Sexing the Body Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

In Sexing the Body. Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality FaustoSterling attempts to answer two questions: How is knowledge about the body gendered? And, how gender and sexuality become somatic facts? In other words, she passionately and with impressive intellectual clarity demonstrates how in regards to human sexuality the social becomes material. She takes a broad, interdisciplinary perspective in examining this process of gender embodiment. Her goal is to demonstrate not only how the categories (men/ women) humans use to describe other humans become embodied in those to whom they refer, but also how these categories are not reflected in reality. She argues that labeling someone a man or a woman is solely a social decision. «We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender – not science – can define our sex» (p. 3) and consistently throughout the book she shows how gender beliefs affect what kinds of knowledge are produced about sex, sexual behaviors, and ultimately gender. This book has three aims. First, Fausto-Sterling challenges our dualistic thinking about the sex categories and how we use them. In particular she focuses on three pairs of concepts: sex/gender, nature/nurture and real/constructed. She cuts through these false dichotomies, claiming that sexuality is a somatic fact shaped by cultural effects. Throughout the book she explains how the categories used to define sexuality changed over time, thus supporting her argument that human sexuality is neither timeless nor universal. She recalls the feminist historian Joan Scott who argued that historians should not assume that the term “experience” contains a self-evident