Tag Archives: science

"in their graves because of false modesty"? [neha spring 2012]

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

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This past Saturday, I presented a paper at the spring meeting of the New England Historical Association (NEHA) at Rivier College in Nashua, New Hampshire. You can check out the full text of the presentation here: “In Their Graves Because of False Modesty?”: An Allegation of Sexual Assault in Boston, 1914-1915 (PDF, via DropBox).

The paper was my first attempt to pull together a research project I’m working on into a coherent narrative. The research concerns a mysterious deposition I stumbled upon in the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. As I write in the opening paragraphs:

Mediated, it is true, by the framework of legal testimony, the narrative voice of the deposition is nevertheless an active one. [Nellie] Keefe [the deposed] describes herself purposefully seeking medical treatment and intervening in that treatment when it goes contrary to her expectations. She positions herself as a consumer of medical services, with the ability to select a treatment plan with which she feels comfortable, rather than the passive recipient of medical care with which she is uncomfortable — from a medical professional whose authority she should not, or cannot, challenge. She evokes the spectre of sexual aggression by describing how Dr. Underhill “turned the light out [and] inserted his finger in my vagina,” yet ultimately circumscribes Underhill’s actions by indicating that she successfully ordered him to stop.

To the modern reader, the deposition feels both remarkably contemporary, yet also deeply embedded in an historically-specific set of social and medical expectations surrounding patient-doctor interactions. While Keefe’s self-reported actions make clear that she was dissatisfied with Underhill’s professionalism, she also indicates that Dr. Underhill was similarly dissatisfied with her performance of the role as patient. “During the treatments he would pull the blanket off me and I would pull it on again and he would pull it off again leaving me stark naked,” she testified, vividly illustrating the battle between patient and doctor over the circumstances under which Keefe’s treatment should proceed. Keefe was clearly unhappy with Dr. Underhill’s methods, yet returned to his office multiple times to try and negotiate a more satisfactory interaction. What appears at first to be a straightforward account of a doctor’s unprofessional conduct is, I would argue, a more complicated document containing multiple and uncertain meanings.

You can download the full paper from DropBox.

Like my past appearances at NEHA, it was great to spend a morning talking history with a diverse and encouraging group of practicing historians from all over New England. I particularly enjoyed the presentation of my co-panelist Allison Hepler (University of Maine, Farmington), whose research into the life of “Communist hussy librarian” Mary Knowles not only paralleled my own project in unexpected ways, but also gave me a certain amount of professional pride (who wouldn’t want to be known as a “Community hussy librarian”?!).

While we had very little time for Q & A at the session, I had warm words of encouragement from folks for the continuation of my research. What questions and reflections I did field helped clarify how I might move forward from here. I’m particularly motivated to explore the network of female friendships and associations that seem to be such a central part of the Keefe-Underhill case. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to work exercising my reference and historical research skills!

booknotes: straight

27 Tuesday Mar 2012

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Until I fell in love with my partner, Hanna, I generally conceptualized myself as “mostly straight.” This was because, despite the passionate friendships I formed with female friends and the way lesbian sexual fantasies made me go all squishy with excitement, I didn’t feel I was queer enough to be considered authentically out of bounds of straightness. And I passively imagined that, given the statistical odds, chances were I’d fall in love with a person who was a cisgendered man (although I wouldn’t have used the term “cisgendered” back then).

Then Hanna came along, and I realized I was falling for her, and then we were together, a couple in the world, and I had to develop a whole new vocabulary for talking about myself: “mostly straight” no longer felt accurate. But was I lesbian? bisexual? fluid? queer? Should I articulate my sexuality in terms of my kinky fantasies? The gender identity and sexual orientation of my partner? The aggregate attractions I’ve felt but never acted upon for people across the gender and sexuality spectrum? If I’m a person who’s felt squishy feelings for people who identify as male, female, trans, gay, bi, straight, and numerous combinations of the above … how meaningful is it to try and identify something inherently personal (one’s subjective sense of self) in terms of the objects of my affection (which are multivarient, ever-changing). In a strange way, the language I choose to speak of myself has an effect on the identities of anyone I’ve ever felt the thrill of sexual excitement over.

It’s a social dilemma that, three years later, I’ve yet to resolve. These days, when filling out forms I go for the string-of-words approach. The form asks Sexual Orientation? I respond: “lesbian/bisexual/fluid” or the like. Check boxes be damned. In a pinch, “bisexual” is probably the best catch-all (I register attraction to people of multiple gender expressions and sex identities). In biomedical terms, “lesbian” is probably the most accurate in that I’m in a monogamous relationship with a cisgendered woman — so our medical needs will be those of women who have sex exclusively with women. But that isn’t all of who I am — or who my partner is, for that matter, since she identifies as bisexual. “Fluid” helps capture some of the contextual nature of my sexual desires, and my sense of personal change over time. But will provide little information to my primary care provider that “lesbian” doesn’t already communicate — with much less room for confusion.

