Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...) (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article retrace les changements multiples et rapides apparus au cours des quinze dernières années dans la théorisation des rapports entre sexe et genre. Il porte, en deuxième lieu, sur la réception, l’application et par-dessus tout la modification de ces théories par certains spécialistes de la production culturelle dans l’Europe médiévale, où la différence s’exprime sous des formes variées qui n’existent pas nécessairement dans les sociétés modernes. La déconstruction du système binaire masculin/féminin (qu’il soit considéré comme une différence sexuelle (...) ou de genre) fit son apparition parmi les penseuses féministes dans les années quatre-vingt dix et aboutit à la « queerisation » des discours universitaires en déstabilisant les étiquettes qui avaient été naturalisées, notamment l’identité genrée systématiquement attribuée à l’individu dans la société médiévale ou moderne. Nous montrerons que les théories queer et post-coloniale, loin d’être aux antipodes de la théorie féministe, en émanent et existent parallèlement à elle. Les partisans de chacune de ces théories s’intéressent aux forces sociétales, y compris notre propre discours, qui maintiennent la différence et créent des communautés d’oppression. Cependant, il est également nécessaire de soulever une question, à savoir quand se produira la prochaine rupture radicale et comment elle engendrera de nouvelles théories. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article retrace les changements multiples et rapides apparus au cours des quinze dernières années dans la théorisation des rapports entre sexe et genre. Il porte, en deuxième lieu, sur la réception, l’application et par-dessus tout la modification de ces théories par certains spécialistes de la production culturelle dans l’Europe médiévale, où la différence s’exprime sous des formes variées qui n’existent pas nécessairement dans les sociétés modernes. La déconstruction du système binaire masculin/féminin (qu’il soit considéré comme une différence sexuelle (...) ou de genre) fit son apparition parmi les penseuses féministes dans les années quatre-vingt dix et aboutit à la « queerisation » des discours universitaires en déstabilisant les étiquettes qui avaient été naturalisées, notamment l’identité genrée systématiquement attribuée à l’individu dans la société médiévale ou moderne. Nous montrerons que les théories queer et post-coloniale, loin d’être aux antipodes de la théorie féministe, en émanent et existent parallèlement à elle. Les partisans de chacune de ces théories s’intéressent aux forces sociétales, y compris notre propre discours, qui maintiennent la différence et créent des communautés d’oppression. Cependant, il est également nécessaire de soulever une question, à savoir quand se produira la prochaine rupture radicale et comment elle engendrera de nouvelles théories. (shrink)

: Lay understanding and scientific accounts of female sexuality and orgasm provide a fertile site for demonstrating the importance of including epistemologies of ignorance within feminist epistemologies. Ignorance is not a simple lack. It is often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty. Studying both feminist and nonfeminist understandings of female orgasm reveals practices that suppress or erase bodies of knowledge concerning women's sexual pleasures.

Lay understanding and scientific accounts of female sexuality and orgasm provide a fertile site for demonstrating the importance of including epistemologies of ignorance within feminist epistemologies. Ignorance is not a simple lack. It is often constructed, maintained, and disseminated and is linked to issues of cognitive authority, doubt, trust, silencing, and uncertainty. Studying both feminist and nonfeminist understandings of female orgasm reveals practices that suppress or erase bodies of knowledge concerning women's sexual pleasures.

: This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients (widely used by Amerindian and African women in the West Indies).1.

This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients.1.

: Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiologies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read text-books whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiologies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiohgies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiohgies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

