Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index

THE 'MATERIALIST' BENT IN CONTEMPORARY Brunella Casalini1

Abstract: Since the late eighties, feminist To those who have fought against literature has produced a great number of racism and has always seemed contributions on the body. It has forgotten, however, its more properly biological above all an enemy. dimension. Despite the desire to reconcile and essentialism have been, in fact, widely nature and nurture, this oversight has been encouraged by the fear of falling into some used in the past to mark the inferiority of forms of essentialism and the difficult dialogue groups characterized by certain physical between social sciences and natural sciences. In recent years, however, some authors have characteristics: women, blacks, disabled and tried to restore the body’s material dimension elderly persons. No wonder these groups have to center stage. This has happened because and have revived, in a lived their as a destiny to which they more or less hidden way, a biological had to surrender, relinquishing any hope of conception of race and sex. In this new context it has become more and more urgent to strive possible social change. for an alliance between the natural sciences, From the seventies to date, the the social sciences and able to confront the challenges of the current phase of weapon used against sexism and racism has biocapitalism and biocolonialism. A new been mainly social constructivism. When the feminist materialism seems necessary to contrast the present form of , a UNESCO General Conference, in November molecular reductionism that decomposes the 1978, unanimously voted in favor of a body into , manipulable and exploitable bits of informational sequences declaration stating that race is a social that are transformable into “biovalue”. As construct with no biological basis, this was Sarah Franklin maintains: “This instrumentalism has become inseparable from interpreted as the inevitable and permanent the capitalisation of life itself” (Franklin, 2000: decline in the use of the concept of “race”, at 189). least in the scientific field (cf. Haraway, 2004b; Keywords: biology, materialism, human and Fausto-Sterling, 2004). A few years earlier, non-human animals, race, sex, gender, feminism Anne Oakley, in her Sex, Gender and Society

(1972), had adopted the distinction between 1. Race and sex between biological "sex" and "gender" as proposed by the reductionism and social constructivism psychologists John Money and Anke Ehrardt

and the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, and the idea

1 Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Florence.

134 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index that gender should be considered as nothing (2010), the spread of neuro-sexism in more than a cultural interpretation of sex, and contemporary scientific and popular scientific that biology, compared to culture, plays a literature (see, for example, Pinker, 2002). For minimal role in determining the differences the Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron- between males and females (cf. Gremon, 2009; Cohen, for example, there is a female Warnke, 2011). Thus, biological empathetic brain and a male logical and predispositions can be overcome through systematic brain: “The female brain is education (cf. Oakley, 1972: 170). predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The In the patriarchal system, biological male brain is predominantly hard-wired for sex and social gender coincided and were understanding and building systems” (Baron- considered the same thing, so that natural Cohen, 2003: 1). The origin of this inferiority determined social inferiority. Now, differentiation, according to Baron-Cohen, according to social constructivism, the must be traced back to the fetal stage, to the separation of gender from sex leaves the sixth/seventh week of pregnancy. At this stage, natural status of sex undisputed: sex is an inert it is the level of testosterone that decides and unchangeable reality. At the same time, whether one will develop a male or a female though, the implications arising from brain. Baron-Cohen is explicit in emphasizing biological givenness are neutralized with the that these differences do not imply the importance attributed to the change in inferiority of one sex over the other, as has attitudes, mentality and values. been stated in the past. He even confesses that Nowadays, contemporary medicine he long hesitated to publish the results of his and biology, using a seemingly neutral and research for fear of not being considered objective language, are reproducing a politically correct (Baron-Cohen, 2003: 10- conception of sexual and racial differences that 11). However, as noted with some irony by seems to mark a dangerous return to the past, Cordelia Fine (2011: kindle edition), the idea with one key difference: if in the past the focus that women are more likely to put others at was on the phenotype, now it is on genotype. ease, and men to build and understand the The body, in fact, is decomposed into world, seems to evoke an all too traditional, molecules: genes and neurons are “at the helm predictable and stereotypical image of female of life itself" (Haraway, 1997: 161). psychology. Cordelia Fine has extensively In another recent work, Fatal documented, in her Delusions of Gender Invention. How Science, Politics and Big

