from NWSA Journal Volume 12, Number 3

Biological Behavior? Hormones, Psychology, and Sex

CELIA ROBERTS

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Contemporary behavioral endocrinology and biological psychology claim that sex hormones play an important role in the production of sex differences in human and other animal behaviors. This article critically examines these claims, which range from simple biologically determinist arguments through to more complex attempts to theorize the connected roles of the hormonal and the social. In each case, these sciences rely on a social/biological distinction. Analyzing contemporary feminist work on the body as lived, and innovative scientific views of biology's "co-action" with the environment, it is suggested that this distinction is limiting and requires rethinking. Rather than accusing science of essentialism and rejecting the role of the biological outright, it may prove more fruitful for feminism to theorize the "interimplication" of the biological and the social in attempts to understand sex differences in behavior.

Since their "discovery" early this century, sex hormones have taken a strong role in the explanation of sex differences in human and other animal behaviors (Oudshoorn 1994). In recent times, for example, they have been held in popular scientific literature to indicate that women are better suited than men to child-rearing, and to underlie women's incapacity for certain types of work (Moir and Jessel 1991). Within the sciences of psychology and behavioral endocrinology, sex hormones are attributed powers to produce sex differences in behaviors such as children's play and adult sexuality.

Given the political implications of such attributions, it is important that feminist responses to these sciences are complex and convincing. Whilst critiques of biological reductionism in the explanation of sex differences in human and other animal behavior are well established within feminist thought (Bleier 1984; Fausto-Sterling 1992; Spanier 1995), I argue here that for two central reasons more specific attention needs to be paid to the positive theorization of the role of biology in the production of behavior. Firstly, on many occasions, scientists do attempt to account for the social in their work (that is, they do not provide accounts that are entirely reductionist in a biological sense); this work also needs feminist examination. Secondly, theoretical discussions within feminist thought demonstrate that it is difficult, if not impossible, to entirely dismiss the role of the biological in the production of sex differences. As I will argue, it remains inadequate (both theoretically and politically) for feminism simply to reject the biological. This paper, then, attempts to find a more complex "middle way" of approaching the biological in its powerful and historically specific instantiations (in this case as sex hormones), without being reductionist.

Part One: Hormones And "The Organ of Behavior"

How do scientific theories explain the connections between the brain, the biological body, and human behavior? What is the role of hormones in this understanding, insofar as it relates to sex differences?

The most simple view, and what biologist David Crews calls the classical view, is biologistic. It argues that "all somatic sexual dimorphisms, including brain, and hence behavior, result from gonadal hormone production that begins after morphological differentiation of the gonad" (1988, 332). In this view, brain and behavioral factors derive directly from sexed bodily differences. Thus, for example, studies are made of the sexuality of rats, whereby early androgen levels are manipulated and later changed patterns of sexual behavior noted. The theory is that androgen causes masculine behavior and its absence causes feminine behavior. As Bernard Donovan states, "This idea can be traced back to classical studies [in 1959] of the hormonal control of the differentiation of the genital tract, for when pregnant guinea-pigs were injected with androgen the genitalia of the female offspring were masculinized and they showed an increase in male-type mounting behavior and aggressiveness" (1988, 236). In later research, male rats were deprived of androgens by castration or by treatment with anti-androgenic drugs, which was seen to result in the "later manifestation of the female pattern of lordosis [the female position adopted during sexual intercourse, which is used as the yardstick of feminine sexual behavior in rats] after priming with oestrogen and progesterone" (236). Thus a simple causal chain was established between the sexual behavior of animals such as guinea-pigs and rats and their hormonally sexually differentiated bodies.

No matter how interesting the sexuality of rats and guinea-pigs may be to some, this research was important largely because of the leads it gave into compelling questions of human sexuality. In 1988, feminist theorists of science Ruth Doell and Helen Longino described the increasing attempts, since the early-1970s, to develop theories of human behavior based on extrapolation from these animal studies (1988, 56). Using the linear model applied in animal studies (the one-way causal model where chromosomes cause gonads, which cause hormones, which cause behaviors), human behavior is studied as an effect of prenatal hormonal input: "The human brain is treated largely as a black box with prenatal hormonal input and later behavioral output. The implication is that the effect of prenatal hormone exposure can be either quantitatively assessed as contributing a specific amount to the end result, or that it is, by itself, determinative of that result" (Doell and Longino 1988, 59). In this simplistic model, differences between humans and nonhuman animals are largely erased, and the influence of the social on behavior is reduced to little or nothing. Often cited examples of this type of work include that of psychologists John Money, Anke Ehrhardt, and Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, all of whom have studied the behavioral patterns of "special" human populations exposed to unusual levels of hormones in utero.