In this essay I explore the role of dialectics for how social theory can take account of the problem of structure and agency, or, determination and freedom, in a critical and emancipatory way. I discuss the limits and possibilities of dialectical, and of anti-dialectical, criticisms of Hegelian dialectics. For this purpose, I look at Judith Butler’s discussion of dialectics and the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in her writings between 1987 (Subjects of Desire; republished 1999) and 1990 (Gender Trouble, republished (...) 2000). Butler’s book Gender Trouble remains a key text of contemporary feminist theory. Butler formulates in this book a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex based on her claim that Beauvoir makes a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that implies the notion of the sexed body as a pre-cultural entity. In her earlier writings, though, her evaluation of de Beauvoir had been much more positive. The change in Butler’s evaluation of de Beauvoir is part of her increasing rejection of dialectics: Butler rejected in Gender Trouble any form of Hegelian dialectics with reference to Luce Irigaray’s (1985) claim that it is ‘phallogocentric’. Although Butler subsequently returned to Hegelian themes, she seems never to have revoked this claim made in her most momentous work. I argue that this change in the theoretical structure of Butler’s argument weakens her critique of identity politics and I suggest reading Butler backwards, from Gender Trouble to the more open discussion of dialectics in her earlier texts. Drawing on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and other formulations of critical theory, I argue that the valid aspects of the critique of Hegelian dialectics can better be formulated as a dialectical critique of dialectics (Adorno; Butler, 1987a) than as a rejection of dialectics (Derrida; Irigaray; Butler, 1990). Retracing the genealogy of Butler’s argument will be a necessary backdrop, too, for evaluating her more recent comments on the Hegelian and ‘Frankfurt School’ traditions such as her Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in November 2002. (shrink)

This article proposes that the urgent task for feminist sociology is to recuperate those lost or residual `body matters' which lurk, unattended to, on the sidelines of the social. Feminist sociology must carefully negotiate the complex space between sociality and corporeality. The new feminist philosophies of the body tend sometimes to grate against this project by valorizing the body but de-valorizing gender. The new sociology of the body is recuperating the body within sociology, but pays insufficient attention to the ways (...) in which gendered bodies have always enjoyed varying degrees of absence or presence in the sociological imaginary - in the guise of `female corporeality' and `male embodiment'. By revisiting the classical texts of sociology, such as those of Durkheim, Weber and particularly Simmel, I explore the textual strategies whereby `the body' and `the social' were dissociated in the first place and how, simultaneously, woman is saturated with, while man is divested of, corporeality and she is divested while he is invested with sociality. The absent women in sociology were the women in the body excluded from the social. It is male bodies which animate the social - they appear for a fleeting moment, only to disappear immediately, in the space between `corporeality' and `sociality'. Thus, it is not simply a case of recuperating bodies into the social, but of excavating the gendered subtexts whereby gendered bodies were differently inscribed into and out of the social in the first place. The crucial point here is not the more familiar story of her saturation with corporeality but the less familiar one of what happened to his body - how, that is, did male sociologists effect the disappearance of their own bodies in the textual strategies of sociology? (shrink)

The “Puerto Rican wannabe” is one contemporary, local expression of contested racial identities—identities that are also inflected with class and gender meanings. This study uses interviews with local youth and young adults to explore their use of the caricature of the wannabe to create and contest race, class, and gender boundaries. The wannabe’s challenge to racially designated categories provides a symbol onto which nonwannabe kids project their own stereotypes, anxieties, and desires. The stories told about the wannabe in this study (...) reveal both the persistence and the fragility of race, class, and gender identities and underline the centrality of sexuality in bolstering and undermining them. Boundary negotiations in one category rely on and affect other categories: In this study, the contestation of racial boundaries reestablishes heteronormative and hierarchical gender relations. (shrink)

This article examines changes and continuities in the epistemic and methodological presence of “race” in British imperial demography from 1920 to 1960. It does so in relation to population-level interventions aimed at improving reproduction in the New Hebrides. Through an examination of the sex ratio in relation to debates about demographic decline, the article describes aspects of how sexual selection was connected to race thinking. Taking a balanced sex ratio as a marker of well-adapted, healthy populations—biologically and culturally—the British authorities (...) in the New Hebrides attempted to regulate the bride price in an attempt to level the imbalanced sex ratio. They believed that this intervention would reduce the marriage age of men while also appeasing missionary agendas of changing marriage and kinship practices. I use the metaphor of a “watermark” to think through the conceptual and methodological absent/presence of race in colonial demography and colonial administrators’ attitudes toward and interventions in local reproductive practices. (shrink)

: The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), (...) to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning , to show how philosophy of language (...) can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning, to show how philosophy of language can (...) contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