When blogging or speaking informally, I’ll use lesbian, dyke, bi, gay, queer, fluid, or sometimes opt for phrasing that’s less about who I am and more about what I do: “As someone in a lesbian relationship…,” “As someone who’s partnered with another woman …”

Hanne Blank, in her recently-published (long anticipated!) Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon Press, 2012) recounts similar dilemmas of self-identification as the partner of a male-identified person whose markers of sex and gender are, nonetheless, all over the biological map due to having been born with XXY chromosomes. The author of Virgin: An Untouched History returns to historical and cultural notions of human sexuality in an effort to illuminate what we mean when we talk about “heterosexual” or “straight” identity. As with “virgin,” the answer turns out to be murky at best. The concept of an individual whose identity or nature was built, at least in part, around an exclusive attraction to “opposite”-sexed partners and activities, only came into being in relation to the study of non-normative or “deviant” sexual behavior during the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even after the term came into common usage, virtually no research has been done — scientific or otherwise — on heterosexual sexuality. We don’t know how the bodies of heterosexuals differ from those of non-heterosexuals, for example. Research on homosexuality suggests there is no marker of sexual orientation on the body, but no one has ever asked the question “How are heterosexual bodies composed?” Scientists studying non-heterosexuality always assume they know the normal against which they are measuring the non-normal. Yet this assumption is never spelled out, and its markers are never articulated. As Blank writes:

Scientists often look for evidence of non-heterosexuality, what we consider the exception to the rule, while assuming that the heterosexual rule itself requires no evidence. Scientifically speaking, this is precisely backwards. In science, it should technically not be possible to even begin considering whether there might be exceptions to a rule until you have proven that the rule exists (42-43).

The reason why we’ve never inquired into the existence of heterosexuality is that, culturally speaking, it is a category of being that has become commonsensical, so self-evident in our minds that we measure every other sexuality in relation to it. There is power in a category so constructed as simultaneously normative and empty of actual definition. Blank compares heterosexuality to the concept of being not a person of color or not a slut. “Nameless and characterless, the space we can loosely categorize as ‘normal’ is almost completely undefined,” she writes (32):

This is why ‘slut’ and ‘prude, ‘pervert’ and ‘deviant’ all work so well as insults and as ways to police the boundaries of sex doxa [an anthropological term meaning “what everyone knows to be true”]. The labels are effortless to deploy, and hard, even impossible, to defend against … The opposite of ‘slut’ is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa (32).

If there is a weakness in Straight it is the emphasis on marriage and reproduction as signs of heterosexual identity. I understand why Blank draws upon these cultural examples of heterosexual life — both marriage and parenting are more social activities than, typically, sexual behavior. People are far more likely to record instances of the former rather than the latter. So from an historical perspective, research on heterosexuality will end up documenting those outward signs with much more confidence than it will what people actually did with their bits (and how they felt about doing it). Unless people talk about their sexual self-identities, it’s hard to do more than catalog instances in which sexual acts were recorded — and those acts were usually the ones considered deviant, exceptional, worthy or note or censure.

Still, other books have been written in recent years on the history of marriage, and I felt myself starting to skim in hopes of more discussion of sexological research and taxonomy, a more inventive backward reading from those instances of “deviance” toward what people considered not-deviant. Some of that does appear in the pages of Straight, but I found myself wishing Blank’s editor had pushed her to include less of the well-trodden history of marital practice and more of the specifically sexual practices that fell within the bounds of the acceptable. She does argue, at one point, that “penis-in-vagina intercourse is the only source of sexual pleasure that has never, so far as we can tell from the historical record, has never been challenged … the fortunes of all other sex acts and all other sources of sexual pleasure, have varied widely” (124). I would have liked to see that assertion expanded on, to have these boundaries of sexual activity discussed in relation to the notion of sexual identity in historical understanding. In the 1890s, for example, would a husband and wife who practiced cunnilingus and fellatio with one another been categorized as “normal-sexual” in the eyes of the early sexologists? Blank leaves much of that open to further discussion — which may, I admit, have been her intent.

In the end, Blank has written yet another accessible survey of a sexual concept we think we all know and instead, it turns out, we know little about. I hope the liveliness of her prose and the concrete examples she provides of individuals who defy our binary sex, gender, and sexual categories (man/woman, gay/straight, cis/trans) will encourage people who may not have thought human sexuality in such complex terms to revisit their assumptions and look at their own identities and behaviors with new, and perhaps more forgiving and expansive, eyes.

booknotes: the trouble with nature

14 Tuesday Feb 2012

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This week’s adventures in queer theory came in the form of anthropologist Roger N. Lancaster’s The Trouble With Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2003), which caught my eye on the shelves of Raven Books on Newbury Street. Yes, it really is the sort of thing I buy myself as a weekend treat.

Lancaster’s wide-ranging examination of narratives around sex, gender, sexuality, and nature in both scientific and popular culture can be read as a single monograph or as a series of fairly free-standing topical essays. Grounded in research done largely in the 1980s and 90s, Lancaster charts the various ways in which evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have been deployed across the political spectrum to argue for a stable “human nature” in the face of social and political flux. “What is most obvious about these naturalistic and naturalizing representations [of sex and gender] is that they are so emphatic on matters which recent history has been so equivocal,” he observes (8).

The language of the natural sciences are seen, in contemporary culture, as the voice of authority on the realm of the possible. Queer activists draw on the authority of supposedly innate desires to argue that they were “born this way” and therefore are eligible for equal treatment. Some strains of feminist theory ground their vision in an understanding of women as innately nurturing, pacifist, or cooperative. Religious conservatives, likewise, often utilizes the language of natural science to argue for a particular theological vision of destiny (consider the case made for intelligent design, or the “natural” complementarity of heterosexual relations). Free-market libertarians argue that human beings have a “selfish gene” and to put forward a communitarian alternative to capitalism would be inevitably futile.

In contrast to these fatalistic, mechanistic notions of humanity, Lancaster draws upon his training in cultural studies and anthropology to argue for the irreducable complexity and variety of human sex, gender, and sexual expression across time and space. While acknowledging that we are, indeed, physical bodies, those bodies are in turn never separable from the meaning we make of that matter: “Hormones, odors, and appetites do count — but their effects are always called forth within a cultural context, which is to say, they count in dynamic and non-reductive ways … it matters less that they are biological than that they are creatively articulated within a framework of arbitrary meanings and contingent practices” (204). To put it less jargonistically, “the body is enmeshed in social facts and human acts,” not an ahistorical constant (205).

