Product Description

This path-breaking study of gender and sexuality is the first to go beyond the nature/nurture debate to offer an alternate framework for considering questions of sex and sexuality.

Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced.

Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29675 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 488 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780465077144
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Anyone who has been following the new brain science in the popular press--and even those whose casual reading includes journals along the lines of Psychoneuroendocrinology--will be fascinated by the puckish observations of Brown University biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, whose provocative and erudite essays easily establish the cultural biases underlying current scientific thought on gender. She goes on to critique the science itself, exposing inconsistencies in the literature and weaknesses in the rhetorical and theoretical structures that support new research. "One of the major claims I make in this book," she explains, "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 beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place." Whether discussing genital surgery on intersex infants or the amorous lives of lab rats, the author is unfailingly clear and convincing, and manages to impart humor to subjects as seemingly unpromising as neuroanatomy and the structure of proteins. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly
As the old complaint that men's long hairstyles make it impossible to tell "if it's a boy or a girl" reveals, gender ambiguity is socially unsettling to many people. Boldly stepping into the breach, Fausto-Sterling contends that the fear of gender confusion has pushed science and medicine to go to extreme lengths in constructing solid concepts of sex (i.e., an individual's anatomical attributes) and gender (i.e., the internal conviction of one's maleness or femaleness). As in her now classic book, Myths of Gender, Fausto-Sterling draws on a wealth of scientific and medical information, along with social, anthropological and feminist theory, to make the case that "choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines." Further, she adds, "our beliefs about gender affect what kind of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place." While the book encompasses a wide range of topics--including a cultural history of hermaphroditism (now more properly termed "intersexuality") and the recent medical interventions used to "cure" it, an account of the emergence of sex hormone research and its use to create changes in sexual orientation, and the history of how science has (mis)understood the brain in terms of gender--Fausto-Sterling's cogent use of concrete historical examples, her simple language and personal anecdotes keep this complex synthesis accessible. Her insightful work offers profound challenges toscientific research, the creation of social policy and the future of feminist and gender theory.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New England Journal of Medicine
Poised to cast the deciding vote in a Salisbury, Connecticut, election in 1843, "Levi S." was charged with being a woman and therefore ineligible. A doctor found that Levi had a penis and therefore a vote. But later it was revealed that Levi also had a vagina and menstruated regularly. What to do? Today we may be amused at 19th century conundrums concerning an intersexual person in a society in which only men held the right to vote. But modern America still requires citizens to be either male or female, and the institution that enforces this dichotomy with respect to babies is medicine, with the use of scalpels, sutures, and until very recently, sublime confidence. Physicians measure the intersexual newborn's phallus, and unless it is longer than 3 cm, shorten it to a more demure, clitoral length and perform whatever additional surgeries are needed to declare "it's a girl."

The primary attack on these decisions has come from intersexual adults who express dissatisfaction with the surgeries that were performed on them as children and who ask whether children's welfare is truly the goal of this sex policing. Physicians, on the other hand, may well feel that society demands that children be either boys or girls and that the schoolyard will brutally punish any deviance from these categories.

In this fascinating new book, Anne Fausto-Sterling describes these and many other troublesome issues that face our society when people refuse to fit the category of heterosexual man or heterosexual woman. A scholarly book with more than 120 pages of notes, its 255 pages of text nevertheless read like a bestseller. Fausto-Sterling reviews the history of ideas about sex and sex roles in the 20th century with authority and balance. She relates Johns Hopkins urologist Hugh Young's 1937 descriptions of intersexual people who grew up before the advent of corrective surgery. Young found these people, even the person working as a sideshow freak ("male and female in one"), to be well-adjusted and reasonably happy adults, many with active sex lives. Fausto-Sterling also reviews the case of John/Joan, a child who gravitated later to Johns Hopkins with widely reported, disastrous results. She points out that intersexual newborns are not rare (they may account for 1.7 percent of live births), so a review of our attitudes about these children is overdue, and her book provides an excellent framework for the ongoing debates.

Fausto-Sterling digs deeper than current medical practice to investigate the basic sciences that guide and inform medicine. The scientists searching for steroid hormones had such abiding faith that male and female are antithetical conditions that they stumbled repeatedly. First, they refused to see that each steroid hormone naturally occurs and functions in both sexes. Next, they insisted that "male" hormones (androgens) must act antagonistically to "female" hormones (estrogens), when in fact they often work in a coordinated fashion.

The author also scrutinizes the work of early behavioral endocrinologists. How much of the famous 1959 report from William C. Young's laboratory, declaring that androgens "organize" the developing brain into a masculine configuration, was shaped by prevailing attitudes that men and women have fundamentally different roles in society? Even if the report itself was untainted by such attitudes, what about the audience that accepted this idea so enthusiastically? Why did the founder of behavioral endocrinology, Frank Beach, who performed many similar experiments before the 1959 report appeared, never formulate this principle explicitly, despite its apparently tremendous explanatory power? For Fausto-Sterling, Beach was a hero, untempted by the simple formulation because he was so familiar with the data, which were replete with the exceptions that investigators still grapple with today. She sees Beach as open to the idea of sexual behavior as a continuum in which normal males might occasionally behave like females, and vice versa. For her, Beach had the independent, clear vision to see diversity when society sought dichotomy.

