This Sex Which Is Not TwoBy AZEEN GHORAYSHIChallenging the biological basis of sex and dispensing with the nature vs. nurture oppositionANNE Fausto-Sterling is professor of biology and gender studies at Brown University. In books like Myths of Gender and Sexing the Body, Fausto-Sterling pioneered the application of a feminist critique to biological studies of gender, adding to the growing literature on the social construction of scientific knowledge. We spoke about our current cultural moment and its movement away from binaries of sex and gender, and the ways in which science has shaped and sometimes lagged behind this conversation. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
How did your academic path lead you to studying the development of sex and gender?My original start was as an embryologist in developmental biology and not developmental psychology—that was a long path. But I basically got my start in college. I took an embryology—a development—course, and I saw a 1930s film of gastrulation. It basically blew me out of my chair. I said, This is what I’ve got to study. It was so phenomenal watching these cells flow in sheets and turn themselves into these three-dimensional topographies where they basically refolded themselves from a ball into a gut tube and then a mesoderm and then an epidermis and a neural tube and all of the things that went to form the basic body axis.
Basically I did embryology, and then I got involved in feminist theory. Then I wrote Myths of Gender, which was sort of aimed at trying to use my skills as a biologist to look at scientific claims about what women can and can’t do. I was also teaching embryology, and one of the things you teach in embryology is the development of the urogenital system, and that led me naturally into intersex and the work of John Money, because that’s part of how you lecture on the development of the urogenital system.
Only, at some point, with feminist theory in my head, I began to look at that story more critically. I began thinking about well, how does science actually work? It moved me away from being able to claim that science was sort of neutral and objective, because here I was finding with Myths of Gender, all these ways in which that clearly wasn’t true, in which culture became woven into the fabric of scientific knowledge.
And that was the same thing people were finding in other fields of women’s studies. Gender was neglected or treated in particular ways in science, gender was neglected or treated particular ways in history, and so on and so forth. The people who were doing feminist science studies, of whom I was one, began looking at gender as cultural knowledge that became part of scientific knowledge.
That was through the 1990s. There was a huge amount of intellectual ferment going on then in terms of the theory. I was interacting with Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, and all these people, half a dozen of whom I’m leaving out, who were doing feminist theory.
By that time my lab seemed to be winding down because I was just more engaged with the feminist theory, but I knew I had to write Sexing the Body because I had to show how it was that prevailing ideas about gender became unconsciously woven into biological knowledge.
In the process of doing that, I discovered Esther Thelen and dynamic systems theory, and I became very irritated at the constant reiteration of the nature versus nurture paradigm. I thought, Well, this is what has to happen to the study of gender and development.
Can you walk me through what exactly the dynamic systems model is?It has several pieces to it. First, it’s developmental. Bodies always build on what’s come before. So if you find that women and men in their 30s have a different disease pattern, you can’t just say it’s because one group is male and one group is female, you have to ask, How did that disease pattern come into being? One of the experimental tenets of dynamic systems is that you study patterns or difference as they emerge, so you start before there’s a difference and then you watch it emerge, so that you can begin to see what the components of it are. A dynamic systems approach always has to be developmental and longitudinal. A cross-sectional bit of data is just the starting point to ask where does it come from.
Another piece of it is that the body is always understood as being embedded in the world, and it’s a social and sensory world. You can never partition the body from the world it’s embedded in. One saying among people who do developmental systems theory is that everything is always 100 percent nature and 100 percent nurture at the same time. You can’t do the kinds of things that geneticists like to do where they say it’s 50 percent due to genes and 50 percent due to the environment—that’s a false way of looking at what the body is and how it works.