Queer Feminist Science Studies

A Reader

Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, Angela Willey, Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, Angela Willey

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295742595
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women's, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here "queer"—or denaturalize and make strange—ideas that are taken for granted in both areas of study. Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, contributors foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects that attend to shifting and uneven operations of power, privilege, and dispossession, while also highlighting potentialities for uncertainty, subversion, transformation, and play. Theoretically and rhetorically powerful, these essays also take seriously the materiality of "natural" objects and phenomena: bones, voles, chromosomes, medical records and more all help substantiate answers to questions such as, What is sex? How are race, gender, sexuality, and other systems of differences co-constituted? The foundational essays and new writings collected here offer a generative resource for students and scholars alike, demonstrating the ingenuity and dynamism of queer feminist scholarship.

PART ONE

Histories of Difference

THIS ANTHOLOGY OPENS WITH A SET OF ESSAYS THAT ANALYZE AND contextualize what we call, drawing on Jill A. Fisher (2011), histories of difference in the sciences. Scientific studies of human difference—in particular, differences of sex, gender, race, sexuality, age, and ability—are historically contingent and contested, as are the differences being studied and codified under these labels themselves. The genealogies of specific disciplines and objects included in this section highlight this contingency and reveal key insights into the systematic and white supremacist power relations that normalize certain conceptions and configurations of difference. History, ideology, and culture shape scientific research on differences among human populations and bodies in ways large and small. Because sciences are dynamic and change over time, the consequences—at once material and semiotic—of the enmeshment of science in history and culture cannot be predicted in advance or once and for all. We need, in other words, to constantly forge new analytic lenses and new forms of critical science literacy (Giordano, forthcoming).

This section suggests that contemporary scientific approaches to difference must be historicized in relation to earlier scientific efforts to classify human types—namely, eugenics, sexology, and related bioscientific fields. Classically defined, eugenics promotes higher rates of reproduction for populations with genetic traits considered desirable and reduced rates of reproduction for populations marked as biologically and/or culturally inferior. Sexology, the scientific study of human sex development, developed contemporaneously and in conversation with eugenics, and played a formative role in the production and naturalization of the normal/pathological distinction (Downing, Morland, and Sullivan 2015). The origins of eugenic and sexological thinking are of heterogeneous provenance, dating as far back as ancient Greece, but their modern forms can be traced to European imperial and American settler colonial policies and their adjacent scientific elaborations and justifications in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Feminist and queer scholars have critiqued eugenics and sexology for upholding Eurocentric, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, compulsory able-bodied, and biological determinist presuppositions. They have also analyzed the rise and circulations of neo-eugenic and neosexological ideas in scientific research and policymaking related to population control, reproductive rights, welfare, the AIDS crisis, the obesity epidemic, sexual health and education, disability rights, environmental degradation, indigenous sovereignty, assisted reproductive technologies, and numerous other areas of contemporary concern.

As these examples suggest, sciences of human differences constitute a useful site for interrogating the intersectionality of race, class, sex, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. As Banu Subramaniam astutely surmised in “Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies” (2009), feminist scholarship needs science studies to help us understand what “intersectionality” is. Conversely, queer and feminist engagements toward this end should be recognized as an important resource for addressing some of feminist science studies’ most pressing (and queerest) questions. What counts as difference in evolutionary theory, physiology, biochemistry, endocrinology, genetics, and neuroscience? What is being measured and how? How do sciences of difference in turn shape biomedical, biopolitical, and geopolitical practices? Taken as a whole, the essays in Part One suggest that histories of difference deserve sustained femi-queer genealogical excavation and critical analysis precisely because of their lasting impact on how we come to value, study, treat, manage, and respond to variation (Subramaniam 2014).

In the opening excerpted piece in this section, “Sexing the X: How the X Became the ‘Female Chromosome,’” originally published in 2012 in Signs, Sarah S. Richardson examines how the X became the “female chromosome” and how the X is gendered female in scientific and popular discourse. The sexing of the X, Richardson argues, represents a case of gender-ideological bias in scientific research, both historically and in the present day. Following in the tradition of Emily Martin (1991), Nelly Oudshoorn (1994), Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000), and Donna Haraway (1997), Richardson shows that feminist science studies disarms and displaces—or queers—accepted understandings of the biochemistry and genetics of sex.