In both social science and medicine, research on reproduction generally focuses on women. In this article, we examine how men’s reproductive contributions are understood. We develop an analytic framework that brings together Cynthia Daniels’ conceptualization of reproductive masculinity with a staged view of reproduction, where the stages include the period before conception, conception, gestation, and birth. Drawing on data from two medical sites that are oriented to the period before pregnancy, we examine how gendered knowledge about reproduction produces different reproductive (...) equations in different stages of the reproductive process. We conclude with a new research agenda that emerges from rethinking the role of men and masculinity in reproduction. (shrink)

This article discusses representations of hermaphrodites in the domestic context of Roman gardens and argues that the spatial context of the hermaphrodite body is as germane to critical understanding as the intersexed body itself. The spatial and semantic interrelations between Roman gardens and hermaphrodite images focus on the dynamics of viewing hermaphrodite types in Italo-Roman art, the spatial configuration of hermaphrodites with documented findspots, Ovid's introduction of garden imagery in the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus compared to the Salmakis inscription (...) from Kaplan Kalesi at Halicarnassus, and the historical correlation to Augustan Rome's vegetative symbolism. This synthesis of material, literary, and historical evidence for hermaphrodite images indicates that their representation in Roman domestic art can be read as an expression of domestic harmony that mirrored the emphasis on heterosexual union and political concord ushered in by Augustus and Livia. (shrink)

RésuméCet article propose d’aborder différemment la longue querelle de la génération, qui divise les ovistes, les spermistes et les partisans de l’épigénèse tout au long des 17e et 18e en Europe. Plutôt que d’en définir les acteurs à partir des publiants, à savoir les médecins ou naturalistes français, anglais et européens qui contredisent les théories ovistes ou spermistes de leurs pairs, je chercherai à poser quelques questions en marge de cette querelle : que reste-t-il d’une querelle une fois qu’elle semble (...) terminée? Comment une querelle est-elle perçue par les contemporains qui auraient un accès fragmentaire à la querelle? Quel est le rôle des querelles scientifiques dans l’éducation des médecins? Je traiterai ces questions en analysant quatre dissertations rédigées par les étudiants en médecine de la Royal Medical Society d’Édimbourg au 18e siècle. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article propose d’aborder différemment la longue querelle de la génération, qui divise les ovistes, les spermistes et les partisans de l’épigénèse tout au long des 17 e et 18 e en Europe. Plutôt que d’en définir les acteurs à partir des publiants, à savoir les médecins ou naturalistes français, anglais et européens qui contredisent les théories ovistes ou spermistes de leurs pairs, je chercherai à poser quelques questions en marge de cette querelle : que reste-t-il d’une querelle une (...) fois qu’elle semble terminée? Comment une querelle est-elle perçue par les contemporains qui auraient un accès fragmentaire à la querelle? Quel est le rôle des querelles scientifiques dans l’éducation des médecins? Je traiterai ces questions en analysant quatre dissertations rédigées par les étudiants en médecine de la _Royal Medical Society_ d’Édimbourg au 18 e siècle. (shrink)

In this article three viewpoints on the relation of body and language are discussed: the poststructuralist viewpoint of Judith Butler, the phenomenological viewpoint of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the postmodernist viewpoint of Jean-François Lyotard. The reason juxtaposing for these three accounts is twofold. First, the topic requires a combination of post-structuralist and phenomenological insights, and second, the accounts are supplementary. Butler's account raises questions that can be answered with the help of Merleau-Ponty's work. Lyotard's anthropology of the inhuman offers a perspective (...) of finitude that is missing in the other two. The aim of the article is to outline the necessary ingredients of an adequate conception of the speaking embodied subject. (shrink)

This article is about the ways in which representations of users’ bodies mediate in the designers’ configuration of anti-fertility vaccines and their future users. Anti-fertility vaccines are a novel and not yet available method to regulate fertility. The researchers involved claim that anti-fertility vaccines can be developed for both men and women. But in the material and political specificities of the research contexts, representations of male bodies as users have disappeared, and most research involves the development of a method to (...) be used by women. Anti-fertility vaccines therefore provide an opportunity to study when the sex of future users is deemed relevant by the researchers. This article explores how the fact that most anti-fertility vaccines are developed for female users can be explained without resorting to biological or cultural determinism. How much room for maneuver did the researchers have in defining the vaccines and their users? (shrink)