"Normal" human populations are also studied in this way. As it is not possible in these populations to know the levels of hormones to which infants were exposed in utero, measurements of current levels of hormones are taken. This is followed by measurement of whatever behavior is being observed, and the proposition of a causal link. Such a proposition, of course, extrapolates correlations to causes. Marianne Hassler, for example, studies the "effect" of testosterone (T) on musical ability, finding "that an optimal T level may exist for the expression of creative musical behavior" (1992, 55). Many assumptions underlie this work: Hassler admits to assuming that "current T levels can be looked at as a component of a relatively enduring biochemical system which has been organized during prenatal and/or perinatal brain development under the influence of androgens and/or estrogens" (66). She assumes, in other words, that the brain is set up during the prenatal and/or perinatal period in a male or female way, and levels of adult hormone can be used as an indicator of this set-up. She rejects suggestions that the musical ability she finds may have more to do with environmental influences than T levels by citing examples of children from musical families where one child became a musician and others did not (for example Mendelssohn) (67). Hassler considers this sufficient argument to establish the causal importance of T levels and "male-type" or "female-type" brains and endocrine systems. This view of what constitutes the social--i.e., that everyone in one family has the same experience of "the social"--is extremely (in fact absurdly) limited.

As Doell and Longino note, the linear model problematically figures the brain as a passive biological entity. In much literature around human and other animal behavior, however, some attention is given to the complexities of the brain and its relation to hormones and to the social.1 Doell and Longino argue that for many scientists this does not mean the abandonment of the linear model of causation (1988, 60). As I will demonstrate, references tothe importance of the social are often made and then ignored. In cases where closer attention is paid, scientists acknowledge the brain as a meeting point between the endocrine system and "input" from the external world. Throughout this literature there are many different frameworks of understanding this relation between the body, brain, and the world, most of which involve a division of processes or functions into those that are more biological (more directly caused by hormones) and those that are more social. This process of division, I argue, shows that these theories maintain a reliance on the social/biological distinction.

The work of psychologists John Money and Anke Ehrhardt are good examples of this. In 1955 Money suggested that there is a fundamental difference between gender identity, or role (sense of self as male or female), and sex dimorphic behaviors. Gender identity, he found, was not dependent on gonadal sex, but rather was determined by rearing. Thus a child born with complete androgen insensitivity who was genetically male but raised as a female had a female gender identity that was stable and difficult to change, even when bodily changes in puberty made her body seem male (Ehrhardt 1984, 42-4). Ehrhardt, a colleague of Money's, follows this view in her work on sexed behaviors. She agrees that gender identity may be socially caused, but argues on the other hand that sexed behaviors such as playing with dolls and rough-and-tumble play have a biological (prenatal hormonal) basis (Ehrhardt 1984; Ehrhardt and Meyer-Bahlburg 1981). Sexual orientation is further split off, as is cognitive behavior, such as performance on cognitive tests. These latter two are not seen by Ehrhardt to be hormonally caused, although she suggests that future evidence may prove that they are (Ehrhardt 1984; Ehrhardt and Meyer-Bahlburg, 1981).2

Other theorists give more prominence to the role of the brain, conceptualizing behavior as a result of a complex brain/body interaction. June Macover Reinisch and colleagues, for example, acknowledge that much research has demonstrated the importance of the social in the production of human behavior. Thus they make a claim for "biological potentiality," rather than biological determinism. Reinisch and colleagues "have conceptualized the complex interaction between organismic and environmental factors in the development of sex differences in human behavior as the 'multiplier effect,"' where from birth to adulthood (prenatally) hormonally caused differences in the brain affect the sensations and perceptions received by the brain and the cognitions produced, and establish "behavioral predispositions" that cause "slightly different" male or female behaviors (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 214). These "slightly different" behaviors, they argue, are then encouraged or discouraged by caretakers and others, which increases the influence of the social on behavior. As puberty is reached, differences are further "augmented" and during adult reproductive years the differences between men and women are at a maximum. "As humans age," they go on to argue, "perhaps because role expectations become less divergent, there appears to be a tendency for both sexes to become more androgynous and therefore more similar, resulting in the relative reduction of sex differences among older adults" (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 214)

.

Despite their adherence to this "multiplier effect" model, which takes into account the social via the insistence on brain differences between the sexes and the reinforcement of these through "social roles," Reinisch et al., in reviewing nineteen studies of the behavioral patterns of children and adults exposed to "prenatal hormone environments that were atypical for their sex," end up ignoring the effects of the social on human behavior (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 215). They position the role of the social as a possible confounding factor that can be separated surprisingly easily from a study of the role of biology (hormones):

By studying the effects of prenatal exposure to these exogenous hormones, insight may be gained into the role of prenatal endogenous hormones in the development of behavioral differences both within and between the sexes. However, because the role of prenatal hormonal exposure in the development of human behavioral sex differences is potentially confounded by society's differential treatment of male and female individuals, this review focuses on making comparisons within a given sex. The demonstration of within-sex behavioral differences attenuates the confound between prenatal hormonal contributions and environmental influences on the development of sexually dimorphic behavior. (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 215)

So by separating the sexes, everything becomes strangely simple. Reinisch et al. erase the effect of culture through their acknowledgment of the differential treatment of boys and girls: yes, culture exists, they say, but it is relevant only insofar as it affects the sexes differentially. Thus, if we only compare males with males and females with females, the confound inflicted by the social will be "obviated." (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 271). The logic of this argument is clearly insupportable, as it assumes that the social treatment of all the members of one sex is identical.

