Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality Summary and Reviews

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
by Anne Fausto-Sterling

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
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Book Summary Information

Author: Anne Fausto-Sterling
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-11-22
ISBN: 0465077145
Number of pages: 488
Publisher: Basic Books

Book Reviews of Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

Book Review: Ambivalence
Summary: 4 Stars

This book delves into some of the biological and cultural issues regarding gender identity. In the introduction, Fausto-Sterling tells us that as a biologist, she accepts that there are biological influences on behavior, but at the same time, she is a feminist who is determined that gender identity is also culturally influenced. This book is framed as a kind of reconciliation between the extremes of the two camps. The early part of the book examines hermaphrodites or intersexuals through history. Fausto-Sterling points out that before medical intervention was standard, hermaphrodites were a recognized gender category, who even had their own rules of conduct and inheritance under Jewish law. She then turns her attention to the modern treatment of intersexuals, describing how thanks to charlatans like John Money, many have been surgically adjusted to fit one sex, while finding that their natural gender goes the other way, and they are consequently trapped in bodies that go against nature. She reviews many studies of the medical intervention of intersexuals and infant gender re-assignment, finding dismally few success stories.

The second half of the book takes up a variety of topics. Chapter 5, for instance, discusses and dismisses reported differences between the corpus callosum in men and women. In this chapter, Fausto-Sterling goes to great length to explain how the statistics for the corpus callosum studies may be flawed, but it seems she misses a larger point- -are there any behavioral traits that are associated with the corpus callosum anyway? Even if women turned out to have a corpus callosum that was five times as big, on average, than that of men, so what? We don't know enough yet about the function of the corpus callosum to hazard a guess as to what such results might point to, so finding or not finding a difference in size isn't that consequential. Later chapters in the book cover the history of sex hormone studies, hormones and the development of the brain. The book closes with an analysis of the author's own development of a gender identity, and an analogy of gender identity as a set of Russian dolls, where each influence on gender identity, from genetic to hormonal to cultural, fits within the larger context. And then comes 120 pages of endnotes, followed by 70 pages of bibliography, and the index.

In previous work, Fausto-Sterling had proposed that there are not 2 but many human genders, including separate categories for each preference of sexual activity. In this book she doesn't exactly argue explicitly for many genders, but she almost seems to assume the idea. She also points out that people's sexual activities may change over time, and thus it may be hard to categorize a person as being throughout life a member of one gender or another. I'm not sure I agree with her on this point. I think it might be more accurate to recognize that are only 2 biological genders, each associated with specific physical and behavioral traits, but that not everyone actually fits neatly into these categories. Indeed, if we have a very tightly defined notion of male and female together with all associated traits, perhaps no one actually matches one gender exactly. But that's not to say that we need to multiply the gender categories- -we just need to recognize and respect each person for who he, she, or even it, is.

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