Ontology of Sex

Carrie Hull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415359795
• eBook ISBN: 9781134239924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Poststructuralism, particularly through the writings of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, has achieved remarkable success in challenging our belief in natural sex categories and instincts. Here, Carrie Hull endorses the progressive ideals of poststructuralism while demonstrating the superiority of a realist account of sex and sexuality. Embracing biological and cultural variability, Hull nonetheless shows that the sexed body is naturally structured and deeply meaningful.

Poststructuralist philosophers have argued that biological sex is a continuum rather than a binary, and that sex identity and drive are entirely performances of cultural norms rather than expressions of innate qualities. Hull draws parallels with Nelson Goodman, W.V.O. Quine, and B.F. Skinner to show that these poststructuralist theories are rooted in a nominalist, relativist, and behaviourist philosophy, and develops an alternative framework using arguments from contemporary and critical realism.

Employing colourful illustrations from biology, anthropology and psychology, Hull demonstrates the rich potential of realist philosophy, and concludes that it is philosophically and scientifically correct, on one hand, and politically advisable, on the other, to maintain a distinction - albeit attenuated - between sex and gender, and sexuality and behaviour.

1 Introduction

In the early 1990s, I participated in a humanities workshop at the University of Chicago. The workshop was divided into two halves: “Deconstructing the Categories” and “Reconstructing the Categories.” The reading list for the first half was replete with articles and books dismantling things such as race, mental illness, sex, and sexuality. The second half contained not a single entry. Our efforts to find readings to fill in these blanks seemed rather half-hearted, and in the end we came up empty-handed. While there have been several nascent attempts in the intervening decade, this void has still not been filled. This book provides a realist contribution to the reconstruction of categories in the wake of poststructuralism. I’m calling this project an ontology because I will address questions about the basic structure of reality from a realist perspective. The structures and categories I am primarily concerned with are those of sex and sexuality. This is in part because their deconstruction has garnered so much notoriety, but also because their consideration raises so many interesting issues. Thus, throughout the book, I will have things to say about other binary categories such as nature and culture, mood and behavior, meaning and language, and the natural and social sciences.

The deconstruction of biological sex and sexuality rests on the thesis that knowledge of the natural world is so mediated, and perhaps even constituted, by thought, language, and culture that it is impossible to determine where their imprint leaves off and nature begins. The term “nature” is increasingly frowned upon. Thus, the distinction between biological sex and social gender popularized by feminism in the 1960s and 1970s is challenged. “What constitutes anatomical sex,” Will Roscoe alleges, “has been shown by scholars in several fields to be as much a social construction as what has come to be termed gender.”¹ Examples of intersexuality and transgendered individuals are used as evidence that sex is not so twofold, and desire not so unidirectional, as previously believed. Many contemporary authors question the existence of natural sex categories or instincts. Anne Fausto-Sterling, one of the best-known scholars in the field, writes, “Since intersexuals quite literally embody both sexes they weaken claims about sexual difference.”² Sometimes it is suggested that sex is a continuum rather than a binary. Alice Dreger writes, “the sex spectrum is like the color spectrum; nature provides us with a range where one ‘type’ blends imperceptibly into the next.”³ In the wake of these arguments, we hear the occasional demand to recognize three, four, or more sexes.

Others propose that sex identity and drive are entirely performances of cultural scripts rather than expressions of innate qualities. Michel Foucault is perhaps the best-known proponent of this view:

[T]he notion of “sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle . . .⁴

Judith Butler echoes this assessment: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”⁵ Thus, we “perform” or “accomplish” gender, in the language that fills this literature.⁶ The political argument often following is that equality movements must confront their traditional acceptance of the sex-equals-nature and gender-equalsculture distinction. If sex is already gender, challenging the presupposition that biological sex categories and instincts are natural facts is the only way to further progress. “The possibilities for real societal transformations would be unlimited if the naturalness of gender [used here to include biological sex] could be questioned,” conclude Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna, early proponents of this position.⁷ Many activists have adopted slogans from this seemingly liberating academic movement.