Lancaster’s book is far from the most articulate or persuasive account of the cultural context in which science around sex and gender is practiced (the works of Anne Fausto-Sterling, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Cordelia Fine, Jeffrey Weeks, Gayle Rubin, and obviously Michel Foucault all come to mind, many of whom he draws upon in this work). If you’re not already at least sympathetic to the notion that scientific research is done in the context of human culture, then you will not likely be convinced by The Trouble With Nature. However, what Lancaster contributes to this field is a thorough survey of the ways in which “bioreductivism” filters into (and draws upon) the language of sex, gender, and sexuality so as to become a feedback loop of “common sense.”  He examines how, over the course of the twentieth century, the languages of sociobiology and evolutionary became the undisputed voices of authority on human behavior — a realm once shared with practitioners in such fields as anthropology, history, and sociology.

Most interesting to me was the way in which Lancaster, himself a gay man, is uncompromising in his criticism of queer activists who use “innatist” arguments to advance the rights of non-straight sexual identity groups. “At best … the new innatist claims carve out a protected niche for homosexual exceptionalism,” he writes. “At worst, they reify the prevailing logic of heterosexual metaphysics and thus actively contribute to the reproduction of an exclusionary homophobic — and sexist — environment. For gays can only be gay ‘by nature’ in a ‘nature’ that already discloses men and women whose deepest instincts and desires are also different ‘by nature” (275). As someone who shares Lancaster’s skepticism that a “born this way” argument is a sound long-term political strategy for ending heteronormative policies and prejudices, I appreciated his articulation of an approach to queer rights activism that doesn’t ground its authority in the notion of a fixed non-straight orientation, but rather the infinite variety of human sexual desires.

With that in mind, I’m closing this review with a lengthy quotation from the introduction to The Trouble With Nature in which Lancaster sketches out the talking points for how one might re-frame the political debate over human sexuality and queer practices. “The long-standing demand, made by religious conservatives, distraught parents, and liberal helping professions alike, is but this: Change your unnatural desires. Time and again, the response is given: I can’t change them — They’re part of my nature,” Lancaster writes. “Would it be as convincing to own one’s sexuality in a volantarist fashion, to say, simply, ‘No, I won’t change them — I’m as queer as I want to be?’ ” (22).  He suggests it might be possible to do just that:

“Desire and identity are inherently ambiguous,” a different kind of contention might begin. “Some of us are more or less exclusively homosexual for most of our lives, many more are exclusively heterosexual,” the argument might continue, rightly acknowledging the salient facts. “But sometimes even straight men find themselves infatuated with their best friends and — as any veteran of feminist consciousness-raising can tell you — women who think of themselves as heterosexual sometimes discover lesbian potential they didn’t know was there. It’s not unheard of for gay ment to fall for women, or lesbians to sleep with men.” 

Now for the theory: “Freud believed that all human beings have bisexual potential. Research by Alfred Kinsey, Laud Humphreys, and others suggests that a lot of people act on that potential at some point in their lives. Anthropological studies of other cultures have shown that human sexual practices are remarkably varied — that there’s more than one way to organize the institutions of family, kinship, and sexual life. Some societies even require every male to engage in same-sex relations for extended periods of time. What all of this means is that nothing in ‘human nature’ gives us a heterosexual norm and a homosexual minority. Sexuality is largely what we make of it.” 

Then, a dash of social context to make sense of how we “make” sexuality: “In modern America, people are very much in the process of making new things out of sex and sexuality. All around us, relationships are in flux: gender roles are changing, sexual practices are changing, all at a dizzying speed. None of this means that people ‘choose’ their sexuality the way a person might choose a pair of socks. But in fact, many individuals do change over time.” Segue into the argument: “So much variation, experimentation, and change makes some people very nervous: they come up with absolutist claims about an unchanging nature, or, they fall back on the premodern idea of divine law as the last recourse in these matters. But ‘nature’ explains nothing here. And nobody really knows very much about why people have the feelings they have.” 

Then, cut to the chase: “None of this is an illness or a disease. None of this means that the end of the world is at hand. There’s nothing wrong with any way that people can express love, make community, or find consensual pleasure. What’s wrong is trying to make people feel sick or evil or perverted about things that are just part of being human. What’s wrong — and dangerous — is trying to narrow the range of pleasures people find in our wondrously human bodies” (23-24).

While I doubt The Trouble With Nature is a great starting place for those interested in the cultural history of human sexuality, I think Lancaster’s book has a lot to offer on the subject and I’m glad I made it an addition to my growing library of sexuality literature.

movienotes: orgasm, inc

02 Thursday Feb 2012

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During the winter holiday, I finally had a chance to screen Liz Canner’s Orgasm, Inc., a documentary which examines the development of “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD) as a disease in need of medical intervention, and the pharmacological and surgical remedies being marketed to the public in often unethical ways.

The full documentary is available via Netflix streaming.

I thought Canner’s documentary was engaging, thoroughly researched, and managed to be harshly critical of unethical medical practices while not dismissing women’s desire for sexual satisfaction. I realize that the issue of medical intervention for women unsatisfied with their sexual response is a highly contentious issue within feminist circles, and I want to say up-front that I am not against medication or surgery per se if it is proven to be effective, responsibly marketed and prescribed, and offered not as a magical fix but as one of a wide array of possible solutions.

