Sex Genes: A Critical Sociomaterial Approach to the Politics and Molecular Genetics of Sex Determination

H ow should the social sciences engage with the materiality of “nature”? The literatures of both the social studies of science and gender studies have wrestled with this question in their analyses of the production of scientific knowledge. In examining the production or consumption of scientific knowledge, these literatures have demonstrated how production and consumption are social and cultural activities. Within this shared terrain, however, many differences emerge both within and between these two literatures on the questions of how to theorize about the social in the scientific and about the scientific in the social, and how to create a language that does not separate science from society. One topic explored has been the biological explanations for differences between males and females. Biologists and social scientists have proposed explanations for behavioral differences, and debates abound. In this article I do not discuss theories of or data on behavioral differences. Instead, I explore research on the material production of males and females in molecular genetic research on sex determination. I address the question of how the social sciences should engage with the materiality of nature—in this case, the molecular genetics of sex determination. I employ a critical sociomaterial approach to social scientific engagements with the biological sciences. The sociomaterial approach encompasses the poststructuralist view that meanings are not inherent in events, phenomena, and things. That is, it assumes that humans attribute meanings to things through complex interactions based within specific locations in