These arguments deconstructing sex are couched in the larger projects known as poststructuralism and constructivism, projects that have implications for most if not all realms of knowledge.⁸ Poststructuralism and constructivism are as much critiques of earlier philosophies as they are their own unique positions. Understanding them thus requires understanding the philosophies against which they are a reaction: primarily, varieties of foundationalism. When we examine the intellectual record, as I will in the next chapter, we can better understand how the drive for absolute certainty quite naturally resulted in disillusionment.

Philosophers and scientists through the ages have sought to ground knowledge with the certainty typical of mathematical or logical proofs. The resulting first principles, be they Platonic, Cartesian, utilitarian, or physicalist, have then been used to defend philosophical and scientific systems as well as political platforms. It is this absoluteness that has bemused and frustrated poststructuralist and constructivist commentators, as they question both the possibility and desirability of foundational truth.

The poststructuralist response to foundationalism is well known, and I will use Michel Foucault and Judith Butler as its best representatives. The Anglo-American variant of the philosophy, typically going by the name of constructivism, is less familiar. However, this philosophy is extremely helpful because it explicitly and carefully addresses scientific and ontological issues. Nelson Goodman and W.V.O. Quine provide clear articulations of the relevant intellectual trends, and they do not hesitate to label the philosophies they advance. Goodman is an avowed nominalist, the ontology maintaining that kinds and categories are cultural constructions, and a “radical” relativist. Quine, on the other hand, is a self-declared “ontological relativist” and “linguistic behaviorist.” In Chapters 3 and 4, I will elucidate these philosophies. This may seem a complicated and perhaps unnecessary detour from our concern with sex and sexuality. However, I will also show that these same philosophies – nominalism, relativism, and behaviorism – are essential to the poststructuralist projects of Foucault and Butler, and equally crucial to many of the arguments suggesting that biological sex is a cultural construction.

I then turn to my proposed alternatives to this contemporary deconstruction of sex and sexuality. One of my key arguments is that there are ways of redeeming aspects of the philosophical tradition without resorting to its mathematical piety and rigidity. Throughout the second half of this book I explore a range of theorists united in their influence by twentieth-century antifoundationalism, yet retaining a tempered concept of objectivity. While it is inaccurate to say that these thinkers provide a happy middle ground between the originating “isms” and the contemporary “post-isms” (for I suspect critics will say they are closer to the former), they challenge the preconception that knowledge need be absolutely certain in order to be accorded any validity. Furthermore, these theorists propose that different standards of truth should be adopted for different disciplines. This is hardly a new position. Despite his reputation for espousing all sorts of “isms,” Aristotle was remarkable for his awareness that “discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter.”⁹ Whereas a high degree of certainty might be appropriate in astronomy or mathematics, the same standard is out of place in the study of biological organisms, on one hand, or social structures on the other. Very few things in the human world are determinate, and very few are chaotic. As Andrew Sayer notes:

If the only choice is between either regarding objects as having essences fixed for all time or conceptualising them as merely transient or even ephemeral . . . then most social phenomena, which lie in between these extremes, will be occluded.¹⁰

We need some tools for explaining those many phenomena in between.

Informed by this general alternative, in Chapter 5 I look at the more specific options presented by contemporary realism. Contemporary realism is engaged in a struggle with the notion of tentative, approximate truth. This realism is again inspired by Aristotle but modernized by current philosophers such as Richard Boyd, Rom Harré, Richard Miller, and Ruth Millikan. One of my primary tools will be “critical realism,” a school started by Roy Bhaskar and now joined by many others, including Caroline New, Andrew Sayer, Tony Lawson, Margaret Archer, and Ted Benton. As realists, we assert that the world is indeed structured. However, unlike realists of earlier centuries, today’s advocates do not seek an absolute a priori foundation for these structures. Rather, knowledge is tentatively grounded in our evolutionary experience of the world, particularly as this knowledge is espoused in the theories of the natural and social sciences.

Realism further suggests that the desire to avoid the charge of foundationalism or essentialism can result in a potential misunderstanding of biological organisms. Outside the occasionally deterministic world of genetics and evolutionary psychology, biologists are emphasizing complexity and after-the-fact explanation as opposed to simplicity and logically deducible prediction. What is absolutely key, I will argue, is our acceptance of the fact that biological means variable within limits. I will use these arguments to challenge the nominalist presuppositions of constructivism and poststructuralism, and the popular contention that biological sex is a continuum.

