Abstract
Myra Hird opens Sex, Gender and Science with an observation from teaching that anyone who teaches on feminist or gender theory will recognize immediately: the keenness with which students are willing to explore gender, and to accept its social construction, but the parallel reluctance to relinquish the biological ‘facts’ of the sexed body. Her book has two primary aims: firstly, to make the argument that Western understandings of ‘sex’ are ‘… based less upon an actual knowledge of sex ‘differences’ rooted in morphology than in a cultural discourse that emphasizes sex dichotomy rather than sex diversity’ (p. 2); and secondly, to draw on ‘new materialism’ in order to contest those cultural assumptions. For Hird, the new materialism ‘… refers to a significant shift in the natural sciences that emphasizes openness and play within the living and non-living world, contesting paradigms which posited a changeable culture against a static nature’ (p. 145). She identifies four central tenets to the new materialism – non-linearity and self-organization, contingency, variation and diversity – and explores these via literature from both the physical sciences and from the social sciences, making a powerful case for the role of ‘science-literate analyses of matter’ (p. 13) within feminist theory.
The scope of the book is wide-ranging, beginning with a review of feminist writing on science and the cultural construction of materiality. Hird then sets out the features and implications of the epistemic and political shifts of the Enlightenment that facilitated a transition from the ‘one-sex’ body to the understanding of two different, and complementary, sexes, and explores the ways in which the ‘essence’ of sexual difference – in bones, hormones and genes – has been written into scientific accounts of the sexed body. Chapter 4 revisits evolutionary theory to argue that, contrary to the arguments from sociobiology and neo-Darwinism, Darwin's original thesis posits that nature can be seen (and is increasingly being seen within the physical sciences) as a ‘complex open system subject to emergent properties’ (p. 13), rather than one of conformity and linearity. The latter half of the book takes up these principles of the new materialism and non-linearity by looking at the appropriation of sexual reproduction as representative of sexual difference, the silencing of the sexual diversity of living matter, and the intersexuality of the human body. The final chapter reiterates the book's core argument that it is a mistake on the part of feminists to reject science studies as necessarily reinscribing sexual difference in ways which are harmful to women, arguing instead that new materialism offers novel possibilities for both feminist theory and praxis through its articulation of the inabilities of culturally dominant discourses of sexual difference to account for the immense diversity of the natural world. This, she argues, creates not only the possibilities for challenging sexual difference, but more fundamentally, for destabilizing assumptions about the sex/gender binary itself.
The book's argument is rigorously made and is illustrated copiously with the kind of examples that you want to read out loud to those around you. Mushrooms with 28,000 sexes, regenerating livers and human mouths alive with hundreds of bacteria, amongst a host of other examples, line up to illustrate the ‘superabundant diversity’ (p. 13) of nature. Hird describes at entertaining length the contortions that primatologists have gone through in order to find explanations for homosexual behaviour that conform to heteronormative understandings of sexual activity as necessarily oriented towards reproduction. The attribution of normatively gendered behaviours to plants and animals is also well-documented, ranging across accounts of marriage and monogamy throughout the non-human natural world, displays of ‘modesty’ from the pistils (designated as female) of flowers, ‘divorcing’ birds, ‘promiscuous’ pollen, and ‘spiteful’ monkeys who ‘selfishly’ prevent other monkeys from reproducing. Other case studies are more sobering. In particular, the discussion of intersexuality in humans, and of the interventions that a rigid sexual dichotomy demands, illustrates clearly Hird's central argument that biology, and the appreciation of diversity, offers an essential means of challenging sex dimorphism, whose cultural production makes its material consequences no less real for those falling foul of that particular nexus of knowledge and power relations.
Sex, Gender and Science is a useful antidote to the impasse between biology and social constructionism that is apparent in the prevailing reluctance to relinquish the certainties of the sexed body and to engage directly with science studies. It is consistently argued and engagingly written, with a helpful glossary at the end of the book to facilitate the science-literacy it advocates. In the penultimate section of the final chapter, Hird proposes that rather than resist diversity, we should learn from bacteria, the diversity of whose accomplishments take over a page to list, declaring finally:
‘So in the tired game of identity, I would choose neither goddess nor cyborg (Haraway 1991). I would rather be a bacterium’
(p. 151)
By the end of the book, I couldn't have agreed more.