In the medical-technological practice of in vitro fertilization, it is increasingly the couple, rather than an individual patient, that is considered the unit of treatment. This article traces some mechanisms involved in the construction of medical interventions on female bodies as appropriate and effective therapeutic solutions to problems and diagnoses pertaining to male bodies. It traces the transformation of male infertility through shifts in localization and definition of the problem, concomitant reconceptualizations of the techniques involved, redistributions of properties, and specific (...) ways of constructing "success. " It is argued that both the notion of the couple as the patient in cases of male infertility and the claim that IVF techniques are appropriate solutions to this couple's problem simultaneously presuppose and legitimize medical interventions on women's bodies. This double movement is produced by leaving exactly the required material work of physical interventions—and, consequently, the uneven distribution of costs between the sexes—out of scientific accounts of these practices. (shrink)

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability (...) mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy has offered mixed opinions on the collaborative projects of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But although there has been much discussion of the political expediency of what Deleuze and Guattari do say about sexual difference, this article will outline what is absent fromAnti‐OedipusandA Thousand Plateaus. Specifically, I will argue that though Deleuze and Guattari offer a historical account of a range of power structures—most notably capitalism, but also despotism, fascism, and authoritarianism—they give no such account of the development (...) of patriarchy. Secondarily, this article will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of contemporary power relations could be improved by adding an accompanying analysis of the institution of patriarchy. After offering a detailed account of the technical vocabulary used by Deleuze and Guattari for the analysis of political institutions, I will argue that what their work requires is an account of how patriarchy is historically produced by an “abstract machine” of masculinity. This article will finish with some suggestions for the way that such an account could be given via an analysis of the abstract machine ofphallusization. (shrink)

This article is an investigation into the ways in which anatomico-medical bodies are produced through means of public mediation and spectacle technologies. The examples of `RealVideo surgery' (surgical operations broadcast live over the Web) and the early modern anatomy theaters, provide two instances where `the body' enframed by science is mediated via technology. Referencing the genealogical work of Michel Foucault, and through an analysis of the anatomy theaters and RealVideo surgery, this article attempts to show how such institutionally framed and (...) legitimizing science practices do not simply produce `the body', but are rather involved in multiply articulating different types of technoscientific bodies. At issue in such instances are the ways in which practices and habits of reading, decoding and recognizing bodies are being reconfigured in the utilization of such technologies as the Internet and Web, and the possible modes of critical analysis which may develop from within such instances. (shrink)

In 1977 Michel Foucault contemplated the idea of punishing rape only as a crime of violence, while in 1978 he argued that non-coercive sex between adults and minors should be decriminalized entirely. Feminists have consistently criticized these suggestions by Foucault. This paper argues that these feminist responses have failed to sufficiently understand the theoretical motivations behind Foucault's statements on sex-crime legislation reform, and will offer a new feminist appraisal of Foucault's suggestions.

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

Throughout history, women and men have been seen as "opposites" in various respects. Examples from the writings of political theorists illustrate this point, while Virginia Woolf is shown to have departed radically from the general tendency to dichotomize sexual difference. Further, this "need" to dichotomize sexual differences contributes to anxiety about and stigmatization of homosexuality. As the social salience of gender becomes reduced, it is to be expected that hostility to homosexuality will decline.