135 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index

Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First unwanted consequences. It resulted, first of all, Century (2011), Dorothy Roberts documented in a further legitimization of old gender and the return to a new bio-politics of race, based racial stereotypes that have never really on cutting-edge research conducted in the field disappeared; second, in a shift of attention of genomics and biotecnology. Roberts away from the economic and social causes that denounced the danger arising from the are at the root of many of the current scientific attempt to link to genetic causes the inequalities in health between men and lower life expectancy of the American black women, colored and white peoples; and, last and its most common diseases2, but not least, in giving a new form of thereby diverting attention away from the legitimacy to a biological conception of race economic, social and, not least, health and and sex: a conception resting no longer on a environmental injustices that affect racial reference to anatomical features, but on the minorities in the US.3 As Anne Fausto-Sterling more hidden reality of hormones and/or (2004) explains, the trend reported by Roberts molecular , which is often spoken of as was to some extent also the perverse effect of if it were possible to trace their effects a move that initially seemed destined to independently from the interaction of the body produce inclusive and positive social effects: with the environment. namely, the introduction of clinical trials Countering this trend and following extended to women, ethnic and racial in Richard Lewontin's and Richard Levins's minorities.4 All this had some unexpected and footsteps (cf. Lewontin and Levins, 2007),

2 According to Dorothy Roberts, science is efficient than spending public money on social redefining race as a biological category inscribed in the intervention directed at changing lifestyles and genetic code. At the same time, based on the results of increasing the general level of education in order to genetic research, pharmaceutical companies are improve the health of particular groups (cf. A. Fausto- producing new drugs developed and marketed with a Sterling, 2004: 22). On this subject Fausto-Sterling's specific racial target in mind, such as the drug BilDil, works are all very important, see: Fausto-Sterling, approved in 2005 by the Food and Drug Administration 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2008. as a specific medicine for black people suffering from 4 In 1993 the US Congress decided to have a heart disease (cf. Roberts 2011: x-xi). sufficient number of women and ethnic minorities 3 Some genetic diseases, such as Hungtinton participate in the clinical trials sponsored by the disease, are unrelenting, and little or not at all influenced National Institute for Health. Its intention was to use the by environmental factors. In most cases, with regard to statistics for ascertaining whether certain medical other types of , however, the situation is treatments would work differently depending on gender, different. Many of the diseases that affect the highest ethnic or racial group. Behind this decision it is not mortality of the black population in the United States, difficult to recognize the implicit assumption that such as cancer, diabetes and hypertension, for example, gender, ethnicity and race can exert a fundamental have a much more complex etiology. Investing in influence through innate or genetically determined scientific research to find the genes that predispose a mechanisms (cf. Fausto-Sterling ,2004). person to such forms of diseases may be much less 136 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index

Stacy Alaimo suggests that we should rather lesions)” (Annandale 2007: kindle edition). In think of a "co-determination" of social and this new vision of the relationship between sex biological causes. Outlining a "new and gender - as pointed out by Fausto-Sterling materialist" , Alaimo – "Instead of asking how anatomy limits recalls that biology itself is in fact a socialized , one asks how the function shapes biology: racism is an environmental factor, as anatomy" (Fausto-Sterling 2007: kindle is class, which means that it is "socio-political edition): in the course of its life story, the body forces” that “generate landscapes that infiltrate engaged in the process of its becoming human bodies”: “the 'pancreas under changes its own biological characteristics. capitalism' and the 'proletarian lung' testify to the penetrating physiological effects of class (and racial) oppression, demostrating that the 2. The return to the body’s materiality biological and the social cannot be considered separate spheres” (Alaymo, 2010: 28). Faced with the return of new and Similarly, Anne Fausto-Sterling more subtle forms of determinism, social (2007) and Ellen Annandale (2007) invite us to constructivism is interpreted by some rethink the relationship between sex and contemporary authors as a kind of "flight from gender in light of an open and continuous nature" (Alaimo 2000), an escape from interaction of the biological and the social materiality that reveals a dangerous weakness. body, which allows for a greater fluidity of Social constructivism is now proposing a new gender identity and sexual identity. For insidious form of dualism in which the body Annandale, biology and culture once again get becomes a passive, irrelevant and immaterial tied together, but in a new way, so that "new facticity. According to Elizabeth Spelman identities, attitudes and behaviours reach (1990), constructivist feminism was the victim deeply into the body's interior and alter its of a sort of “somatophobia”: after centuries in traditional health profile. As health problems which women were associated with their that were once largely the province of males corporeal reality, the road to their begin to increasingly affect women (e.g., lung cancer), and vice versa (e.g., melanoma), the materiality of the biological body is modified and takes on characteristics more typical of the 'opposite sex' (the damaged lung, skin

