Believing Is Seeing: Biology As Ideology Author(S): Judith Lorber Source: Gender and Society, Vol

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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 women 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 chromosomes (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 common in women and men (Epstein 1988). They startout with two social categories ("women," "men"),assume they are biologically different ("female," "male"),look for similarities among them and differences between them, and attributewhat they have found for the social categories to sex differences (Gelman, Collman, and Maccoby 1986). These designs rarely question the categorizationof their subjects into two and only two groups, even though they often find more significant within-groupdifferences than between-groupdifferences (Hyde 1990). The social constructionperspective on sex and gender suggests that instead of startingwith the two presumed dichotomies in each category-female, male; woman, man-it might be more useful in gender studies to group patternsof behavior and only then look for identifying markersof the people likely to enact such behaviors.

WHAT SPORTS ILLUSTRATE

Competitive sports have become, for boys and men, as players and as spectators,a way of constructinga masculine identity, a legitimated outlet for violence and aggression, and an avenue for upwardmobility (Dunning 1986; Kemper 1990, 167-206; Messner 1992). For men in Westernsocieties, physical competence is an importantmarker of masculinity (Fine 1987; Glassner 1992; Majors 1990). In professionaland collegiate sports, physiological differences are invoked to justify women's secondarystatus, despite the clear evidence that gender status overrides physiological capabilities. Assumptions about women's physiology have influenced rules of competition; subsequentsports performances then validatehow women and men are treatedin sportscompetitions. Gymnasticequipment is geared to slim, wiry, prepubescentgirls and not to mature women; conversely, men's gymnastic equipment is tailored for muscular,mature men, not slim, wiry prepubescentboys. Boys could compete with girls, but are not allowed to; women gymnasts are left out entirely. Girl gymnasts are just that-little girls who will be disqualified as soon as they grow up (Vecsey 1990). Men gymnasts have men's status. In women's 572 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1993 basketball,the size of the ball and rules for handlingthe ball change the style of play to "a slower, less intense, and less exciting modificationof the 'reg- ular'or men's game"(Watson 1987,441). In the 1992 WinterOlympics, men figure skaterswere requiredto complete threetriple jumps in their required program;women figure skaterswere forbiddento do more than one. These rules penalized artistic men skaters and athletic women skaters (Janofsky 1992). For the most part,Western sports are builton physicallytrained men's bodies: Speed,size, and strength seem to be theessence of sports.Women are naturally inferiorat "sports"so conceived. Butif womenhad been the historically dominant sex, ourconcept of sport wouldno doubthave evolved differently. Competitions emphasizing flexibil- ity,balance, strength, timing, and small size might dominate Sunday afternoon televisionand offer salaries in six figures.(English 1982, 266, emphasisin original) Organizedsports are big businesses and,thus, who has access and at what level is a distributiveor equity issue. The overall statusof women and men athletes is an economic, political, and ideological issue that has less to do with individualphysiological capabilitiesthan with their culturaland social meaning and who defines and profits from them (Messner and Sabo 1990; Slatton and Birrell 1984). Twenty years after the passage of Title IX of the U.S. Civil RightsAct, which forbadegender inequality in any school receiv- ing federal funds, the goal for collegiate sports in the next five years is 60 percent men, 40 percent women in sports participation,scholarships, and funding (Moran 1992). How access anddistribution of rewards(prestigious and financial) are jus- tified is an ideological, even moral, issue (Birrell 1988, 473-76; Hargreaves 1982). One way is thatmen athletesare glorifiedand women athletesignored in the mass media. Messner and his colleagues found that in 1989, in TV sports news in the United States, men's sports got 92 percent of the coverage and women's sports 5 percent, with the rest mixed or gender-neutral (Messner, Duncan, and Jensen 1993). In 1990, in four of the top-selling newspapersin the United States, stories on men's sportsoutnumbered those on women's sports23 to 1. Messner andhis colleagues also found an implicit hierarchyin naming, with women athletes most likely to be called by first names, followed by Black men athletes, and only white men athletes rou- tinely referredto by their last names. Similarly,women's collegiate sports teams are namedor markedin ways thatsymbolically feminize and trivialize them-the men's teamis called Tigers,the women'sKittens (Eitzen and Baca Zinn 1989). Lorber / BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY 573

