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NWSA Journal 12.3 (2000) vii-xvi



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The Science and Politics of the Search for Sex Differences: Editorial

Laura Severin and Mary Wyer 1


In feminist academic circles, it has been often noted in recent years that the concept of "gender," so central to feminist theory since Gayle Rubin first described the sex/gender system (Rubin 1975), has perhaps outlived its usefulness. Though it emerged in the context of providing a challenge to sociobiological and determinist theory that legitimated the subordination of women, it seems to be haunted by the ghosts of our own critical priorities. The theoretical move to distinguish cultural influences from biological ones has been valuable in revealing male-centered social processes and practices that constrain and control women's lives. Yet the sex/gender dichotomy has allowed feminist theorists to set the biological aside, as if the body is a "coatrack" upon which all that is cultural hangs (Nicholson 1994).

The analytic distinction between sex and gender is further critiqued as reproducing the body/mind division at the center of Western knowledge (Scott 1997). Moreover, the very definition of gender is evaporating since it has been used in academic research in such a wide array of ways as to undermine its coherence as a theoretical concept. As Mary Hawkesworth puts it so well, the term "gender" has been used to refer to an attribute of individuals, an interpersonal relation, an ideology, or a mode of social organization, among other definitions (1997). At its best, it has become a short-hand term for a whole universe of very different and complicated social, historical, psychological, and symbolic phenomena. At its worst, as many have pointed out, "gender" is short-hand for "woman," as if those different and complicated phenomena were irrelevant (Keller 1992; Collins 1991; Haraway 1991; King 1988). But, to shamelessly paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a woman is not a Woman is not a woman everywhere.

As if this were not enough to provoke rethinking one of the givens in feminist theory, queer theory has challenged the presumed four-square alignment of binary sexes (female or male) with binary sexualities (homo- or hetero-) that pervades prevailing social and psychological theory. Human sexuality is more complicated than this, including intersexual and transsexual experiences, as well as homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual ones (Weed 1997). Indeed, the notion that there are just two biological sexes is evaporating in the face of counter evidence that calls the conceptual coherence of what we have named "sex" into question (Kessler 1998; Fausto-Sterling 1993). A biological model that projects variable outcomes from a complex set of developmental factors is replacing the conventional model of a linear and bifurcated developmental process that [End Page vii] leads to an individual's sex (Fausto-Sterling 2000). In light of the above, it would appear that feminist theory has the tools to thoroughly dismantle the dualistic, masculinist, and heterosexist frameworks that perpetuate disempowering distinctions among people.

Alongside these theoretical and empirical advances, however, an entrenched effort continues to demonstrate fundamental biological grounding for dualistic social categorizations by gender and sexuality. Much of this research progresses under the rubric of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and behavior genetics. Here's a sample from a recent work:

Every fetus is created without a sex until a single gene switches on and begins a cascade of chemical reactions that turns half of us into males and half into females. The changes affect not only physical characteristics but mental ones as well. Men are programmed to seek more partners and sexual novelty; women are "serial monogamists," seeking mates who will remain long enough to raise offspring. Women want emotional attachment and financial security not because that's what they are taught but because it helps species survive. (Hamer and Copeland 1998, 10)

Over twenty years ago, chemist Marian Lowe made the point that though feminists do not have to take such arguments seriously as scientific theory about human behavior, we do need to take them seriously as political theory (Lowe 1978). Her caution then is still relevant today. In the...

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