Lastly, in Chapter 6, I build on this framework to counter the relativistic and behavioristic tendencies of poststructuralism and constructivism. A single realist thesis unifies my response: to be related to and affected by language and culture is not necessarily to be derivative of language and culture. That our understanding of biological sex is influenced by culture, and that chemical contamination, hormones, and surgery can alter biological sex, does not mean that sex is entirely shaped by these forces. Some relations, I will contend, are primary, fundamental, or ontological. I will also assert that meaning is one such relationship using what I call the “emotional realism” of Adolf Portmann, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and Eugene Gendlin. Meaning gives the body a depth, a depth that counters the contemporary doctrine that human behavior, including sexual behavior, is learned strictly via the mimicry of cultural norms. I will argue that we have the capacity both to express innate, and to learn new, behaviors, sexual and otherwise.

This understanding of meaning leads me to propose that language has at least two components: the spoken and written aspect emphasized by poststructuralists and constructivists, and the nonlinguistic conceptual aspect often denied existence in contemporary scholarship. Millikan, Sheets-Johnstone, and Gendlin contend that meaningful words and sentences have a felt sense that maps onto objects in our environments. The relativity of words to other words cannot be used to divorce language from the world, because language is rooted in this nonlinguistic sense or meaning. Even spoken and written language has the potential to communicate information about our world and our own selves. While not everything we say is true, the possibility of truth must be a precondition if the proliferation of language is to make any sense at all. It is likely that particularly salient words and sentences, some of which surely include words about sex and sexuality, will reflect rather than construct reality.

What does all of this imply for the general issue of biological sex and sexuality? I propose that it is philosophically and scientifically correct, on the one hand, and politically advisable, on the other, to maintain a distinction between sex and gender, and sexuality and behavior. I will have very little to say about gender per se, as there are plenty of wonderful books on the topic already. But taking my cue from poststructuralism and constructivism, I concur that the sex categories have permeable boundaries, giving rise to individuals fitting comfortably into neither the male nor female slot. Sexuality is eminently more variable than sex.

However, I will emphasize that biology, as well as culture, plays a role in limiting these possible variations. I will also show how the perceivable form of the body grounds some of the sexual behaviors connecting similarly and dissimilarly sexed beings. As a consequence, the sexed body is naturally meaningful. If my alternative is left as such, there is little difference between it and positions adopted by cultural conservatives targeting sexual minorities. But I firmly resist the absolutist claim that there is one and only one natural sexuality. Since human beings are variable and moody, and have the capacity to learn new behaviors, this will be reflected in a multifaceted sex identity and desire.

I realize that there are realpolitik concerns that any mention of a natural body must lead down the slippery slope to biological determinism. Anne Fausto-Sterling argues that if we maintain the sex–gender distinction, we exclude the possibility of feminist critiques of biological science.¹¹ Indeed, it is partly for political reasons that poststructuralism and constructivism are so popular. This is problematic for a number of reasons. I do think that the investigations of feminism have to be broadly consistent with results in other fields. Tony Lawson makes the interesting observation that “political positions that have no grounding other than their perceived strategic advantages are likely to be challenged and called into question sooner or later. . .”¹² I, for one, do not want to build my feminism on theories that ignore or run contrary to the best work of the natural sciences.

Yet as I will also suggest, a reluctance to look at nature can result in the overlooking of evidence that could help to counter inequality. The leveling of the sex–gender distinction would dictate that feminist critiques of science are identical to critiques of social science, and I will show that there are important differences, at least some of the time, in these types of critiques. The leveling could also lead to the downplaying of concerns about environmental harm. For example, there is some evidence that chemical contamination may be increasing the frequency of intersexuality. Sometimes, it is true, the results of an engagement with science and biology might disappoint us. We might find, for example, that there are natural differences between human beings, as well as natural similarities. The results might also enlighten and liberate us. In general, realists argue that biology furnishes both potentials and limitations.

Ted Benton cautions that the a priori refusal by social scientists to examine our natural origins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The quest for certainty
• 3. Twentieth-century nominalism, relativism and behaviorism: Goodman, Quine, and Foucault
• 4. Poststructuralist and constructivist feminism
• 5. Contemporary realism’s challenge to nominalism
• 6. Structure and the evolution of sexual form and meaning
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index