137 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index emancipation seems to involve the removal of appears guilty of the irresponsible tendency to the biological dimension of the body.5 leave unquestioned the idea of a fixed and In the late eighties, the body returned unchanged natural essence. Some strongly in the reflection of , contemporary feminists are convinced that it is inspiring the production of many important pointless, if not counterproductive, to ignore works, for example the theoretical the biological body. While remaining within contributions by Moira Gatens, the paradigm of post-structuralist and post- and Elizabeth Grosz.6 Even then, however, modernist philosophy, they have tried to despite their attempt to overcome all forms of recuperate some kind of materialist vision and dualism and binarism, these feminist to work out an approach that allows a constant philosophers seemed – as Lynda Birke writes dialogue to take place between biology, – to linger on "the malleable surface of a sociology and feminist theory, in order to internally stable corporeality” (Birke, 2000a: overcome the dichotomies that characterized 137). Thus, the ghost of biology kept coming modernity, from that between nature and back and reappearing periodically (cf. Birke, nurture to that between humans and animals, 1999: 42). and at the same time to avoid biological This explains why, according to some reductionism. For these authors, it is necessary authors such as Nancy Tuana (cf. 2007: 57), to go beyond the dualism between nature and feminism does not appear entirely without culture, between the material and the blame before the re-emergence of the discursive, and between realism and social contemporaneous forms of sexual and racial constructivism. This is possible by imagining determinism. On the epistemological level, it nature, objects and non-living nature, not as

5 An important exception has been the Women's 6 In Volatile Bodies (1994), Grosz tried to outline Health Movement, as epitomised by the Boston an approach that would make possible a definitive Women's Health Collective's book, Our Bodies, subversion of the Cartesian dualism between mind and Ourselves (1973). Lynda Birke points out, however, body, interior and exterior. The model that the author some major limits of this movement: it strengthened the uses to illustrate a possible way of overcoming the idea of the centrality of ; it simplified the dichotomy between inner and outer, between thought language of medicine, but mostly by acritically and materiality, is the so-called “Mobius strip”: a three- repeating accounts and assumptions presented in male dimensional figure in the form of a figure-eight, in medical texts - so, for example, it continued to consider which it is impossible to clearly distinguish two sides common female experiences such as menstruation and and one can pass from what seems the inside to what menopause as deficiencies; “the very focus in women’s seems the outside without climbing over the edge, but health books on control over the body helped to simply by continuing to follow it. This figure shows, reinforce the separation of biological body from social Grosz explains: "the inflection of mind into body and self” (Birke 2000: 12). For a critique of the women’s body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of health movement and the epistemology of feminist self- twisting or inversion, one side becomes another" (Grosz help books of the seventies, such as Our Bodies, 1994: xiii). Ourselves, see also Haraway (1997, chapter 5). 138 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index static and ahistorical, but – in the footsteps of theory of by Elizabeth Grosz, the Latour and the actor-network theory – as recovery of Bergson's and Deleuze's vitalism agents themselves. Scientific activity cannot in Claire Colebrook and Rosi Braidotti, be explained on the basis of the separation Barad's "posthuman performativity”, between subject and object. It calls into Haraway's idea of natureculture”, the "new question a network of relationships in which realism of the body" recently proposed within each actor (human and non-human) plays an the disability studies to counter both the social active role. Nature and bodies materialize by model and the previous medical model, or emerging from an intricate web of interactions Stacy Alaimo's notion of transcorporeality. between actors and actants. So One of the basic ideas that emerge from the so writes: "Nature is agentic – it acts and those called new material feminism is given by a actions have consequences for both the human conception of becoming as an open, non- and nonhuman world" (cit. in Alaimo, purposeful, contingent process, characterized Hekman, 2008: 5). An example given in by a "becoming-with” – in the words of Donna Barad's “agential realism”, to illustrate the Haraway, who is one of the forerunners of this active character of matter as agent, is new trend in contemporary feminist thought. constituted by the technological, discursive Nothing is excluded from this becoming with, and material practice that nowadays allows us which sees interacting, and being transformed to see the image of the fetus in the womb. This in the interaction, human and non-human practice has contributed to the creation of the living creatures, landscapes and technologies. image of the “fetus as a self-contained object This vision considers symbiogenesis floating freely in the eye of science", an image the norm in both the biological and the social which strengthens at the same time the world. It offers important suggestions not only illusions of fetus's autonomy and of the for a new environmental policy and a different objectivity of the scientific gaze (cf. Barad, kind of globalization, attentive to the 1998: 110-114). relationship between environment, health and There are different positions that can social justice, but also to redefine the be considered an expression of so-called relationship between the social sciences and material feminism.7 See, for example, to name the natural sciences. This must be so because – but a few of them: the rediscovery of Darwin's as Haraway and Birke both insist – biology