In their review, Reinisch et al. examine studies of the behavior of adults or children who have been exposed in utero to atypical patterns of hormones. These people's behaviors are compared to others' who were not exposed to such "environments." Comparisons are made according to a scale of masculinity and femininity: with the help of the articles reviewed and with a group of four psychologists, Reinisch et al. classify the sets of behaviors studied into masculine or feminine behaviors. They then indicate if the people exposed to atypical hormone levels are either masculinized, defeminized, feminized, or demasculinized, according to whether or not they exhibit behaviors nominated as either masculine or feminine. Masculinization and feminization are said to occur when the subject shows more of a clearly masculine or feminine behavior. Demasculinization or defeminization is said to occur when there is a decrease in a masculine or feminine behavior, but which is not necessarily seen to be a swing to its "opposite." Unsurprisingly, behaviors seen to be feminine include "interest in playing with dolls," "interest in appearance and hairstyles," and "interest in marriage and maternalism," while masculine behaviors included "rough-and-tumble play," "aggression," "interest in watching sports on TV," and "participation in sports." Homo- and heterosexuality are also figured here: for young male subjects, preferring to play with boys is rated as masculine, whereas playing with girls is rated as feminine. In late-adolescence and adulthood, however, "this assumption was not made" (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 226). That these very categories reflect the social in historically specific ways is not examined by Reinisch et al. They simply note the hormonal influences on the infant, look at its later behavior, noting whether there has been a masculinization or feminization, etc., and then nominate this change as biological.

Logically, this process means that Reinisch et al. end up claiming either that there is some sort of biological force that produces "playing with dolls" and "interest in watching sports on TV," which is nonsensical, or that there is some (biological?) intermediary between the body/brain and these culturally influenced behaviors. This intermediary is presumably what they call "behavioral predispositions" (Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 271), but as to what these actually are, we are given no information. We know there are hormones and there are social behaviors that can be socially rated as masculine or feminine, but there is still no explained connection between the two. In quoting Stephen Gould--"Humans are animals, and everything we do is constrained, in some sense, by our biology"--Reinisch et al. reveal their assumed position (qtd. in Reinisch, Ziemba-Davis, and Sanders 1991, 213-4). They prove nothing and yet claim to have demonstrated an important role for prenatal hormones in child and adult behavior. All they have shown is that people who were exposed to various hormones during fetal development occasionally show different scores on tests of stereotypical social behaviors. Nothing is demonstrated (but much is assumed) about the role of biology in the lives of their human subjects.

When science looks at the role of hormones in the establishment of sexually differentiated behaviors, questions of homo- and heterosexuality are never far behind. Cheryl McCormick, Sandra Witelson, and Edward Kingstone, for example, situate their study of the biological factors in the etiology of homosexuality within a growing search for such factors, which they claim is "partly due to results of experimental work of the last few decades which show that much of the sexual behavior of nonhuman animals is driven by sex hormones" (1990, 69). McCormick et al. argue that adult hormone levels will be unlikely to provide an explanation for sexual orientation, and so it would be more profitable to look to the brain, which they call "the organ of behavior" (69). They state that "to a certain extent, sexual differentiation of the brain is independent of the sexual differentiation of other parts of the body. . . . Thus, one may predict neural differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals without expecting other biological differences" (70). Their findings (which look at incidence of left-handedness in homo- and heterosexual men and women in order to indicate levels of brain hemispheric lateralization),3 they argue, support the notion that prenatal neuroendocrine events are "a factor" in the development of human sexual orientation and that the mechanisms associated with sexual orientation differ between the sexes (69). In this work the brain is not a "black box" but more a neuroendocrine controller. Prenatal hormones are seen to affect the brain (and thus behavior) in a way that is separate to their effect on the body via gonads (measured in hormone levels in the blood).

This more complicated idea, that the brain itself is sexually differentiated by hormones in a separate process to the sexual differentiation of the gonads and thus the body in general, is taken up by many scientists. One year after this research on homosexuality, Witelson published a review of studies of sex differences in human brain organization and behavior (1991). In this review she works through research concerning different neurological areas, and finds evidence of sex differences in each. These differences she attributes to prenatal and perinatal hormonal action. "Research has demonstrated," she asserts,

that the brain is a sexually differentiated organ, that is, that fetal and perinatal sex hormones have organizational effects on brain structure and also have subsequent activational effects on the brain. . . . Such results have led to hypotheses of the role of sex-related biological factors leading to the variation in human brain function and behavior, but the specific relationships and mechanisms remain to be delineated. (1991, 132; emphasis added)

In other words, she reports correlations between certain brain differences and types of behaviors, but can only assume causal relationships. Throughout the article Witelson states that sex differences in various parts of the brain could affect particular behaviors, and so ends up concluding that there is a biological basis of behavioral and cognitive differences between the sexes and between homo- and heterosexuals (1991, 148). The implications of this finding do not disturb her, as she hands over responsibility to others: "The challenge to society," she asserts, "is to accept, respect, and effectively use the neural diversity among human beings" (148, emphasis added).