In “Pelvic Politics: Sexual Dimorphism and Racial Difference,” first published in Signs in 2001, Sally Markowitz makes an intervention into feminist theories of sex and gender as binary systems, arguing that their central conceits have by and large been institutionalized while the implications of the histories out of which they emerge have yet to be carefully reckoned with. She traces the concept of sexual dimorphism—the difference/distance between male and female of a given racial or species type—as a marker of evolutionary development to show that sex “itself” was never actually imagined as binary, but rather always racialized. Racial groups were coded more feminine or masculine, and those with the greatest imagined disparity between sexed bodies, superior. The whiteness of binary sex, a central preoccupation of bioscientific and feminist research, raises important questions for how we understand the meaning of race for femi-queer scholarship and how we figure what we know as “sex” in new bio-cultural treatments of the materiality of bodies (Richardson 2012; Fausto-Sterling 2000; Grosz 1994).

Merl Storr’s “Sexual Reproduction of ‘Race’: Bisexuality, History and Racialization” is from a 1997 bisexuality studies anthology, The Bisexual Imaginary: Representation, Identity and Desire. Like Richardson and Markowitz, Storr highlights the trouble with our (queer) preoccupation with binaries. She reads discourses around the universality of “bisexual” desire through a genealogy of the term. In so doing, the piece shows how the intelligibility of romantic gestures to a sexually free past depends upon the historic racialization of concepts of development in sexology and psychoanalysis. Storr’s genealogy suggests that questions of sexuality’s materiality must answer to the racial history of its intelligibility as such and prefigures some of the most prescient recent critiques of new materialism, posthumanism, and queer theory. She points to slippages between uses of “race” to mean human, white, European, and British, and thus to the importance of careful attendance to the racial resonances of our claims about categories of human and nonhuman (Weheliye 2014; McKittrick 2014). Storr insists that strategies for resistance to sexual hegemonies should look to history and be accountable to their own conditions of intelligibility (Huffer 2013).

Ladelle McWhorter picks up these threads of connection in a thoroughgoing rethinking of the history of sexuality. Whereas Storr traces “bisexuality,” Somerville (2000) “homosexuality,” and Willey (2016) “monogamy,” through histories of scientific racism, McWhorter, like Ann Stoler (1995), turns to the historiography of sexuality to which these figurations belong. Within the larger book project from which this excerpt, “From Masturbator to Homosexual: The Construction of the Sex Pervert,” is drawn, McWhorter offers a genealogical account of “sex” and “race.” In the larger book project, she shows how white supremacy shaped conceptions of sexual threat that informed dominant twentieth-century figurations of homosexuality. McWhorter’s careful, systematic elaboration of Foucault’s history of sexuality through histories of scientific racism is a tremendous resource for queer feminist science studies. By tracking the coformation of various figures of sexual predation, she illustrates the importance of white supremacy to the production of contemporary queer and trans subjectivities with clarity.

David Rubin’s “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender,” first published in Signs in 2012, addresses the place of intersex bodies in genealogies of the sex/gender distinction. Closely reading the contradictions and legacies of psychoendocrinologist John Money’s founding paradigm of intersex treatment, Rubin argues that intersexuality played a crucial role in the invention of gender as a category in mid-twentieth-century biomedical and, subsequently, feminist discourses; that Money used the concept of gender to cover over and displace the biological instability of the body he discovered through his research on intersex; and finally, that Money’s conception of gender produced new technologies of psychosomatic normalization. In staging this argument, Rubin reorients genealogies of gender in science by demonstrating the centrality of the medical normalization of intersex subjects to modern understandings of sex/gender and embodiment more generally.

Discussion Questions

1.What are some common threads between the different histories of difference analyzed in Part One? Where do their archives (which sciences and scientists and geographical contexts they study) overlap and diverge?

