Sexing the Body
Bodies: Somatic and Cultural
07/03/11 22:49 Filed in: Human Nature
In the very interesting book, Sexing the Body, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist at Brown University in Rhodes Island, examines how bodies are sexed, not just through physical aspects, but also through culture. She argues that “sexuality is a somatic fact created by a cultural effect. She intends this position to avoid the dualisms that plague modern societies and sciences, including biology. For example, some feminists and others have argued that the sex of a body is natural and the gender of a body is constructed by society. Fausto-Sterling is forging a path between these naturalism and social constructionism.
Her approach is clearly on the right track. Bodies exist, but they exist in cultural milieus that interpret them as these kinds of bodies and not those kinds of bodies. Yet, the very moment we begin to make distinctions between these and those, we also frame our discourse which means we exclude certain categories of bodies.
Let’s take something a little less controversial (for some of us, anyway): Pluto. Pluto is a rocky mass circling the sun. Once it was considered a planet, now it is not. My generation will probably always see Pluto as a planet, even if we try not to, while my daughter’s generation might see it as either a planet or not a planet, and the generation after that will never know it as a planet. Human bodies can be similar: we see them as one way or another, and that way of seeing the body can change.
Let’s not think about sexing, for a moment, and think simply about beauty. What makes a beautiful body? Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 which, by the standards of 2011, would be overweight. (See, for example, The Devil Wears Prada.) Yet, someone might contend, you’re talking about values there: beautiful or not. Science talks about facts.
This point is the key, though: facts do not exist in a vacuum for us human beings. They exist within a particular tradition or a particular culture. Most of us would consider the law of gravity a fact, but it’s not. The Newtonian understanding of gravity has been superseded by relativity theory. Fausto-Sterling’s book is trying to explain how human bodies exist in cultural milieus which give them their very identification as bodies, as particular types of bodies.
This point does not mean that there is no truth about the situation. If relativism were true, it wouldn’t matter what science said about gravity or about bodies. Yet, it does matter. We can have a whole discussion about relativism and the position laid out here, but that would extend far beyond this particular post. Relativism, however, is a red herring. The real issue centers around how culture (tradition) frames the way we see the world and what that means for human nature. We are interpretive creatures, which means, at a very basic level, our lives entail providing interpretations of the world and testing them out. It’s in the testing of them that we avoid relativism.
Her approach is clearly on the right track. Bodies exist, but they exist in cultural milieus that interpret them as these kinds of bodies and not those kinds of bodies. Yet, the very moment we begin to make distinctions between these and those, we also frame our discourse which means we exclude certain categories of bodies.
Let’s take something a little less controversial (for some of us, anyway): Pluto. Pluto is a rocky mass circling the sun. Once it was considered a planet, now it is not. My generation will probably always see Pluto as a planet, even if we try not to, while my daughter’s generation might see it as either a planet or not a planet, and the generation after that will never know it as a planet. Human bodies can be similar: we see them as one way or another, and that way of seeing the body can change.
Let’s not think about sexing, for a moment, and think simply about beauty. What makes a beautiful body? Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 which, by the standards of 2011, would be overweight. (See, for example, The Devil Wears Prada.) Yet, someone might contend, you’re talking about values there: beautiful or not. Science talks about facts.
This point is the key, though: facts do not exist in a vacuum for us human beings. They exist within a particular tradition or a particular culture. Most of us would consider the law of gravity a fact, but it’s not. The Newtonian understanding of gravity has been superseded by relativity theory. Fausto-Sterling’s book is trying to explain how human bodies exist in cultural milieus which give them their very identification as bodies, as particular types of bodies.
This point does not mean that there is no truth about the situation. If relativism were true, it wouldn’t matter what science said about gravity or about bodies. Yet, it does matter. We can have a whole discussion about relativism and the position laid out here, but that would extend far beyond this particular post. Relativism, however, is a red herring. The real issue centers around how culture (tradition) frames the way we see the world and what that means for human nature. We are interpretive creatures, which means, at a very basic level, our lives entail providing interpretations of the world and testing them out. It’s in the testing of them that we avoid relativism.
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