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Believing Is Seeing: Biology As Ideology Author(S): Judith Lorber Source: Gender and Society, Vol Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology Author(s): Judith Lorber Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Dec., 1993), pp. 568-581 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189514 Accessed: 10/01/2009 17:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Gender and Society. http://www.jstor.org 1992 Cheryl Miller Lecture BELIEVING IS SEEING: Biology as Ideology JUDITH LORBER BrooklynCollege and GraduateSchool City Universityof New York Westernideology takes biology as the cause, and behaviorand social statusesas the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the "naturalness"of gendered behavior and gendered social statuses. Whatwe believe is what we see-two sexes producing two genders. Theprocess, however,goes the other way: gender constructssocial bodies to be differentand unequal.The content of the two sets of constructedsocial categories, 'females and males" and "womenand men," is so varied that their use in researchwithoutfurther specifica- tion rendersthe resultsspurious. Until the eighteenth century,Western philosophers and scientists thought that there was one sex and that women's internalgenitalia were the inverse of men's externalgenitalia: the womb andvagina were the penis and scrotum turnedinside out (Laqueur1990). CurrentWestern thinking sees women and men as so differentphysically as to sometimesseem two species. The bodies, which have been mapped inside and out for hundredsof years, have not changed.What has changedare the justifications for genderinequality. When the social position of all humanbeings was believed to be set by naturallaw or was considered God-given, biology was irrelevant;women and men of different classes all had their assigned places. When scientists began to question the divine basis of social order and replaced faith with empirical AUTHOR'S NOTE: Parts of this article are excerptedfromParadoxes of Gender(New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1994). Preparedwith researchsupportfrom PSC-CUNY668-518 and 669-259. REPRINTREQUESTS: JudithLorber, Department of Sociology, CUNYGraduate School, 33 West42nd Street,New York,NY 10036. GENDER& SOCIETY,Vol. 7 No. 4, December1993 568-581 ?1993 Sociologistsfor Women in Society 568 Lorber / BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY 569 knowledge, what they saw was that women were very differentfrom men in thatthey had wombs and menstruated.Such anatomicaldifferences destined them for an entirely different social life from men. In actuality,the basic bodily materialis the same for females and males, and except for procreative hormones and organs, female and male human beings have similar bodies (Naftolin and Butz 1981). Furthermore,as has been known since the middle of the nineteenth century, male and female genitalia develop from the same fetal tissue, and so infants can be born with ambiguousgenitalia (Money and Ehrhardt1972). When they are, biology is used quite arbitrarilyin sex assignment.Suzanne Kessler (1990) interviewed six medical specialists in pediatricintersexuality and found that whether an infant with XY chromosomes and anomalousgenitalia was categorized as a boy or a girl depended on the size of the penis-if a penis was very small, the child was categorizedas a girl, and sex-change surgerywas used to make an artificialvagina. In the late nineteenthcentury, the presence or absence of ovaries was the determiningcriterion of gender assignment for hermaphro- dites because a woman who could not procreatewas not a complete woman (Kessler 1990, 20). Yet in Westernsocieties, we see two discrete sexes and two distinguish- able genders because our society is built on two classes of people, "women" and "men."Once the gender category is given, the attributesof the person are also gendered:Whatever a "woman"is has to be "female";whatever a "man"is has to be "male."Analyzing the social processes that constructthe categories we call "female and male,""women and men," and "homosexual and heterosexual"uncovers the ideology and power differentialscongealed in these categories (Foucault 1978). This article will use two familiar areas of social life-sports and technological competence-to show how myriad physiological differences are transformedinto similar-appearing,gendered social bodies. My perspective goes beyond accepted feminist views that gender is a culturaloverlay that modifies physiological sex differences. That perspectiveassumes eitherthat thereare two fairly similarsexes distortedby social practices into two genders with purposefullydifferent characteristics or that there are two sexes whose essential differences are renderedunequal by social practices.I am arguingthat bodies differ in many ways physiolog- ically, but they are completely transformedby social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society, the most pervasiveof which are "female"and "male"and "women"and "men." Neither sex nor genderare purecategories. Combinations of incongruous genes, genitalia, and hormonal input are ignored in sex categorization,just as combinationsof incongruousphysiology, identity,sexuality, appearance, 570 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1993 and behavior are ignored in the social construction of gender statuses. Menstruation,lactation, and gestation do not demarcatewomen from men. Only some women arepregnant and then only some of the time;some women do not have a uterus or ovaries. Some women have stopped menstruating temporarily,others have reachedmenopause, and some have had hysterec- tomies. Some women breastfeedsome of the time, but some men lactate (Jaggar 1983, 165fn). Menstruation,lactation, and gestation are individual experiences of womanhood(Levesque-Lopman 1988), but not determinants of the social category "woman,"or even "female."Similarly, "men are not always sperm-producers,and in fact, not all sperm producersare men. A male-to-femaletranssexual, prior to surgery,can be socially a woman,though still potentially (or actually) capable of spermatogenesis"(Kessler and McKenna [1978] 1985, 2). When gender assignmentis contested in sports, where the categories of competitorsare rigidly divided into women and men, chromosomesare now used to determinein which categorythe athlete is to compete. However, an anomaly common enough to be found in several women at every major internationalsports competition are XY chromosomesthat have not produced male anatomyor physiology becauseof a genetic defect. Because these wom- en are women in every way significantfor sportscompetition, the prestigious InternationalAmateur Athletic Federationhas urged thatsex be determined by simple genitalinspection (Kolata 1992). Transsexualswould pass this test, but it took a lawsuit for Renee Richards,a male-to-femaletranssexual, to be able to play tournamenttennis as a woman, despite his male sex chromo- somes (Richards 1983). Oddly, neither basis for gender categorization- chromosomesnor genitalia-has anythingto do with sportsprowess (Birrell and Cole 1990). In the Olympics, in cases of chromosomalambiguity, women must un- dergo "a batteryof gynecological and physical exams to see if she is 'female enough' to compete. Men are not tested"(Carlson 1991, 26). The purposeis not to categorize women and men accurately,but to make sure men don't enter women's competitions,where, it is felt, they will have the advantage of size and strength.This practicesounds fair only because it is assumedthat all men are similarin size and strengthand differentfrom all women. Yet in Olympics boxing and wrestling matches, men are matched within weight classes. Some women might similarlysuccessfully compete with some men in many sports. Women did not run in marathonsuntil about twenty years ago. In twenty years of marathoncompetition, women have reduced their finish times by more thanone-and-one-half hours; they are expected to run as fast as men in that race by 1998 and might catch up with men's running Lorber / BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY 571 times in races of other lengths within the next 50 years because they are increasing their fastest speeds more rapidly than are men (Fausto-Sterling 1985, 213-18). The reliance on only two sex and gendercategories in the biological and social sciences is as epistemologically spuriousas the reliance on chromo- somal or genital tests to group athletes. Most research designs do not investigatewhether physical skills or physical abilitiesare really moreor less
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