7 For a general overview on these “new Frost (2010). See also: Amhed (2008) for some initial materialisms”, cf. Alaimo, Hekman (2010) and Coole, critical remarks. 139 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index refers both to the material and to a discipline, a knowledge, from geographic to DNA maps, is field of knowledge, which has a history, not an innocent activity: spatialization “can be historical origins and developments. If it is fetishised as a series of maps whose grids impossible to deny the material and its nontropically locate naturally bounded bodies productive character, this does not mean that a (land, people, resources and genes), inside discourse is possible that can reflect on it in its "absolute" dimensions such as space and time" immediacy. Thus, in Messengers of Sex, (Haraway, 1997: 136). The map fetish Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism, contributes to creating a world of things in inspired by Haraway, Celia Roberts writes that, themselves, where everything seems clear, rather than asking whether hormones may objective, indisputable, in which the abstract is explain the difference between the sexes - as mistaken for entities and tangible links. does Baron-Cohen -, one should ask what their Against the advance of a genetic "material-semiotic role [is] in combination fundamentalist rhetoric, according to Haraway, with - rather than in opposition to - one must develop a "critical and cross-cutting sociocultural factors such as language and multidisciplinary, multi species and social norms", or in other words, what their multicultural savvy" that is able to develop a role is in the materialization of actants of "critical hermeneutics of genetics" (cf. sexual difference (Roberts, 2007: 19). Haraway, 1997: 160). The removal of the processes that lead 3. The responsibility of tracking and to drawing boundaries often leads us to forget maintaining boundaries that the term “biology” indicates at the same time all life processes, the body, the material Classifying and tracking knowledge reality, and the knowledge that has been boundaries, starting from particular produced about them, and that, as knowledge, standpoints. The role of feminist science, as it is a historically determined cultural practice: taught by , is to prevent the “Biology – Haraway writes - is restlessly concealment of the construction and historical, all the way down. There is no border maintenance of borders, and, at the same time, where evolution ends and history begins, to ensure the possibility of their constant re- where genes stop and environment takes up, discussion and redefinition (cf. Haraway, where culture rules and nature submits, or vice 1997: 67). The construction of maps, which versa. Instead there are turtles all the way characterized the production of modern down” (Haraway, 2004a: 2). As a field of