Sociologists studying gender have debated West and Zimmerman’s premise that “doing gender is unavoidable,” seeking to ascertain whether people can “undo” or only “redo” gender. While sociologists have been correct to focus on the interactional accomplishment of gender, they have neglected one of Garfinkel’s key insights about interaction: that people hold each other accountable to particular narratives. Neglecting the narrative aspect of doing—and undoing—gender impedes our ability to recognize processes of social change. Based on a qualitative study, we show how (...) the movement for LGBTQI acceptance within U.S. conservative Protestant churches works to make gender not “omnirelevant” by challenging conservative “complementarity” narratives that posit two complementary, opposite sexes as a commandment preceding the Ten Commandments in time and importance. We explore this movement’s ambivalent relationship with homonormativity, highlight three ways this movement resists projecting binary gender narratives into scripture, and examine how some in this movement see the pursuit of social justice as a Christian mandate. The efforts of LGBTQI conservative Christians exemplify how reshaping sex/gender/sexual narratives can create possibilities for undoing gender. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the role of dialectics for how social theory can take account of the problem of structure and agency, or, determination and freedom, in a critical and emancipatory way. I discuss the limits and possibilities of dialectical, and of anti-dialectical, criticisms of Hegelian dialectics. For this purpose, I look at Judith Butler’s discussion of dialectics and the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in her writings between 1987 ( Subjects of Desire ; republished 1999) and 1990 ( (...) Gender Trouble , republished 2000). Butler’s book Gender Trouble remains a key text of contemporary feminist theory. Butler formulates in this book a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex based on her claim that Beauvoir makes a distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that implies the notion of the sexed body as a pre-cultural entity. In her earlier writings, though, her evaluation of de Beauvoir had been much more positive. The change in Butler’s evaluation of de Beauvoir is part of her increasing rejection of dialectics: Butler rejected in Gender Trouble any form of Hegelian dialectics with reference to Luce Irigaray’s (1985) claim that it is ‘phallogocentric’. Although Butler subsequently returned to Hegelian themes, she seems never to have revoked this claim made in her most momentous work. I argue that this change in the theoretical structure of Butler’s argument weakens her critique of identity politics and I suggest reading Butler backwards, from Gender Trouble to the more open discussion of dialectics in her earlier texts. Drawing on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and other formulations of critical theory, I argue that the valid aspects of the critique of Hegelian dialectics can better be formulated as a dialectical critique of dialectics (Adorno; Butler, 1987a) than as a rejection of dialectics (Derrida; Irigaray; Butler, 1990). Retracing the genealogy of Butler’s argument will be a necessary backdrop, too, for evaluating her more recent comments on the Hegelian and ‘Frankfurt School’ traditions such as her Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in November 2002. Key Words: Theodor W. Adorno • agency • Judith Butler • Simone de Beauvoir • dialectics • emancipation • G. W. F. Hegel • sex/gender distinction • structure • subjectivity. (shrink)

The standard view about sex differences in sexual desire is that males are lusty and loose, while females are cool and coy. This is widely believed and is a core premise of some scientific programs like evolutionary psychology. But is it true? A mountain of evidence seems to support the standard view. Yet, this evidence is shot through with methodological and philosophical problems. Developments in the study of sexual desire suggest that some of these problems can be resolved, and when (...) they are, the standard view looks, at best, to be an exaggeration. (shrink)

Going through reproductive experiences (especially pregnancy and childbirth) in contemporary Western societies almost inevitably involves interaction with medical practitioners and various medical technologies in institutional context. This has important consequences for women as embodied subjects. A critical appraisal of these consequences—coming dominantly from feminist scholarship—relied on a problematic theory of both technology and the subject, which are in contemporary approaches no longer considered as given, coherent and well individualized wholes, but as complex constellations that are locally situated and that can (...) only be described empirically. In this study, we will be relying on the developments in phenomenological theory to reconceptualize women as technologically mediated embodied subjects and on the new paradigms in philosophy of technology and STS to reconstruct medical technology as situated—with the aim of reconceptualizing their relationship and exploring different possibilities for the mediating role of medical technology. It will be argued that technologization of female reproductive processes and alienating consequences for women are not necessary or directly interrelated. The role of technology varies from case to case and depends mainly on the nontechnological and relational aspects of institutional context, in which medical practitioners play a decisive role. (shrink)

Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove (...) limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine. (shrink)