The problem with medication and surgery to heighten women’s sexual pleasure is that sexual response is complicated and variable (in human beings generally, not just women) and the medical “fixes” so far on offer are high on risk while potential benefits remain unknown. In addition, patients are often seeking medical treatment for something they perceive as broken or wrong with their bodies which, in fact, are well within the range of human variation — and the doctors treating these patients are (I would argue unethically) using medicine to treat a non-disease. For example, one woman whom Canner follows in the documentary signs up to be part of a clinical trial for an electrical implant in her spine that is supposed to help her achieve orgasm. Let me be clear: invasive spinal surgery.* The potential side-effects and risks are numerous. The woman is physically healthy, not suffering from any sort of nerve or spinal column damage that would cause a loss of feeling in her genitals. In fact, Canner interviews the woman and discovers that she is perfectly capable of reaching orgasm just not during intercourse. Which is a “dysfunction” that roughly 70% of people with clits share. In other words, this woman was accepted as a participant in a clinical trial to a physical deficiency that wasn’t actually there.

Canner’s perspective as a film-maker is clearly sympathetic to the anti-medicalization camp, whether it’s authors skeptical of Big Pharma advertising or activists fighting against the over-medicalization of women’s sexuality and elective genital surgery. Her visual technique highlights the production not only of the film but of the medical industry’s media message concerning women’s sexuality. The company spokespeople, medical talking head “experts” pushing pharmacological and surgical solutions, and other advocates of medical intervention are consistently shown off-balance, evasive, unable to answer critical questions, and glib about women’s “choices,” even as they admit to uncertain outcomes. In contrast, the sex educators and activists who advocate a more comprehensive approach to sexual pleasure — one that takes into account emotional well-being, trauma history, relationship health, and sexual knowledge — come across as trustworthy, knowledgeable and comfortable with the variety of human sexual experience. As the founder of Good Vibrations observes in an interview, many of the women who visit Good Vibes store are so unfamiliar with their own bodies that they can’t locate their own clitoris. “Is a drug going to help them?” She asks rhetorically, “Maybe if it has a sex map of the clitoris on the box!” Before we resort to medical intervention — particularly unproven medical intervention — Canner’s film argues, we might do better to explore non-medical ways of improving our sexual well-being.

On the downside, I feel like this film in some ways perpetuated the widespread belief that Women’s Sexuality Is Confusing, in contrast to men’s sexuality which can be reduced to erection/orgasm. This framing is somewhat inevitable given that the drug companies developing medical solutions to “female sexual dysfunction” have Viagra as their model for success. And Viagra is marketable precisely because our culture views the ability to reach and maintain an erection as the be-all and end-all of satisfying men’s sexual desire. In contrast to this measurable goal of sustaining erections, women’s bodies have culturally legible markers of sexual satisfaction. When it comes to women we’re going for the much muddier category of “higher sexual satisfaction” rather than “stronger pelvic contractions” or “more vaginal secretions” or “engorged labia.” The research surrounding sexual satisfaction is highly subjective, recalling the medical discourse around what is to be considered “normal looking” genitalia. The so-called experts Canner interviews are evasive about their standards of measurement, and when pushed often fall back on the language of proprietary trade secrets. In other words, women are being told they’re “normal” or “not normal” based on tests developed by an industry invested in providing (expensive) treatment for women who fall outside the “normal” range.

I would also have been interested in information about the population of women seeking treatment for “female sexual dysfunction.” While several individual women are profiled, there is little discussion of the demographic as a whole. I found myself wondering, as I watched, if one would find differences based on age, sexual orientation and/or sexual relationships, and the other usual markers such as race/ethnicity and class background. Obviously the people able to afford medical treatment for sexual difficulties are likely to be economically secure-to-well-off.  But I wonder if women in same-sex relationships, for example, are less likely to seek medical solutions to perceived abnormality, then women in heterosexual relationships — and if so, what we could discover by exploring that difference. I was also disappointed in the invisibility of trans* women from the narrative, though I understand that this adds a whole different level of complication to the story of women’s sexuality. At one point, when an ob/gyn is interviewed about elective genital surgery she says, “I can’t think of any rational reason for it,” a statement which either puts gender confirmation surgery in the non-elective/medically necessary category or dismisses trans* women’s particular needs as “irrational.” Likewise, I feel like the discussion of pharmacological treatment might have benefited from a discussion of hormone treatment for trans* folks and their experience of evolving desires as they transition. It seemed, from the documentary itself, that the doctors and companies involved in treating women’s sexual dissatisfaction were highly un-interested in gender, sex, or sexual variance of any kind — and therefore would probably resist learning from the trans* community. On the other hand, I imagine trans* folks might represent a potential market for the medical entrepreneurs, and I found myself wondering if there was any overlap in treatment of women diagnosed with FSD and trans* people. And, if so, what that overlap looks like.

Overall, at a brief 78 minutes I found this a highly watchable documentary that would be a really good jumping-off point for further discussion in a classroom, discussion group, or other discursive setting.

the puzzle of heterosexual women [placeholder post]

14 Wednesday Sep 2011

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No thirty at thirty post today — simply because I didn’t get my act together to write one. So look for the “work and vocation [#9]” installment next week. In its place, I offer this three minute clip from the World Science Festival (via io9). It’s part of a 90-minute panel on the origins of orientation: sexuality 2011 which I fully intend to watch sometime in the near future.

There is not a transcript currently available; sorry for that.

The researcher in the clip, Meredith Chivers, describes how self-identified heterosexual women are actually the most puzzling population for sexologists who are seeking correlation between identity and arousal. That is, women who identify as lesbian, bi (or anything other than 100% straight in their attractions) usually show a strong correlation between their self-identified attractions and patterns of arousal when shown erotic images of men or women (the more same-sex attraction you articulate, the stronger your arousal to same-sex imagery). But heterosexual women show no correlation between their interest in men and differential arousal: their baseline is equal attraction to men and women (in the physical arousal sense).