Assumptions about men's and women's bodies and their capacities are craftedin ways thatmake unequalaccess and distributionof rewardsaccept- able (Hudson 1978; Messner 1988). Media images of modern men athletes glorify their strength and power, even their violence (Hargreaves 1986). Media images of modern women athletes tend to focus on feminine beauty and grace (so they are not really athletes)or on theirthin, small, wiry androg- ynous bodies (so they are not really women). In coverage of the Olympics, loving and detailedattention is paid to pixie-likegymnasts; special and extendedcoverage is givento gracefuland dazzling figure skaters; the camera painstakinglyrecords the fluid movements of swimmersand divers. And then, in a blindingflash of fragmentedimages, viewers see a few minutesof volleyball,basketball, speed skating,track and field, and alpineskiing, as televisiongives its nod to the mereexistence of theseevents. (Boutilier and SanGiovanni1983, 190) Extraordinaryfeats by women athletes who were presentedas matureadults might force sports organizers and audiences to rethinktheir stereotypes of women's capabilities, the way elves, mermaids, and ice queens do not. Sports,therefore, construct men's bodies to be powerful;women's bodies to be sexual. As Connell says, The meaningsin the bodilysense of masculinityconcern, above all else, the superiorityof mento women,and the exaltation of hegemonicmasculinity over othergroups of menwhich is essentialfor the domination of women.(1987, 85) In the late 1970s, as women enteredmore and more athleticcompetitions, supposedly good scientific studies showed that women who exercised in- tensely would cease menstruatingbecause they would not have enough body fat to sustain ovulation (Brozan 1978). When one set of researchersdid a yearlong study that compared 66 women-21 who were training for a marathon,22 who ran more tharian hour a week, and 23 who did less than an hour of aerobicexercise a week-they discovered thatonly 20 percent of the women in any of these groups had "normal"menstrual cycles every month (Prior et al. 1990). The dangers of intensive training for women's fertilitytherefore were exaggeratedas women began to compete successfully in arenasformerly closed to them. Given the association of sports with masculinity in the United States, women athletes have to manage a contradictorystatus. One study of women college basketball players found that although they "did athlete" on the court-"pushing, shoving, fouling, hard running, fast breaks, defense, ob- scenities and sweat" (Watson 1987, 441), they "did woman" off the court, using the locker room as their staging area: 574 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1993

While it typicallytook fifteen minutesto preparefor the game, it took approximatelyfifteen minutes after the game to showerand remove the sweat of an athlete,and it tookanother thirty minutes to dress,apply make-up and stylehair. It did not seem to matterwhether the players were going out into the publicor gettingon a van for a long ridehome. Average dressing time and ritualsdid notchange. (Watson 1987, 443) Anotherway women manage these statusdilemmas is to redefine the activ- ity or its result as feminine or womanly (Mangan and Park 1987). Thus women bodybuildersclaim that "flex appealis sex appeal"(Duff and Hong 1984, 378). Such a redefinitionof women'sphysicality affirms the ideological subtext of sports that physical strength is men's prerogative and justifies men's physical and sexual dominationof women (Hargreaves1986; Messner 1992, 164-72; Olson 1990; Theberge 1987; Willis 1982). When women demon- stratephysical strength,they are labeled unfeminine: It's threateningto one's takeability,one's rapeability, one's femininity,to be strongand physically self-possessed. To be ableto resistrape, not to commu- nicaterapeability with one's body, to holdone's body for uses andmeanings otherthan that can transform what being a womanmeans. (MacKinnon 1987, 122,emphasis in original) Resistance to that transformation,ironically, was evident in the policies of American women physical educationprofessionals throughoutmost of the twentiethcentury. They minimizedexertion, maximized a feminine appearance and manner,and left organizedsports competition to men (Birrell 1988, 461-62; Mangan and Park 1987).

DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS

As sports construct gendered bodies, technology constructs gendered skills. Meta-analysisof studies of gender differences in spatial and mathe- matical ability have found that men have a large advantage in ability to mentally rotate an image, a moderateadvantage in a visual perception of horizontalityand verticalityand in mathematicalperformance, and a small advantagein ability to pick a figure out of a field (Hyde 1990). It could be arguedthat these advantagesexplain why, within the shortspace of time that computershave become ubiquitousin offices, schools, and homes, work on them and with them has become gendered:Men create,program, and market computers, make war and produce science and art with them; women microwirethem in computerfactories and enter data in computerizedoffices; Lorber / BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY 575 boys play games, socialize, and commit crimes with computers;girls are rarelyseen in computerclubs, camps, andclassrooms. But women were hired as computerprogrammers in the 1940s because thework seemed to resemblesimple clerical tasks. In fact,however, program- mingdemanded complex skills in abstractlogic, mathematics,electrical cir- cuitry,and machinery, all of which... womenused to performin theirwork. Onceprogramming was recognizedas "intellectuallydemanding," it became attractiveto men.(Donato 1990, 170) A woman mathematicianand pioneer in data processing, Grace M. Hopper, was famous for her workon programminglanguage (Perry and Greber1990, 86). By the 1960s, programmingwas split into more and less skilled special- ties, and the entry of women into the computerfield in the 1970s and 1980s was confined to the lower-paidspecialties. At each stage, employers invoked women's and men's purportedlynatural capabilities for the jobs for which they were hired (Cockbur 1983, 1985; Donato 1990; Hartmann 1987; Hartmann,Kraut, and Tilly 1986; Kramerand Lehman 1990; Wright et al. 1987; Zimmerman1983). It is the taken-for-grantednessof such everyday gendered behavior that gives credence to the belief that the widespreaddifferences in what women and men do must come from biology. To take one ordinarilyunremarked scenario: In modern societies, if a man and woman who are a couple are in a car together,he is much more likely to take the wheel than she is, even if she is the more competentdriver. Molly Haskell calls this taken-for-granted phenomenon "the dirty little secret of marriage:the husband-lousy-driver syndrome"(1989, 26). Men drive cars whetherthey are good drivers or not because men and machines are a "natural"combination (Scharff 1991). But the ability to drive gives one mobility; it is a form of social power. In the early days of the automobile,feminists co-opted the symbolism of mobility as emancipation:"Donning goggles and dusters,wielding tire irons and tool kits, taking the wheel, they announced their intention to move beyond the bounds of women's place" (Scharff 1991, 68). Driving enabled them to campaign for women's suffrage in parts of the United States not served by public transportation,and they effectively used motorcades and speakingfrom cars as campaigntactics (Scharff 1991, 67-88). SandraGilbert also notes that duringWorld War I, women's ability to drive was physically, mentally, and even sensually liberating: For nursesand ambulance drivers, women doctors and women messengers, thephenomenon of modembattle was very different from that experienced by entrenchedcombatants. Finally given a chanceto takethe wheel, these post- Victoriangirls raced motorcars along foreign roads like adventurers exploring 576 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1993

new lands, while their brothersdug deeper into the mud of France.... Re- trievingthe wounded and the dead from deadly positions, these once-decorous daughtershad at lastbeen allowed to provetheir valor, and they swooped over thewastelands of thewar with the energetic love of WagnerianValkyries, their mobilityalone transportingcountless immobilized heroes to safe havens. (1983,438-39) Not incidentally,women in the United States and England got the vote for their war efforts in WorldWar I.

SOCIAL BODIES AND THE BATHROOM PROBLEM

People of the same racial ethnic group and social class are roughly the same size and shape-but there are many varieties of bodies. People have differentgenitalia, different secondary sex characteristics,different contri- butions to procreation,different orgasmic experiences, differentpatterns of illness and aging. Each of us experiences our bodies differently, and these experienceschange as we grow, age, sicken, and die. The bodies of pregnant and nonpregnantwomen, short and tall people, those with intact and func- tioning limbs and those whose bodies are physically challenged are all different.But the salientcategories of a society groupthese attributesin ways that ride roughshodover individualexperiences and more meaningful clus- ters of people. I am not saying thatphysical differencesbetween male and female bodies don't exist, but that these differences are socially meaningless until social practices transformthem into social facts. West Point Military Academy's curriculumis designed to produceleaders, and physical competence is used as a significant measure of leadershipability (Yoder 1989). When women were acceptedas West Point cadets, it became clear thatthe tests of physical competence, such as rapidlyscaling an eight-foot wall, had been constructed for male physiques-pulling oneself up and over using upper-bodystrength. Rather than devise tests of physical competence for women, West Point providedboosters that mostly women used-but thatlost them test points- in the case of the wall, a platform.Finally, the women themselves figuredout how to use their bodies successfully. JaniceYoder describes this situation: I was observingthis obstacle one day,when a womanapproached the wallin the old prescribedway, got herfingertips grip, and did an unusualthing: she walkedher dangling legs up the wall until she was in a positionwhere both her handsand feet were atopthe wall. She thensimply pulled up her sagging Lorber/ BIOLOGYAS IDEOLOGY 577

