.  Importantly, he claims that, “The sexual impulse is probably entirely independent of its object and is not originated by the stimuli proceeding from the object” (location 236). 

In his discussion of sadomasochism, Freud observes that “The sexuality of most men shows a taint of aggression, it is a propensity to subdue, the biological significance of which lies in the necessity of overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by actions other than mere courting” (location 349).  When combined with his earlier characterization of the “conventional reticence and dishonesty of women” (273), the dynamics of heterosexuality as Freud observes them are troubling.  However, it is also significant that Freud identifies that all “normal” sexual behavior contains elements of perversion, and “this universality suffices in itself to prove the inexpediency to prove the opprobrious application of the name perversion” (location 386).  Further, it is also significant that Freud wishes to “find out how much of the biology of the sexual life of man can be discovered by means of psychological investigation” (location 114), instead of trying to find coincidences of sexual characteristics with physical markers, as so many before him tried to do.  He also seems to be arguing for situational sexuality, as he says that there are very few people who truly prefer children or animals sexually to adults, but that most who prey upon the young or engage in bestiality do so out of cowardliness or lack of other partners (especially in the case of animals). Freud also argues for the existence of sexual urges from birth—not from puberty—and thus claims that sexual perversions can have their roots in childhood development and experience.