I have lots of questions about this type of research as a measure of someone’s orientation — for starters, how can researchers tell whether the person studied is reacting to the erotic nature of the pictures or the sex/gender of the body on display? — but I do think the data are an interesting starting point for asking more questions.

booknotes: the truth about boys and girls

26 Friday Aug 2011

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I have recently discovered NetGalley, an online resource for requesting e-book versions of forthcoming titles from a wide variety of publishers. As a blogger and librarian, I was able to sign upi for an account and I’ve requested a handful of titles. It’s my first true foray into the work of e-book reading. Verdict so far: meh on e-books in general, but I’m totally down with electronic advance review copies. It makes distributing ARCs so much more cost effective for publishers, which in turn makes it much more likely they’ll be willing to share them with bloggers who might review the book but have no purchasing budget.

The first galley I read was The Truth About Boys and Girls: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett. Rivers and Barnett are the team that brought us Same Difference (2004), which tackles the work of scientists who claim that men and women are innately different in their psychological makeup. The Truth About Boys and Girls picks up this same subject, but focuses specifically on the way claims about innate gender difference are a) unsupported by rigorous scientific research, and b) continue to have potent persuasive power among parents, teachers, policymakers, and others involved in shaping the everyday life of children. This thesis is not going to be news to anyone who moves in feminist circles, so I would caution that unless you want to stay current on all the publications in this area, a quick skim of this book is likely all that is in order. Maybe I’m biased toward the overly technical and detailed, but when it comes to reviews of the relevant scientific research on this subject, I’ve found Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brainstorm and Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender to be the best critiques out there.

Still, this is a highly-readable book that might serve as an introduction to the topic, particularly those who feel at sea fairly quickly amidst scientific jargon. The chapters are arranged to take on the major areas of supposed gender difference: ability with maths, ability with language, empathy and caring, physical aggression, and several chapters at the end specifically targeted toward the rising popularity of sex-segregated classrooms (and the myth that sex-segregation enhances learning for both boys and girls).

The most frightening take-away from this book, I found, was the reminder that our world is becoming more not less invested in the idea of innate gender difference. As Barnett and Rivers point out in their introduction, “It’s ironic that as neuroscience tells us more and more about the similarity of our brains, popular culture incessantly beams the opposite message, drowning out the real story” (5). Both girls and boys are harmed by these difference stereotypes (girls consistently being told they will under-perform in math and science, for example, thus increasing the likelihood due to stereotype threat that they will meet those low expectations). However, it’s particularly striking to see how — in our current cultural climate, at least — boys are particularly vulnerable to the straightjacket of gendered expectations. Girls, at least, have alternate and fairly prominent voices advocating for them: they might get relentlessly marketed to by the Disney princess line and told they can’t do math because their brains don’t work that way … but they also (most likely) have adults in their lives who encourage them to play soccer, ride bicycles, or take on leadership roles. The “boy crisis” panic of recent years, rather than focusing on the harm that gender stereotyping does to boys has actually focused mostly on reinforcing those stereotypes in ever-more extreme ways:

Out of this crucible of alarm, a particular image of the ‘typical’ boy has emerged in many media reports: he’s unable to focus, can’t sit still, hates to read, acts up in class, loves sports and video games, and gets in trouble a lot. Indeed, such boys do exist — it has long been established that boys suffer more from attention deficit disorder than girls do — and they need all the help they can get. But research shows that this picture does not reflect the typical boy. Boys, in fact, are as different from one another as they are from girls. Nonetheless, some are advocating boys-only classrooms in which boys would be taught in boot-camp fashion (78).

And a few pages later, summarizing the recommendations of author Leonard Sax:

A boy who likes to read, who does not enjoy contact sports, and who does not have a lot of close male friends has a problem, even if he thinks he is happy (89).

Although the authors don’t overtly connect such panic about masculine behavior to homophobia, I have to say the above sentence fairly screams with “oh my god what if he has teh gay!” Later on, in the chapter about “rough and tumble” play, the authors do note that adult interpretation of children’s play as conforming to gender stereotypes might actually be subverting them or otherwise working around those expectations in interesting ways. Rough and tumble play, they suggest “gives boys an acceptable medium for being physically close in cultural or social environments that otherwise discourage such behavior” (114). Obviously this doesn’t mean that all physical closeness is homoerotic to the participants, but it does suggest that in a society that discourages boys from physical intimacy with one another and/or with girls — physical closeness that most human beings need regardless of gender — play that adults read as “masculine” and aggressive might actually be a way of meeting the human need for touch.

Like Cordelia Fine in Delusions of Gender, Rivers and Barnett emphasize the degree to which children perform gender based on the modeling and perceived expectations of the adults around them. For example, they note that the majority of research of the group behavior of children is conducted in school settings — sites where adults are constantly reminding children that they are gendered beings (from the greeting of “good morning boys and girls!” to sorting children into male and female groups for recess).  Recent research on play behavior among children has found that in spaces where gender is not brought to the fore by adults — for example in unstructured neighborhood play — children are less likely to fall into gendered patterns of behavior, and to seek playmates across gender lines.

“In short,” Barnett and Rivers write toward the end of The Truth, “the differences within each sex are greater than the differences between the sexes. It makes no sense to talk about boys and girls as if they were homogeneous groups that are different enough to warrant separate educational treatment” (180). “Not only do single-sex public schools violate constitutional principles, but they deprive our children of important learning opportunities and run the very real risk of reinforcing the toxic sex stereotypes that are rampant in our society” by encouraging children to think that boys and girls are so wholly alien from one another they can’t even learn side-by-side.