In all of these theories, the claim to account for the role of the social in the production of sexually differentiated behaviors is false. In each of them, the social is reduced to simplistic ideas of what happens in families (the idea that everyone in the same family is treated equally), or in society (that all members of the same sex are treated equally within a society). Notions of racial, class, or cultural differences are ignored in this research, as is the wealth of feminist and other work on the complexity of the social and its effects on human embodiment. As I have shown, this simplistic understanding of the social allows these theorists to strengthen their claims about the role of biological (hormones) in the production of behaviors. They claim to have controlled for, or to have examined, the social and then to have found that the biological is actually more important.

Part Two: Critiques of the Biological/Social Split

Is Biology Separate from the Social?

Living processes are never static and this applies to the biological processes associated with sex differences. No matter what kind of sex difference has been measured, the difference can exist only at one point of time. The individuals who have been tested . . . are constantly changing because they are in constant interaction with their environments. We actively select and change our environments and, at the same time, we are actively selected and changed by them. Flexibility characterizes all levels of biology and behavior. (Rogers 1999, 118)

In the view of the scientists discussed in part one, biology can be separated from the social. The biological body is understood as established during development and is thought to remain quite stable throughout a life. The brain in particular is conceptualized as a relatively static entity. In contrast to this mainstream idea, other scientists stress the flexibility and responsiveness of the brain to the external world, arguing that the human brain is affected and changed by the external world, not just by prenatal endocrine events. Physiologist Lesley Rogers, for example, writes:

The brain is able to learn and in so doing its biochemistry and cellular structure are changed. Thus environmental influences alter its storage and capacity to process information, and thus can affect the course of brain development. . . . This is often forgotten in discussions of brain structure and function. The brain is seen as a controller determining behavior, and often insufficient attention is paid to feedback of behavior and other environmental influences on brain development and function. Although it is possible that sex hormones can influence brain development, it is equally possible that environmental factors can do the same. (Rogers 1988, 49)

This means that there can be another interpretation of the correlations found between types of brains and certain behaviors discussed above: behaving in certain ways can change the brain. As Rogers argues, "the effect of testosterone on the brain does not occur in the absence of environmental influences and it cannot be considered in separation from these" (1988, 51). According to Rogers, the human brain remains plastic throughout life, and thus no correlation can be assumed to be caused by hormones or genes (1999, 111). The challenge to scientists, she states, is to design research that can investigate the simultaneous and perhaps inseparable effects of hormones and the environment on the development of brain and behavior.

There are many studies of nonhuman animals that show that brain development and production of sexed behaviors is dependent on social environment. Rogers' work describes the role of light on the outside of the egg for development of chicks' brains. Her studies demonstrate that, rather than being genetically or hormonally determined, lateralized brain development and subsequent sex differences in chicks' food-seeking behaviors are also influenced by this light (Rogers 1999, 111-5; Bradshaw and Rogers 1993, 54-9). Sex hormones interact with light stimulation to produce sex differences.

Psychologist Celia Moore comes to a similar conclusion in her extensive work with rats. In contrast to the classical studies discussedin part one, Moore demonstrates that hormonal development and adult sexual behavior in rats is partially dependent on maternal behavior when they were pups. In a series of studies, Moore and colleagues have shown that because of a scent they excrete, male pups receive more anogenital licking from their mothers than do female pups (Moore 1984; Moore and Power 1992; Moore and Dou 1996; Moore, et al. 1997). When they do not receive this licking (for instance when dams are prevented from smelling the pups or when they are stressed during pregnancy), rats do not display typical sexual behavior in adulthood (Moore 1984; Moore and Power 1986, 1992). Female rats who are treated with male hormones and receive more licking than others display atypical sexual behavior as adults. As Moore states, these pieces of evidence show that maternal behavior mediates the actions of sex hormones. Her studies "fail . . . to support generally accepted views that early hormones affect behavior through direct effects on brain differentiation. . . . Hormones coact and interact with other factors throughout development. . . . Hormone-based sources of sex differences may be located throughout the body and in the social surround" (Moore qtd. in Rogers 1988, 46).4

Other animal studies also show the essential role of the environment in producing so-called hormonally caused behavior: male cichlid fish have to have physical contact with other males in order to be hormonally able to reproduce (Francis, Soma, and Fernald 1993; Fox, et al. 1997); in some birds sight of the male bird, or hearing his song, causes the female bird's ovaries to secrete hormones and accelerate egg growth (West and King 1987, 51-89); and female rhesus monkeys are unable to have sex or to care for their young if they are raised in isolation from other monkeys (Haraway 1989, 231-43). In humans, testosterone secretion in men can be suppressed under extreme stress and elevated through sport and sexual fantasy (Rogers 1999, 75-6).