bottomand went over. She solved the problemby capitalizingon one of women'sphysical assets: lower-body strength. (1989, 530) In short, if West Point is going to measureleadership capability by physical strength,women's pelvises will do just as well as men's shoulders. The social transformationof female and male physiology into a condition of inequalityis well illustratedby the bathroomproblem. Most buildings that have gender-segregatedbathrooms have an equal numberfor women and for men. Wherethere are crowds, thereare always long lines in frontof women's bathroomsbut rarelyin front of men's bathrooms.The cultural,physiological, anddemographic combinations of clothing, frequencyof urination,menstruation,and child care add up to generally greaterbathroom use by women than men. Thus, althoughan equal numberof bathroomsseems fair, equity would mean more women's bathroomsor allowing women to use men's bathroomsfor a certain amountof time (Molotch 1988). The bathroomproblem is the outcome of the way gendered bodies are differentially evaluated in Western cultures: Men's social bodies are the measureof what is "human."Gray's Anatomy, in use for 100 years, well into the twentieth century,presented the humanbody as male. The female body was shown only where it differed from the male (Laqueur 1990, 166-67). Denise Riley says that if we envisage women's bodies, men's bodies, and human bodies "as a triangleof identifications,then it is rarelyan equilateral trianglein which both sexes are pitched at matchingdistances from the apex of the human" (1988, 197). Catharine MacKinnon also contends that in Westernsociety, universal"humanness" is male because virtuallyevery quality that distinguishes men from women is alreadyaffirma- tivelycompensated in thissociety. Men's physiology defines most sports, their needsdefine auto and health insurance coverage, their socially defined biog- raphiesdefine workplaceexpectations and successfulcareer patterns, their perspectivesand concerns define quality in scholarship,their experiences and obsessionsdefine merit, their objectification of life definesart, their military servicedefines citizenship, their presence defines family, their inability to get alongwith each other-their wars and rulerships-define history, their image definesgod, andtheir genitals define sex. Foreach of theirdifferences from women,what amounts to an affirmativeaction plan is in effect, otherwise knownas thestructure and values of Americansociety. (1987, 36)

THE PARADOX OF HUMAN NATURE

Genderedpeople do not emerge from physiology or hormones but from the exigencies of the social order,mostly, fromthe need for a reliabledivision 578 GENDER & SOCIETY / December 1993 of the work of food productionand the social (not physical) reproductionof new members.The moralimperatives of religionand cultural representations reinforce the boundary lines among genders and ensure that what is de- manded,what is permitted,and what is tabooedfor the people in each gender is well-known and followed by most. Political power, control of scarce resources,and, if necessary,violence upholdthe genderedsocial orderin the face of resistanceand rebellion.Most people, however, voluntarilygo along with their society's prescriptionsfor those of theirgender statusbecause the norms and expectations get built into their sense of worth and identity as a certain kind of humanbeing and because they believe their society's way is the naturalway. These beliefs emerge from the imagery that pervades the way we think,the way we see and hearand speak, the way we fantasize,and the way we feel. There is no core or bedrockhuman nature below these end- lessly looping processes of the social productionof sex and gender,self and other,identity and psyche, each of which is a "complexcultural construction" (Butler 1990, 36). The paradoxof "humannature" is that it is always a man- ifestation of cultural meanings, social relationships,and power politics- "not biology, but culture,becomes destiny"(Butler 1990, 8). Feministinquiry has long questionedthe conventionalcategories of social science, but much of the currentwork in feminist sociology has not gone beyond adding the universal category "women"to the universal category "men."Our current debates over the global assumptionsof only two categories and the insistence that they must be nuancedto include race and class are steps in the direction I would like to see feminist researchgo, but race and class are also global categories (Collins 1990; Spelman 1988). Decon- structingsex, sexuality,and genderreveals manypossible categoriesembed- ded in the social experiencesand social practicesof whatDorothy Smith calls the "everyday/everynightworld" (1990, 31-57). These emergentcategories group some people togetherfor comparisonwith other people withoutprior assumptionsabout who is like whom.Categories can be brokenup andpeople regroupeddifferently into new categories for comparison.This process of discovering categoriesfrom similaritiesand differencesin people's behavior or responses can be more meaningfulfor feminist researchthan discovering similaritiesand differencesbetween "females" and "males" or "women"and "men"because the social constructionof the conventional sex and gender categoriesalready assumes differences between them and similaritiesamong them. When we rely only on the conventionalcategories of sex and gender, we end up finding what we looked for-we see what we believe, whetherit is that "females"and "males"are essentially differentor that "women"and "men"are essentially the same. Lorber / BIOLOGY AS IDEOLOGY 579

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Judith Lorber is Professor of Sociology at BrooklynCollege and The GraduateSchool, City Universityof New YorkShe is the authorof WomenPhysicians: Careers, Status and Power (New York:Tavistock, 1984) and co-editor,with Susan A. Farrell, of The Social Constructionof Gender (Sage, 1991).