Hopefully our society will get the message sooner or later. In the meantime, I can only say that I’m glad that there are so many feminist parents out there who are encouraging their daughters and sons to carry on bravely being who they are rather than what the outside world insists they ought to become.

booknotes: brain storm

06 Wednesday Oct 2010

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This past week I devoured a book Hanna found for me on the new books wall at the library: Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, by Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist currently teaching at Barnard College. The book is a systematic survey and assessment of the quality of the scientific research that has been used over the past fifty years in support of the theory that male and female brains are innately different because of different patterns of hormone exposure during gestation.

While the research in this area is inconsistent at best, and methodologically flawed at worse, the idea of sex-typed “brain organization” which pre-disposes men and women to gendered “masculine” and “feminine” behaviors has become widely popularized common sense knowledge, justifying everything from the intrusive medical treatment and scrutiny of gender- and sex-variant people to the dismissal of concerns about social structures that may support gender inequality (if men are “naturally” more interested in careers, and women are “naturally” more interested in caring for children, then no amount of social policy — the argument goes — will alter this predisposition).

Jordan-Young’s goal in Brain Storm is not to argue against the scientific exploration of sex and gender development, but rather to suggest that the science we currently rely upon to support the assertions of sex difference are problematic.  She argues that an “epistemology of ignorance” characterizes the work of scientists who do research on brain organization. That is, these scientists purposefully ignore (because they assume it is irrelevant) any potential sociocultural explanations for the gendered behavior of their subjects, attributing the differences they do discover on atypical, early hormone exposure rather than on the complicated interaction between “nature” and culture. They assume this sociocultural evidence is irrelevant because they expect to find sex-typed differences, and expect those differences to be explained by early physiological sex-differentiation. They have closed the door on alternate (and ultimately, at least according to the strength of available evidence, more compelling) explanations.

This book is far too dense to adequately condense its major ideas into one short booknote; I encourage all of you interested in this area of research to read the whole book, since Jordan-Young’s explanations of how these scientific studies have been generated are really useful as a window into understanding how to better interpret research findings. Regardless of your philosophical position on the physiological origins of sex and gender variety, Brain Storm will help you become a better consumer of the evidence out there that is currently used to support that network of ideas.

To give you a flavor for the type of material covered in Brain Storm, here are a few excerpts.

From “Chapter Six: Masculine and Feminine Sexuality”, which explores how researchers have defined “masculine” and “feminine” sexuality in their research and findings.  Jordan-Young points out that during the 1950s-1970s, when brain organization theory was taking hold in the scientific community, immense changes took place in the cultural perception of what “masculine” and “feminine” sexuality looked like, and how it “naturally” expressed itself.  The scientific literature, however, largely ignores these historical shifts, treating these categories as uncomplicated notions that do not need to be explicitly defined.

Surprisingly, against this backdrop of change [the sexual revolution], most brain organization researchers have used the common term feminine sexuality through more than four decades as though it is absolutely self-evident and unproblematic. But the ground has been shifting under their feet. While ideas and practices associated with “normal” sexuality changed in the broader world during those decades, the transformation of masculine and feminine sexuality was just as dramatic [yet unacknowledged] in the studies that are intended to determine how male and female sexual natures develop.

In brief, from the late 1960s until around 1980, brain organization researchers relied on a model of human sexuality that sharply divided masculine and feminine sexual natures … Things began to change in the early 1980s. In the most general way, scientists continued to assert that early exposure to “masculinizing” hormones make sexual development either more masculine or less feminine, and their preoccupation with sexual orientation intensified. But a closer look at the specific behaviors coded as masculine or feminine in the later studies shows some surprising and very important differences from the first period. In particular, masturbation, genital arousal, and sex with multiple partners came to be understood as “commonsense” features of feminine sexuality, even though these had earlier been read as clear signs of masculinization (pp. 113-114).

In “Chapter Seven: Sexual Orienteering,” Jordan-Young tackles the jaw-droppingly simplistic approach brain organization researchers continue to take toward sexual orientation, despite increasing acknowledgment across a wide range of scholarly fields that sexual identity and orientation highly subjective, often subject to change over time, and are inextricably wrapped up in both “nature” and culture.

To Dr. A and Dr. N, who are among the mos influential scientists in the world studying biological influence on human sexuality, subjects who gave equivocal or contradictory answers to questions about sexual orientation are either being obstructive or confused. Ironically, Dr. A’s admonition to “listen to the subject” ends up being qualified by “if they’re consistent.” Dr. A doesn’t consider the possibility that subjects’ hedging and ambiguity reflect meaningful complexity — that the phenomenon of sexual orientation is complex and sometimes ambiguous. Instead, he thinks of sexual orientation as a simple categorical trait — the objections of modern intellectuals and old cranks like Alfred Kinsey not withstanding, you can sort people into discrete types. In this view, subjects who don’t fit the profile are simply lying, or perhaps more charitably, self-deluded.

While other scientists vigorously debate what sexual orientation is and how best to measure it, brain organization researchers almost never address the fundamental questions involved. The majority of studies linking early hormone exposures with human sexuality have focused primarily or exclusively on sexual orientation — yet most brain organization studies that are “about” sexual orientation have not defined sexual orientation at all, or have used vague and contradictory definitions that often do not agree with the measures scientists have used (p. 145-146).

It was particularly revelatory for me to realize the (obvious once you’re looking for it) point that the most basic ways of sorting groups of people according to orientation can matter, both when it comes to grouping people for the purposes of research and for the purposes of understanding populations in more cultural/social frameworks.