140 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index knowledge biology was born in the late implosion of some of the fundamental nineteenth century, and with it originated also divisions and boundaries of the modern the division between the natural sciences and sciences (the boundaries between human and the social sciences. Based on this division, animal, between body and machine, and human behavior and social practices have between physical and non-physical). Thus, it become the object of the social sciences, while creates a space for contestation. the human body and the animal world have Haraway knows very well that become the subject of the natural sciences – feminists are generally suspicious of science biology, medicine, and anatomy. If and technology. The cyborg itself, born of biology is historical and there is no way to military technology, risks being considered an establish an ahistorical boundary between expression of an imperialist and patriarchal nature and culture, it is very important to pay culture. Nevertheless she offers an alternative attention to the operations, metaphors, reading: in questioning the boundaries, and in analogies, classifications, narratives and recalling the responsibility of their images with which facts are transformed into construction, she sees the cyborg as natural products and the foundation of cultural prefiguring a world where there will be no practices is raised. In particular, we must pay more fear of the coexistence between humans, attention to the scientific construction of machines and animals, where one will settle historically situated discourses on race, on the for partial points of view, and will opt for a dichotomy between sex and gender and on the post-gender, post-race and post-speciest boundary between human animals and non- identity. The contemporaneous and human animals. Through taxonomies and interrelated processes of creating boundaries classifications natural sciences have between races, species and genders, in fact, constructed boundaries. The activity of were, according to Haraway, “dangerous and drawing borders even in the natural sciences rickety machines for guarding the chief has political implications: for it delimits areas fictions and powers of European civil of domain. The figure of the cyborg, "a manhood” (Haraway, 1997, 30). In her most cybernetic , a hybrid of machine and recent work Haraway highlights how human organism, a creature of social reality as well as beings emerged in an evolutionary history that a creature of fiction", evoked in the famous has seen a significant role of other "companion Cyborg Manifesto (cf. Haraway, 1991), is species". promising to the extent that it leads to an “The discursive tie among the

141 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the to the relationship between the animal world animal – all reduced to type, all Others to and the biological knowledge that historically rational man, and all essential to his bright was often produced precisely through constitution – is at the heart of racism and, laboratory experiments conducted on guinea lethally, flourishes in the entrails of humanism. pigs. [...] Species reeks of race and sex; and where Historically associated with their and when species meet, that heritage must be biology and with the care of dependent untied and better knots of companion species people's bodily needs, often apostrophized attempted within and across differences. with epithets taken from the animal world, Loosening the grip of analogies that issue the women have not only seen a source of collapse of all of man's others into ine another, emancipation in the removal of the biological companion species must instead learn to live dimension of their body and its implications, intersectionally” (Haraway, 2008: 18). but have also tried to separate themselves from the animal world. Thus the reflection on the 4. Human and nonhuman animals relationship between human and non-human animals remained alien to feminist theory until One of the consequences deriving very recently9. Uncritically accepting the from an acritical and optimistic acceptance of position of the dominant culture, feminism has social constructivism, according to biologist taken for granted that not social sciences but Lynda Birke, has been to implicitly reaffirm natural sciences should study the animal the validity of the distinction between what world. The feminist cultures have also counts as sociocultural and what should be assumed the validity of dualism between sex considered as natural. “As a result – she writes and gender, bringing back gender to culture – “biology” all too often comes implicitly to and sex to nature – as we have seen. This has mean an underlying bedrock, inaccessibile to made it impossible to read the interconnections analysis. It is just as often equated with between gender, race and species, or between unchanging essence” (Birke, 2000a: 587).8 A sexism, racism and speciesism. To understand further consequence has been not paying these linkages it is necessary to "explore the attention to the nonhuman animals' world, and biological" and ask questions that dig up the