Other research shows that the social and physical environment of certain animals can cause a complete change in sex and thus in sexed behavior. David Crews' work on reptiles, for example, demonstrates that in some species, gonadal differentiation is determined during embryogenesis as a consequence of environment (external temperature), rather than as a result of chromosomes (1988, 328-9). Other animals, including some types of fish, are hermaphroditic and change sex according to their social environment (for example, the disappearance of a dominant male or female) either only once or repeatedly (Crews 1994, 100-1). Still other animal species are not sexually differentiated at all (they are all females), but reproduce asexually in parthenogenesis (self-cloning). This does not mean that these animals (for example, species of whiptail lizards) do not engage in sexual behavior. They engage in behavior that is identical to the mating behavior of sexually differentiated species, but in which the females take turns to act male or female parts. This sexual interaction is believed to cause the females to lay more eggs than they would if they were alone (101).5

Crews uses this research to argue against the simplistic theory that chromosomes cause gonadal sex, which through hormones causes masculine or feminine characteristics and sexual behaviors. In particular he argues against the notion, which goes along with this understanding, that males are the "organized" or differentiated sex, and females the "default" sex (that is, that the action of androgens causes males to develop, while females are produced in the absence of androgens).6 Part of his argument here is evidence that both of the so-called female hormones--estrogen and progesterone--may play an active role in male sexuality. In some species, including humans and rats, testosterone is converted to estrogen in the brain and activates both male and female copulatory behaviors (Crews 1994, 103; Ehrhardt 1984, 40). As Rogers states,

Males secrete the so-called "female" sex hormone, oestrogen, and females secrete the "male" sex hormone, testosterone. Indeed, some females have higher plasma levels of testosterone than do some males. In the brain, where sex hormones are meant to cause sex differences in behavior, the distinction between the sexes becomes even less distinct. There are no known sex differences in the binding of oestrogen in the hypothalamic area of the brain, let alone binding at higher levels of brain organisation; and testosterone must be converted to oestrogen intracellularly before it can act on neurones. (1988, 44)

As both Rogers and Crews point out then, animals do not form entirely male or female brains, and, in animals such as rats, female nerve circuits are not lost in males, hormone administration can cause them to be activated (Rogers 1988, 45; Crews 1994). It is the interacting roles of the social, environmental, and hormonal that cause any particular male or female behavior in animals.

These examples of the interaction of the social and the biological in nonhuman animals are useful challenges to the theories outlined in part one, because they demonstrate that even in supposedly "simple" animals such as rats and chicks (animals that are used as models in these sciences to argue for biological causality of behaviors), and lizards, birds, and fish, sexually differentiated behaviors are not caused by biology. Even though hormones are understood to play an important role in the production of these behaviors, this role cannot be theorized in isolation from the animal's physical environment and its interactions with other animals. If the behavior of "simple" animals is not caused biologically, then how can a legitimate claim be made in relation to humans, who are perceived within science as more complicated and complex than these other animals?

The Body as Lived

Alterity is the very possibility and process of embodiment: it conditions but is also a product of the pliability or plasticity of bodies which makes them other than themselves, other than their "nature," their functions and identities. (Grosz 1994, 209) Contemporary feminist theories of the body provide tools for a critique and rethinking of the biological/social distinction evident in psychology and behavioral neuroendocrinology.7 This section outlines this work, with a particular focus on that of philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, in order to develop a more complex notion of the interrelation of the social and biological.

Grosz' book Volatile Bodies (1994) forms part of an important body of feminist theory arising from the 1980s in the wake of poststructuralist analyses of psychoanalysis. This body of work, which includes Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), and Moira Gatens' Imaginary Bodies (1996), problematizes the distinction made in earlier feminist thinking between sex and gender, in which sex was a biological substrate and gender an externally-produced social interpretation. Each of these writers theorizes the body as an entity that disrupts this easy social-biological distinction and as active in the production of gender and sexual differences.

In opposition to the idea that the biological body exists independently of representations of it (which can be objectively made by science), these theorists argue that representations and understandings of the body participate in the very constitution of bodies. Grosz, for example, writes in the introduction to Volatile Bodies, "I will deny that there is the 'real,' material body on one hand and its various cultural and historical representations and cultural inscriptions on the other. It is my claim throughout this book that these representations and cultural inscriptions quite literally constitute bodies and help produce them as such" (1994, x). Butler makes a similar claim about sexed bodies, arguing that these are materialized through the repeated performative social practices that constitute gender.