For example, does your definition group people according to the gender of the people whom they are attracted to (men or women)? Or does your definition arrange people according to whether their attractions are same-sex or opposite sex? Both of these definitions, obviously, beg the question of what to do with people who do not fit a binary schema — but for the moment let’s pause here.

If you arrange people on a heterosexual/homosexual schema, you’re grouping them by same-sex vs. other-sex attractions. That is, gay and lesbian people will be in one group, straight women and men in the other. And research designed to explain these categories would look for sameness within the groups and difference between them. You would presume that straight men and women had certain markers of sameness, while queer folks had similar profiles.

Most brain organization research uses the heterosexual/homosexual schema when it comes to structuring their research populations (i.e. they have a “straight” population and a “gay/lesbian” population, and yet their research questions and theories actually follow the people-attracted-to-men vs. people-attracted-to-women model. They assume that individuals who are attracted to men (gay men, straight women) will have markers of sameness, and individuals who are attracted to women (straight men, lesbians) will have markers of sameness — and that these two groups, when compared, will show patterns of difference.

The distinctions seem slight at first, but actually matter a great deal when it comes to structuring a research study or understanding how we make sense of the world, about what we expect of certain groups of people, and what assumptions those expectations rest upon.

The most painful sections of the book to read, at least for me, were the sections that dealt directly with research around intersex conditions, most prominently girls and women with CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia). Since brain organization researchers are interested in the effect of hormones on brain development, they have obviously sought out populations known to have had atypical hormone exposure. They then study these individuals for “signs” of sex/gender/sexuality atypicality — “atypical” usually meaning, as the above excerpts show, “contrary to researchers’ culturally-shaped assumptions about gendered behavior.” In “Chapter Nine: Taking Context Seriously,” Jordan-Young uses the example of CAH studies to show how the tunnel vision approach of brain organization researchers has led them to ignore powerful evidence that sociocultural context matters when it comes to sex and gender identity. Not necessarily to the exclusion of hormonal or other “natural” influences, but in ways that simply should not be ignored by scientists who are attempting to test their hypothesis.

No brain organization research, for example, takes into account the fact that the sexual feelings and activities, the self-identity of their CAH subjects is inevitably influenced by the fact that these girls and women are subject to intense scrutiny and intervention — both social and medical — from birth into adulthood. They are expected to behave atypically, and monitored rigorously and anxiously by parents and medical professionals in hopes they will be “normal.” Their bodies are often treated to invasive “normalizing” surgeries and examined regularly. They are asked to perform certain sexual acts, such as masturbation, under supervision, and until very recently little or no thought was given to the actual quality of their sexual experiences and feelings about their own bodies and sexuality — all that mattered was intervening in their lives in the hope that they could be shepherded toward “normal” sex/gender/sexual identities (read: straight person presenting and identifying as female).

To me, this sort of anxiety surrounding gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as the simplistic notion that male/female heterosexual = best possible outcome for all people is just incredibly sad. It’s a very sad testament to the lack of imagination among medical professionals and the general populace that human variation is not only okay, but might actually be the best possible outcome.

I don’t really have any concluding thoughts about this book other than that it’s definitely a keeper, and I urge you all to at least be aware of its existence in the world, should you find yourself in need of a comprehensive survey of brain organization research. It also has an extensive bibliography that can point you in all sorts of branching directions … next up on my list, for example, is Katrina Karkazis’ 2008 book Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience.

Happy reading!

booknotes: sexing the body

17 Thursday Jun 2010

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I took a class as an undergraduate in the Cultural History of Victorian Science and Technology, which was one of the most awesome classes of my lengthy undergraduate career. One of the conversations I remember from that class was a discussion about how and why some new technologies and scientific theories succeed and some fail. We tend to have a merit-based vision of innovative success and failure: good ideas succeed, bad idea fail. But this isn’t necessarily so — you might have a bad idea but really good marketing skills. You might have a good idea but fail to file your patent paperwork at the right moment. Usually at the beginning of a new technology (take cars for example) the a multitude of products compete for the industry standard. The gasoline-powered internal combustion engine was only one of a number of automobile technologies developed around the turn of the twentieth century: its hegemony today had everything to do with marketing and the availability of cheap oil, rather than its inherent superiority to, say, an electric motor (which was on the scene simultaneously, even a little bit prior to, gasoline-powered motors).

What does this have to do with Anne Faustos-Sterling’s Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000)? I thought of the story of the automobiles and its lesson about the interaction of science, technology, and culture while I was reading Sexing the Body because what my cultural history professor had done for modern technologies, Faustos-Sterling, a trained biologist, does for the scientific exploration of gender and sex in the human body. The work is now a decade old, but still reads (to my eyes anyway) as a fairly current account of how sex and gender have been understood through the lens of science, specifically intersexuality during the twentieth century and how the treatment of intersexual persons is shaped by larger cultural understandings of gender, sex and sexuality.

This exhaustively-researched, amply-footnoted book does a commanding job of balancing the important-yet-technical ins and outs of scientific studies involving rats and hormones with a compelling, readable narrative. Faustos-Sterling documents the way in which the production of scientific knowledge — specifically the knowledge related to human sex and sexuality — is inexorably shaped by the cultural understandings of what is normal sex and gender presentation. She begins with external markers of sexuality and a truly horrific chapter concerning how people with unacceptable genitalia have been treated by the medical establishment in the twentieth century. She then moves internally to look at the less visible ways in which scientists have identified the sex of persons, from gonads to hormones. As you might expect, her argument is that “sex” is far from easily established on a medical level, and the standards by which we have chosen to measure sex are hardly objective, unchanging scientific criteria but rather contingent on the narratives concerning sex and gender that scientists performing their laboratory tests take part in and are influenced by.