Fausto-Sterling is not a radical social constructionist. She repeatedly insists that nature has a say in the outcome of experiments -- as one might expect of a geneticist and professor of biology. But she is persuasive in showing how scientists' social background often affects their conceptualization of results, their naming of discoveries, and their decisions about which experiments to perform. Fausto-Sterling is not above rhetoric. It is plain that she disagrees with certain writers, and she unabashedly declares her hopes for our political future. In discussing sex differences in relation to the human brain, she picks on the bedraggled corpus callosum. In 1982, the corpus callosum was reported to differ between men and women, but a flurry of subsequent studies convinced investigators in the field that there is either no sex-based difference in this brain structure or only a very subtle, hard-to-pinpoint difference. What for Fausto-Sterling is matter for condemnation of research in human sex differences could as easily be seen as a validation of the scientific process.

However, Fausto-Sterling also takes pains to present at least two sides of every story, and she never fails to credit the intelligence and good intentions of others, even if, in hindsight, they have made dreadful mistakes. As physicians, scientists, and other citizens continue to take stock of ideas about men and women, and boys and girls, in this new century, Fausto-Sterling's careful and insightful book offers us the chance to question past assumptions and to dream of new formulations nearly as radical as allowing women to vote.

S. Marc Breedlove, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2000 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.

Customer Reviews

Bridging Essentialism and Constructivism
This book is wonderful. Fausto-Sterling does not take sides on the essentialism and constructivism. She argues that biology does matter in determining one's sexual orientation, but at the same time, culture plays a central role as well. In other words, culture and biology interact with one another, in a complicated fashion. It 's an interaction that is dialectical, rather than linear. The author skillfully weaves scientific knowledge with politics and history in a accessable language. Unlike many scientists,whose arguements tend to be ahistorical, she takes into account of history in building her arguements. This work will be interesting for both the scientifically inclined and the theoretically inclined.

When It Comes to Sex ,...
...it all comes down to emotions, recalling that the original meaning of that word was a movement of people, a civil disturbance. From the intersexual to the homosexual, Fausto-Sterling reviews the history and politics that informed the science and medical practice of 20th Century sex. I happily add this volume on the gender politics of popular science to a different but equally interesting work by Simon LeVay, Queer Science. However unlike LeVay, Fausto-Sterling recognizes a relationship between sexualized science and the rise of American monopoly capitalism (and its demands for social stability) though her observations in this arena are frustratingly preliminary. Readers of this book might also enjoy Jennifer Terry's An American Obsession which delves more deeply into cultural history.

Ambivalence
This book delves into some of the biological and cultural issues regarding gender identity. In the introduction, Fausto-Sterling tells us that as a biologist, she accepts that there are biological influences on behavior, but at the same time, she is a feminist who is determined that gender identity is also culturally influenced. This book is framed as a kind of reconciliation between the extremes of the two camps. The early part of the book examines hermaphrodites or intersexuals through history. Fausto-Sterling points out that before medical intervention was standard, hermaphrodites were a recognized gender category, who even had their own rules of conduct and inheritance under Jewish law. She then turns her attention to the modern treatment of intersexuals, describing how thanks to charlatans like John Money, many have been surgically adjusted to fit one sex, while finding that their natural gender goes the other way, and they are consequently trapped in bodies that go against nature. She reviews many studies of the medical intervention of intersexuals and infant gender re-assignment, finding dismally few success stories.

The second half of the book takes up a variety of topics. Chapter 5, for instance, discusses and dismisses reported differences between the corpus callosum in men and women. In this chapter, Fausto-Sterling goes to great length to explain how the statistics for the corpus callosum studies may be flawed, but it seems she misses a larger point- -are there any behavioral traits that are associated with the corpus callosum anyway? Even if women turned out to have a corpus callosum that was five times as big, on average, than that of men, so what? We don't know enough yet about the function of the corpus callosum to hazard a guess as to what such results might point to, so finding or not finding a difference in size isn't that consequential. Later chapters in the book cover the history of sex hormone studies, hormones and the development of the brain. The book closes with an analysis of the author's own development of a gender identity, and an analogy of gender identity as a set of Russian dolls, where each influence on gender identity, from genetic to hormonal to cultural, fits within the larger context. And then comes 120 pages of endnotes, followed by 70 pages of bibliography, and the index.

In previous work, Fausto-Sterling had proposed that there are not 2 but many human genders, including separate categories for each preference of sexual activity. In this book she doesn't exactly argue explicitly for many genders, but she almost seems to assume the idea. She also points out that people's sexual activities may change over time, and thus it may be hard to categorize a person as being throughout life a member of one gender or another. I'm not sure I agree with her on this point. I think it might be more accurate to recognize that are only 2 biological genders, each associated with specific physical and behavioral traits, but that not everyone actually fits neatly into these categories. Indeed, if we have a very tightly defined notion of male and female together with all associated traits, perhaps no one actually matches one gender exactly. But that's not to say that we need to multiply the gender categories- -we just need to recognize and respect each person for who he, she, or even it, is.