Importantly, neither Grosz nor Butler suggest that bodies are utterly constituted by language, or have no biological content. Butler clearly states that there are "undeniable materialities" (including "hormonal and chemical composition") pertaining to the body, but suggests that there are no clear boundaries that divide these materialities from cultural interpretations of them (Butler 1993, 66-7). This notion of the inseparability of the biological and social in the production of sexed bodies is also espoused by Grosz: "[T]he interimplication of the natural and the social or cultural needs further investigation-the hole in nature that allows cultural seepage or production must provide something like a natural condition for cultural production; but in turn the cultural too must be seen in its limitations, as a kind of insufficiency that requires natural supplementation" (1994, 21). Thus Grosz' suggestion is to attempt to problematize the strict division between nature and culture, or biology and society, and think of these terms instead as somehow mutually dependent, with each requiring the other for its existence. Biology is seen to be endlessly open to cultural intervention, but nevertheless to retain some existence: it is the body which then becomes "the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of the binary pairs" (23).

This notion of the body as a threshold is further explicated in Grosz' understanding of sexual difference. Rejecting a social constructivist view of the body as a passive and neutral recipient of social inscription, and yet also refusing any simple biologistic view of "obvious" sexual differences, means that sexual difference must be rethought along the same lines as the body itself. Grosz writes:

I am reluctant to claim that sexual difference is purely a matter of the inscription and codification of somehow uncoded, absolutely raw material, as if these materials exert no resistance or recalcitrance to the processes of cultural inscription. This is to deny a materiality or a material specificity and determinateness to bodies. It is to deny the postulate of a pure, that is, material difference. It is to make them infinitely pliable, malleable. On the other hand, the opposite extreme also seems untenable. Bodies are not fixed, inert, purely genetically or biologically programmed entities that function in their particular ways and in their determinate forms independent of their cultural milieu and value. (1994, 190)

Again Grosz argues that the problem here is the attempt to separate the biological and the social into two distinct categories. Instead she suggests that each side is necessary and limits the other in ways that can never be set in advance, but which nonetheless have significant effects. From this point of view, sexual difference, although always overwritten with cultural values, must contain some sort of biological dimension, a dimension that can be seen as a materiality that makes developments possible. Sexual difference is not a matter of pre-existing categories with set contents, but is an interval or gap--a radical difference--between the sexes' experiences and knowledges. It does not fit clearly into the dualism of nature and culture (Grosz 1994, 208-9).

In these theorists' deconstructive view of the nature/culture distinction, one side of the dualism always operates as a limit for the other side. Although it is argued that such limits are never knowable in advance, there is a tendency to emphasize the flexibility of the social in contrast to the fixity of the biological. Butler, for example, tends to place stronger emphasis on the flexibility of gender than the materialities of sex in her readings of discourses and events (Martin 1994, 110-2). As in the quote below, at times Grosz also positions the biological as more fixed than the social (the biological is theorized as a limit on the social, rather than the other way around). This emphasis allows an active/passive split to resurface as biology is positioned as a passive limitation on the social.

The body is constrained by its biological limits--limits, incidently, whose framework or "stretchability" we cannot yet know, we cannot presume, even if we must presume some limits. The body is not open to all the whims, wishes, and hopes of the subject: the human body, for example, cannot fly in the air, it cannot breathe underwater unaided by prostheses, it requires a broad range of temperatures and environmental supports, without which it risks collapse and death. (1994, 187)

In a review article, Pheng Cheah argues that the radicality of Grosz' and Butler's theorizing about the body is undercut by the positioning of materiality as negative constraint (Cheah 1996). In Cheah's reading, Grosz' reliance on the Lacanian notion of "the natural lack in mankind," and Butler's focus on the performative role of language and signification, mean that they focus only on human bodies as active, and view nonhuman nature as passive. In relation to Grosz, for example, Cheah writes,

[D]espite her astute observation that the body is indeterminably positioned between material weightiness and cultural variability so that either trait may be used depending on whether one opposes essentialism or social constructionism, the emphasis on strategic use favours variability as a higher level of strategic cognition. Often the weightiness of matter or nature in general is played down. Or inhuman nature carries an unfavourable connotation in comparison with human nature which is fluid and capable of retranscription. (1996, 127)

As I argued above, this view of nonhuman nature as completely biological (non-social) and unchanging is challenged by recent scientific work on the role of the social in the lives of many animal species.

Despite these criticisms, the theorization of the "interimplication" of nature and culture is of great value in its moving away from questioning whether "the body is social or biological" and more toward asking "how an examination of the body demonstrates the limitations of these categories." In relation to the sciences discussed in part one, this approach is extremely radical as it undermines the basic assumption that complex processes can be divided into entities that are either biologically or socially caused. The problematization of the biological/social distinction produced by feminist theories of the body means that questions about the causes of sexed behaviors must be completely reframed.

Part Three: A Feminist Response--Rejecting Essentialism?