Warning to anyone who has experienced hospital or medical-related trauma: the descriptions of medical malpractice that included things like operating on infants without painkiller, operating on people of all ages without consent, and providing misleading or outright erroneous medical information to patients or the parents of underage patients are infuriating and painful to read. I find the idea of any medical professional performing invasive, medically unnecessary surgery on a person without their consent or with coerced consent so upsetting that I had to put the book down several times just to let my blood pressure drop.

Much like Hanne Blank’s history of virginity, Sexing the Body takes a concept (“sex”) that we have come to think of as biologically determined and physically identifiable and questions just how much we really know about what “sex” constitutes. Even if the components of our body that have become markers of “sex” (male or female) are, indeed, physical realities, the decision to establish those particular physical characteristics as markers of sex is, in the end, a socio-cultural decision we make, and one that we can change.

And this, in the end, is Fausto-Sterling’s hopeful call: for us all to look beyond the dualities of male versus female, masculine and feminine, and nature (what we have come to label “sex”) and nurture (what we have come to label “gender”) and acknowledge the reality that we are both and neither, that what we understand as sex and gender identity is both nature and nurture — and, in fact, more. That we cannot hope to gain more knowledge about human biology and behavior if we continue to constrain ourselves to limited, limiting categories and attempt to shoehorn the diversity of humanity into their narrow confines.

Booknotes: Autobiography of Charles Darwin

02 Monday Mar 2009

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This is Darwin week in my intellectual history class; we’re reading selections from On the Origin of Species, Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, and finally Charles Darwin’s charmingly personal Autobiography, which he wrote for his family toward the end of his life. I don’t have any Big Thoughts to share with you on Darwin’s story, but there were a couple of passages from his recollections that I thought I would quote here, to give you a sense of his autobiographical writing and sense of himself as a human being.

On his education: “During the three years I spent at Cambridge my time was wasted, as far as academical studies were concerned, as complete as at Edinburgh and at school . . . I got into a sporting set, including some dissipated low-minded young men. We often used to dine together in the evening, though these dinners often included men of a higher stamp, and we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards. I know that I ought to feel ashamed of days and evenings thus spent, but as some of my friends were very pleasant and we were all in the highest spirits, I cannot help looking back on these times with much pleasure . . . But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow” (50-53).

On society: “Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we [he and his wife] have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere. During the first part of our residence we went a little into society, and received a few friends here; but my health almost always suffered from the excitement, violent shivering and vomiting attacks thus being brought on . . . I have [thus] lost the power of becoming deeply attached to anyone . . . As far as I can judge this grievous loss of feeling has gradually crept over me, from the expectation of much distress afterwards from exhaustion having become firmly associated in my mind from seeing and talking with anyone for an hour, except my wife and children” (95).

One final note: For those of you who didn’t see this link earlier on my post about Darwin and Lincoln’s joint birthday, check out the beautiful online exhibition about Darwin’s life and work at Chicago Field Museum.

Booknotes: Bonk

30 Tuesday Sep 2008

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A few weeks ago, the Boston Public Library finally notified me that a reserve copy of Mary Roach’s latest book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, was on hold for my reading pleasure. “Hooray!” I thought, “another fun book about sex!” . . . so I checked it out and read it.

I’ve heard wonderful things about Mary Roach’s science writing over the years, from a variety of bibliophile friends, but have not read either of her previous books (Stiff and Spook). They were about death. But, I mean, who wouldn’t be entertained by the shenanigans of researchers who dress rats in polyester knickers to test the effect of artificial fabrics on libido? Or pause to consider why in a study “of male and female genital slang carried out at five British universities, respondents came up with 351 ways to say penis . . . and only three for clitoris”? And really, who could resist the knowledge that in the Middle Ages witches were thought to be the cause of impotence: “witches with no formal training in andrology could employ a [simple] approach. They made the man’s penis disappear.”

Her descriptions of some of the bumbling medical interventions in humans sex lives are often not for the faint of heart, but I found them fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way: so many of our attempts to make sense of human sexuality through the lens of science have been simultanouesly terribly earnest and woefully misguided. In the end, even the most enthusiastic scientists, it seems, have come to the conclusion that what turns people on (or off) is unpredictable, varied, and irreducibly complex.

Roach ends her book with a description of one of Masters and Johnson’s later works, published in 1979, which describes the experiences of a group of lesbian, gay, and straight couples, committed and not, whom they invited to their labs and put under the microscope:

Ultimately, [Masters and Johnson] set aside their stopwatches and data charts and turned a qualitative eye upon their volunteers. What emerged were two portraits. There was efficient sex — skillful, efficient, goal-directed, uninhibited, and with a very low “failure incidence” . . . gay, straight, committed or not . . . [they] tended to have, as they say, 100 percent orgasmic return.

But efficient sex was not amazing sex. The best sex going on in Masters and Johnson’s lab was sex being had by the committed gay and lesbian couples. Not because they were practicing special secret homosexual techniques but because they “took their time” (301).

What strikes me is that Masters and Johnson found this simple observation worth noting (and italicizing) in their book . . . isn’t time and attention an obvious cornerstone of relational sex? Apparently, for many of the hetero couples Masters and Johnson observed in the late seventies, whatever goal they had in mind (orgasm? procreation?) eclipsed the far richer process of togetherness that the lesbian and gay couples foregrounded in their interactions. The impish side of my soul wonders what the religious right would make of that . . .