2.Collectively, the essays in Part One make a strong case for the import of intersectionality to queer feminist genealogies of science. How do these genealogies help us to understand intersectionality? What are the most salient contributions of this approach, and what are its limitations?

Works Cited

Davidson, Phoebe, ed. 1997. The Bisexual Imaginary: Representation, Identity and Desire. London: Cassell.

Downing, Lisa, Iain Morland, and Nikki Sullivan. 2015. Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books.

Fisher, Jill A. 2011. Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Giordano, Sara. Forthcoming. The Politics and Ethics of “Labs of Our Own”: Post/feminist Tinkerings with Science.

Grosz, E. A. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.

Huffer, Lynne. 2013. Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. New York: Columbia University Press.

Martin, Emily. 1991. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (3): 485–501.

McKittrick, Katherine. 2014. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.

Oudshoorn, Nelly. 1994. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones. New York: Routledge.

Richardson, Sarah S. 2012. “Sexing the X: How the X Became the ‘Female Chromosome.’” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37 (4): 909–933.

Somerville, Siobhan B. 2000. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Subramaniam, Banu. 2009. “Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34 (4): 951–980.

———. 2014. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Willey, Angela. 2016. Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sexing the X

How the X Became the “Female Chromosome”

SARAH S. RICHARDSON

“UNEXPECTED.” “COUNTERINTUITIVE.” “INTELLECTUALLY SURPRISing” (Kuman 2001). These were among the exclamations of researchers upon the 2001 discovery that the human X chromosome carries a large collection of male sperm genes (Wang et al. 2001). Although both males and females possess an X chromosome, the X is frequently typed as the “female chromosome” and researchers assume it carries the genes for femaleness. This essay traces the origins of this long-standing and infrequently questioned association of the X with femaleness and examines the influence of this assumption on historical and contemporary genetic theories of sex and gender difference.

Humans possess twenty-two pairs of autosomal chromosomes and one pair of sex chromosomes—X and Y for males, X and X for females. Today it is well established that the Y carries a critical genetic switch for male sex determination. The X, however, has no parallel relationship to femaleness. Female sexual development is directed by hormones acting in concert with genes carried by many chromosomes and is not localized to the X. Indeed, the X is arguably more important to male biology, given the large number of X-linked diseases to which men are uniquely exposed. Despite this, researchers attribute feminine behavior to the X itself and assume that female genes and traits are located on it. Researchers look to the X to explain sex differences and female quirks and weaknesses and have argued that men are superior because they possess one fewer X than females.

The X chromosome offers a poignant example of how the gendering of objects of biological study can shape scientific knowledge. Moving freely between stereotypical conceptions of femininity and models of the X chromosome, X-chromosomal theories of sex differences reveal a circular form of reasoning that is familiar in gender analysis of biology. As Evelyn Fox Keller writes: “A basic form common to many [feminist analyses of science] revolves around the identification of synecdochic (or part for whole) errors of the following sort: (a) the world of human bodies is divided into two kinds, male and female (i.e., by sex); (b) additional (extraphysical) properties are culturally attributed to these bodies (e.g., active/passive, independent/dependent, primary/secondary: read gender); and (c) the same properties that have been ascribed to the whole are then attributed to the subcategories of, or processes associated with, these bodies” (1995, 87). A classic historical example of this phenomenon is the gendering of the egg and sperm in mid-twentieth-century medical textbooks, documented by Emily Martin (1991). A second example is the gendering of the sex steroids estrogen and testosterone, as told by Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000).

Rooted in history and philosophy of science, and drawing on the interdisciplinary methods and questions of feminist science studies forged by scholars such as Fausto-Sterling, Keller, Donna Haraway, and Martin, this essay investigates the sexing of the X in a variety of scientific materials both internal and external to the biosciences. The sexing of the X, I argue, represents a case of gender-ideological bias in science, both historically and in the present day. [. . .]

The Feminine Chromosome

Scientific and popular literature on the sex chromosomes is rich with examples of the gendering of the X a...