I have argued that the sciences that describe the role of hormones in the production of sexually differentiated behaviors tend toward biologistic explanations. This is achieved through the devaluing and reduction of social explanations, caused in part by adherence to a social/biological dichotomy. Such biologistic explanations are commonly used to justify and affirm oppressive situations, although they also have a long history of being used to advocate tolerance of differences (Kenen 1997; Terry 1997). They are always political. The status of science in Western culture is often used to bolster sexist and homophobic understandings of sexual and sexuality differences, and often either through omission (thus race-blindness) or admission to bolster racism (Harding 1993b). The important question for feminists then becomes, how can we most effectively critique such explanations?

One major feminist response to such biologistic explanations has been to reject them as essentialist. Grosz defines essentialism as "the attribution of a fixed essence to women," and defines as a subcategory of essentialism, biologism: "a particular form of essentialism in which women's essence is defined in terms of their biological capacities" (1990, 334). The problems of essentialist claims are listed by Grosz: "[T]hey are necessarily ahistorical; they confuse social relations with fixed attributes; they see these fixed attributes as inherent limitations to social change; and they refuse to take seriously the historical and geographical differences between women--differences between women across different cultures as well as within a single culture" (Grosz 1990; 335). Work such as that produced by Reinisch et al. (described earlier) meets this definition.

However, the essentialism debates of the 1980s and 1990s have led many feminists to question the value of critiques that stop at the accusation of essentialism. This questioning has centered around issues concerning bodily differences between the sexes, asking: If we critique biologistic explanations of sexual differences, what happens to the body, or to bodily differences? Do we have to reject all descriptions of biology in rejecting essentialism? Or can there be some other way of theorizing biology that does not posit it as either primary or unchanging?

The idea that essentialism cannot be simply rejected was based on the belief that feminism needs to retain some notion of "women" to survive as a political movement. Many theorists have argued that feminism must retain this word, even at the expense of opening itself up to the accusation of essentializing and thus not properly accounting for differences between women, and/or claiming some sort of defining meaning of "women" that does not exist. Rosi Braidotti puts it strongly: "[A] feminist woman theoretician who is interested in thinking about sexual difference and the feminine today cannot afford not to be essentialist" (1989, 93).

When feminist theorists take this stand for what Gayatri Spivak names a "strategic" use of essentialism (1984, 11), however, they very rarely base their strategic use of the word "women" on a biological definition. Instead they tend to rely on some sort of shared cultural oppression, or lived and/or psychical embodiment. In Volatile Bodies, for example, Grosz stresses a notion of sexual difference that is related to a shared experience of embodiment. She claims that some experiences of the cultural, political, signified, and signifying body are, in general if not in their specifics, shared by women: the experiences of menstruation and lactation. Grosz is quick to point out that

This irreducible specificity in no way universalizes the particular ways in which women experience their bodies and bodily flows. But given the social significance of these bodily processes that are invested in and by the processes of reproduction, all women's bodies are marked as different to men's (and inferior to them) particularly at those bodily regions where women's differences are most visibly manifest. (1994, 207)

Thus she relies on a notion of a certain commonality of women's bodily experiences while at the same time refusing to name this body "biological." In a footnote she explains further: "I am not advocating a naturalist or even a universalist attribute. Nonetheless, it is also true that all women, whatever the details of their physiology and fertility, are culturally understood in terms of these bodily flows" (Grosz 1994, 228).

The distinction between the biological and the morphological body is central to Grosz' argument. On the question of the relation of the biological body to essentialism, Spivak makes an important point in an interview with Ellen Rooney, who asks if our confusion about how to theorize the body is the root of the problem of essentialism. Interestingly, Rooney follows this question with a reference to a newspaper article that stated that women find it hard to find their cars during menstruation because of hormonal changes. Spivak interrupts and says "Really? I didn't see that. It gives me an answer to the question" (1994, 176). By this, I presume that she means that the answer to Rooney's question about the central role of the biological body is "yes." Rooney then goes on to ask Spivak about her attempts to address bodies, and Spivak replies:

I am against universalizing in that way. I mean I would look at why they're essentializing, rather than to say "this is bad" necessarily, because I think there is something, some biological remnant in the notion of gender, even in the good notion of gender. Biology doesn't just disappear, except it should not be offered as a ground of all explanations. So basically on that, you know, I'm a non foundationalist in that sense especially when grounds are found to justify bad politics. So it's almost as if I'm going at it the other way, a sort of deductive anti-essentialist, how is the essence being used? (1994, 176-7)

Spivak thus rejects an outright refusal of the notion of biology, and focuses instead on an examination of how biology is used to make certain political claims. She stresses that there is no biology (or way of thinking about bodies and their functions) that is somehow pure, untainted by culture or the social: there is, for her, no "body as such" that can be thought outside of cultural systems of thought. In this her position seems to come close to that of Grosz. She states:

But apart from that I would say that biology, a biology, is one way of thinking the systematicity of the body. The body, like all other things, cannot be thought as such. Like all other things I have never tried to approach the body as such. I do take the extreme ecological view that the body as such has no possible outline. . . . You know, if one really thinks of the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such. . . . There are thinkings of the systematicity of the body, there are value codings of the body. The body, as such, cannot be thought, and I certainly cannot approach it. (Spivak 1994, 177)

Spivak's position on essentialism and the body is useful here. For it avoids simplistic rejections of scientific arguments as essentialist (they are essentialist and therefore bad) and instead argues for an examination of the political uses of essentialist claims. Also, her position on biology avoids the reaffirmation of the biology/social distinction by refusing an absolute denial of the role of biology. We can assume that some sort of the biological exists, but it cannot be thought outside of discourse.