8 On this theme, see also: Birke, 2010: 337-349. produced a number of interesting works; see, for For a general assessment of Birke's position, see: example, J. Donovan e C. J. Adams, 2007 and S. Asberg, 2010: 413-423. Laugier, 2012. 9 The “animal turn” in feminist thought has 142 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index deep reasons for the division of labor between the effect of these circular narratives (cf. social sciences and natural sciences, or the Oudshoorn, 1994 and Roberts, 2007). Since reasons why the social sciences have taken the beginning of the twentieth century, when over the study of human behavior, leaving to they were discovered, scientists have tended to biology the study of animal behavior. One speak and write as if they could be divided into needs to ask why the natural is understood as female hormones and male hormones. In fact, that which refers to a fixed, ahistorical and Birke explains, each one of us produces all immutable reality. Studying the animal world kinds of hormones, although in different with the exclusive means of biology means amounts (Birke, 2000a: 40). In some animals, placing animals out of history and considering on the other hand, sex change or "gender them as "biological automata" (Birke, 2010: bending" is quite common": “Fishes, for 340). example, can change sex depending on One of the consequences resulting environmental and social conditions, while the from the inability to distinguish between sex of the turtle depends on the temperature at nature and culture in a renewed materialistic which the egg is held before birth. In short, the vision is the possibility for contemporary binary assumption, or the assumption of the feminism to overcome speciesism, to existence of only two sexes in nature, is a recognize the continuity between human and projection of the human and cultural habits non-human animals and, last but not least, to and rests on a very limited type of animals historicize biology itself. Biology is a science (especially those more like us, the mammals)" that has had its historical evolution, which has (Birke, 2000b: 592). also been used to support racist, speciesist, The phenomenon of hormonal sexist and hetero-sexist policies. One of the alterations produced by chemical agents contributions of feminist biology has been to present in the atmosphere (cf. Birke, 2000b: highlight the presence of binary concepts of 587-589) was interpreted within this binary gender in natural sciences. Science fiction scheme. Both scientific literature and, even abounds in references to the gender dichotomy more, popular literature have highlighted the by which life processes are read, as if the deviating effects that chemicals produce on division between male and female regarded gender norms, denouncing in particular the even the molecular world. The case that has danger they pose to masculinity. Basically, garnered more attention by feminist scholars is Birke writes: "The differences between that of hormones, which is also an example of different bodies are minimized, while

143 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index

'deviations' are emphasized". This is not of devoted to homosexuality in the animal world, course to deny the effects that environmental entitled Against Nature? An exhibition on toxins have on human bodies and on the animal homosexuality. Through photos, reproductive system, but to put what is going samples, texts and models it showed a small on in a more complex picture, which makes it selection of the more than one thousand five possible to take into account the fact that "the hundred animals displaying homosexual biological body is not hermetically closed to behavior, studied and documented by now the physical-chemical (including the presence numerous scientific papers.10 All these cases of potentially toxic chemicals) in which it testify the far from normative and normal lives, nor to the culture in which small changes nature of heterosexuality, and the fact that in the body make sense" (Birke, 2000b: 597). animals, like humans, have genders in addition We need a biological knowledge able to think to sexes. The goal of these studies, however, is critically about the categories with which it not so much to "naturalize" homosexuality as works. We need approaches to biology that it is to show the plot of "natureculture". The escape determinism and allow us to look at the variety found in animal sexual behavior is body, now broken down into molecules, in its such, according to Baghemil (2010) and Hird creative and dynamic complexity, in its ability (2004), that we should talk of cultural to transform and change with what is going on variations. For these authors, it makes no sense inside and outside of itself. Having abandoned to continue to think that only human beings are the old model of biology, feminism should cultural animals: the pursuit of pleasure could work to build new models able to counteract be a dynamic force also in the culture of some old prejudices. So, if heterosexism has been species (cf. Alaimo, 2010). Indeed, nature and read as a norm inscribed in nature, and culture seem to be inseparable even in the homosexuality has long been considered animal world, an animal world that escapes the unnatural, it is important to illustrate and vision of a static world, mechanically explain the countless examples that rather determined by instincts, to which it had been reveal nature as "queer”. condemned by the myth of “human In 2006, the Naturhistorik Museum in exceptionalism". Oslo, Norway, inaugurated the first exhibition

10 See: http://www.nhm.uio.no/besok- Bagemihl 1999; Roughgardern, 2004; Hird, 2004; oss/utstillinger/skiftende/againstnature/index-eng.html. Alaimo, 2010. On the queer character of the animal world, see: 144 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index

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