Disability activists influenced by queer theory and advocates of “human enhancement” have each disputed the idea that what is “normal” is normatively significant, which currently plays a key role in the regulation of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Previously, I have argued that the only way to avoid the implication that parents have strong reasons to select children of one sex (most plausibly, female) over the other is to affirm the moral significance of sexually dimorphic human biological norms. After outlining the (...) logic that generates this conclusion, I investigate the extent to which it might also facilitate an alternative, progressive, opening up of the notion of the normal and of the criteria against which we should evaluate the relative merits of different forms of embodiment. This paper therefore investigates the implications of ideas derived from queer theory for the future of PGD and of PGD for the future of queerness. (shrink)

Standpoint theory makes the claim that there are social positions from which privileged perspectives on knowledge can be obtained. This article describes some arguments that stake out relatively narrow grounds for the relevance of standpoint theory to science and technology: namely, the oppressed are in a potentially good position to understand social relations. Although these grounds seem narrow and apparently irrelevant to the bulk of the activity of the sciences, recent work in science and technology studies indicates that social relations (...) are topics and resources as much in physics and mathematics as in primatology and psychology. So, if we accept the arguments for standpoint theory, the social picture of science should lead us to recognize the wide-ranging applicability of standpoint theory to science. (shrink)

Biomechanical engineering is marked by highly experimental efforts to craft mechanical devices that might one day alleviate the scarcity of transplantable organs in the USA. A pronounced desire among bioengineers involves melding humans with machines, bearing the promise of perfecting the natural yet messy flaws of the ‘natal’ body. Not all bodies are considered equal within this field, however. Visual renderings of heart devices — as an unusual sort of body prosthesis — foreground a specialized aesthetic, where the well-toned male (...) form defines an idealized generic of beauty and perfection. This analysis considers the moral underpinnings of the embodied aesthetic in specific reference to engineers’ efforts to fabricate implantable ‘artificial’ hearts. Of central concern are the sociomoral consequences of a standardized male beauty, set alongside the striking absence — or invisibility — of the female form within this rarified field of science. (shrink)

In conjunction with the growing feminist literature on pregnancy and visualization, this paper uses Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic to demonstrate how the effort to make the interior of the pregnant body visible in medical discourse was a crucial part of the development of the modern medical gaze. In doing so I develop two concurrent arguments. First, I argue that the pathological corpse of the Clinic can conceptually serve as a double for the pregnant body as it emerged in (...) modern medicine in the 20th century. At the same time I use the insights of the Clinic to illustrate changes in pregnancy from early modernity to the 20th century. In early modernity, the pregnant body was understood in terms of generation, as a tree that bears fruit; by the 19th century, the pregnant body was a machine that reproduced the species. This transition can be seen in the overlap of pathology and pregnancy in early modernity, an overlap that continued throughout the 19 century and is inadvertently reinforced through the practice of ultrasound. (shrink)

The ambiguity of August Strindberg’s approach to women has engendered varying interpretations, including accusations of misogyny. Among his allegedly misogynistic plays is the 1887 naturalistic masterpiece, The Father. Chronologically coinciding with the rise of the women’s movement in Sweden, The Father, rather than endorsing a misogynistic culture, allows for an alternative reading that contributes to the destabilisation of gender binaries and an understanding of gender identities as relational and performative. In its portrayal of a fierce struggle between a seemingly diabolic (...) wife and a supposedly tyrannical husband, the play delves deeply into the dynamics of gender and the subversion of normatively established orders. This article analyses Strindberg’s play in relation to Slavoj Žižek’s conception of the ‘femme fatale’ and Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity to illustrate how the play’s central characters performatively subvert the hegemonic norms by which they are constituted. (shrink)

Feminist scholarship highlighting the importance of sexuality suggests the utility of studying beliefs about gender and sexuality, but the public opinion literature on gender-related attitudes has paid almost no attention to this issue. This research report addresses U.S. men's and women's beliefs about several aspects of sexuality: gender differences in sexual drives, gender inequalities in sexual power, and sexual orientation. The results suggest that men and women tend to share similar beliefs about sexual drives and sexual orientation but disagree notably (...) on issues of sexual power. In addition, naturalization of sexuality is associated with greater acceptance of the sexual status quo, suggesting that naturalizing beliefs play a role in maintaining sexual inequality. (shrink)