The danger to feminist criticisms of scientific positions such as those describing the role of hormones in producing sex differences, is that if biology is simply rejected as essentialist, simplistic, or just plain unbearable, it is reinstated as unknowable and beyond the social, beyond feminism (see also Wilson 1999; Grosz 1999, 31-2). In turn, giving biology this status means that the social/biological distinction is affirmed, rather than deconstructed. Equally pertinent is the proposition that when scientific understandings of biology are examined, biology is not simply biological. I have shown above that even the behavior of supposedly "simple" animals as rats and chickens cannot be explained as simply biological (or non-social). Elsewhere I have shown that the more basic science of endocrinology is unable to sustain an argument that the sexed body itself is simply biological. Instead there are many complicated interactions and congruence that fluctuate and combine to produce any particular sexed body at any particular moment (Roberts 1998). Feminist theory, then, does itself a disfavor by presuming that biology is the opposite of the social, or that indeed the split between the social and the biological is anywhere clear or knowable. For it seems always that one is inside the other already: the social in the biological and, perhaps more perturbingly for feminist theory, the biological in the social. Neither can be understood in separation from the other. As Spivak says, "the body, like all other things cannot be thought as such" (1994, 177).

Sex hormones play varied roles in the production of sex differences within different discourses. As has been demonstrated, these range from simple determination of differences via gonads, through the structuring of brains and mysterious "predispositions," to a more complex view of co-action with the social environment. Whilst feminist theorists have successfully argued that the biological cannot be directly approached, we need effective ways of thinking through these historically powerful roles. To focus on the co-construction or "interimplication" of the biological and the social, rather than replicating their division, may prove fruitful.


Celia Roberts completed her Ph.D. in Women's Studies in 1998. Her dissertation engages with feminist theories of the body through an examination of scientific and biomedical understandings of sex hormones. She is currently Research Associate in the Faculty of Education at Sydney University, working on a study of gender equity in public institutions. Correspondence should be sent to Roberts at School of Social, Policy, and Curriculum Studies, Faculty of Education (A35), University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; c.roberts@edfac.usyd.edu.au

Notes

1 . Whilst the articles discussed here represent important strands of research into sex hormones and brain development, this paper does not attempt a comprehensive appraisal of the field of neuropsychology. Rather, the research is used as evidence of particular modes of understanding the social/biological distinction prominent within behavioral endocrinology and biological psychology. For a comprehensive feminist analysis of neuropsychology, see Wilson (1998).

2 . Ehrhardt's work since the mid-1980s has focused on issues relating to HIV/AIDS and sexuality, rather than sex differences.

3 . A self-report, 12-item questionnaire was used to ascertain the hand preference of 32 homosexual women and 38 homosexual men. The levels of left-hand preference were compared to previously measured levels of handedness in a general population sample (N=2322). The homosexual women were found to have higher prevalence of left-hand preference, a result which is used to argue for "atypical pattern of hemispheric lateralization in this group" (McCormick, Witelson, and Kingstone 1990, 2). Homosexual men did not differ from the general population sample. There are clearly numerous problems with this study: homosexual subjects were recruited from "a local homophile organization" and therefore may have had many social factors in common, and subject numbers are very low. The logic of the discussion is also odd: McCormick et al. argue that from their results, "one would expect" that 4 percent of left-hand-preferring women would be homosexual, and 1 percent of right-hand-preferring women to be homosexual. Ninety-six percent of left-handed-preferring women, then, would not be homosexual. As a causal explanation for female homosexuality then, brain hemispheric lateralization (as demonstrated by hand preferences) seems very weak indeed. For further critical evaluation of studies regarding hand preference and brain lateralization, see Rogers (1999, 103-18).

4 . Rogers (1999, 109-11) also reports studies showing that handling of rat pups by humans after birth influences brain development when testosterone is also present (i.e., in males, or if females are injected with testosterone). These results also support the contention that the effects of hormones are combined with social interactions in the production of sex differences.

5 . Crews' interpretation of these behaviors has been the subject of controversy within major scientific journals. For a discussion of this controversy, and an analysis of Crews' diverse writing practices, see Myers (1990).

6 . This view forms the basis of mainstream biological and physiological views of sexual development. It has been criticised by feminist theorists of science (see for example, Fausto-Sterling 1995).

7 . For a critical survey of contemporary theories of embodiment, including feminist theories, see Williams and Bendelow (1998).

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