Reconsidering the turn to biology in feminist theory

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Re-considering the turn to biology in feminist theory

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DOI: 10.1177/1464700114545323

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Special section article

Re-considering the turn tobiology in feminist theory

Samantha FrostUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Abstract

This article argues that feminist theorists should conceive of the life sciences not only as

a factual resource but also as a figural resource. It proposes that in shifting our con-

ceptual orientation to biological science from fact to figure, feminists will be able to give

theoretical life to scientific findings about the ways in which social environments and

material habitats are processes integral to our development, growth, and social and

political well-being. The figuration of ourselves as specifically biocultural creatures will

enable feminists to gain a stronger theoretical and analytic purchase on the ongoing

mutual shaping of the biological and social dimensions of existence. This, in turn, will

enable feminists to creatively re-imagine the fields and fora of feminist politics.

Keywords

Biology and feminism, embodiment, gender, nature–culture binary, science studies

Introduction

Feminists are increasingly exploring the materiality that emerges when we insert acaesura in the immediate association between the body and biopolitical subjectformation – the materiality of the body as an organism rather than its materialityas a subject. To explore this dimension of materiality, they often turn to the bio-logical sciences. However, when they do so, it is not immediately clear what theymight or should do theoretically and politically with the information they garnerbeyond holding it up as evidence for discrediting prevailing conventions of under-standing: the body qua organism is or works not like this but rather like that. Thepoint of observing the hesitancy with which feminists elaborate scientific researchon the body-as-organism is not to diminish the careful research produced by scho-lars such as Anne Fausto-Sterling or Evelyn Fox Keller. Indeed, their work isexemplary in that they elucidate the various political and epistemic ‘milieux’ that

Corresponding author:

Samantha Frost, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 420 David Kinley

Hall MC-713, 1407 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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underwrite their scholarship (Code, 2006). Rather, the point is to query thestrength and direction of the ‘therefore’ that implicitly follows the correctivecritique.

Feminist engagements with the life sciences are riven with an ambivalence thatderives from the insight that biology the science and biology the object of study arehistorically specific and politically fraught discursive formations. If, as Myra Hirdsuggests, there are benefits to be had in ‘engaging directly with the natural sciences’(2004: 224), in what do those benefits lie? Hird proposes that the ‘details of cor-poreality’ found in the life sciences might serve as resources for feminists to developricher and broader critiques of the norms and institutions that ‘regulate women’srelationships with their own bodies’ (2004: 225). The idea here is that more infor-mation makes for better critique. At the same time, however, Elizabeth Wilsonnotes that for some feminists, the body-as-organism is primarily an effect of thediscourses that produce the body-as-subject: the saturation of biology with thedemands and pressures of biopolitics is inescapable (1998: 1–2). From such a per-spective, the suggestion that feminists use scientific findings to reconsider the body-as-organism could be dismissed as a naıve and even stubbornly atavistic effort toavoid coming to terms with the contemporary insight that anything we could besaid to know of bodies-as-organisms is historically specific and implicated in theinstrumentalisation of the life sciences. Indeed, Cecelia Asberg observes thatthe very imbrication of the knowledges of biological bodies with the institutionsand practices that foment their discursive formation could mean that for feministsto turn to science would be for them to accede to science’s wanton imperialism; itwould be to reaffirm science as ‘proper’ knowledge and thus to perpetuate ‘thecultural authority of scientific knowledge in relation to other kinds of knowledge’(Asberg and Birke, 2010: 418). Currently, then, feminists find themselves at some-thing of an impasse, not wanting to ‘take an anti-scientific stance as our openinggesture’, as Elizabeth Wilson notes, and yet concerned about how ‘credulous-ness [. . .] about data put in front of us by scientific investigation’ might blind us tothe political dynamics that constitute scientific practices and buttress the presumedsuperiority of scientific modes of knowing (Kirby and Wilson, 2011: 233).

The quandary about how much to rely on findings from the life sciences – aboutwhether to lean on them, about the extent to which feminists can trust them – turnson the suspicion that the science informing the corrective critique might implicatefeminists in as-yet undetected forms of biopolitics. However, I want to suggest thatwhat compels feminists to ask questions about the theoretical and political impli-cations of biology and what makes us sometimes dread the answer is not neces-sarily, or only, a politically astute historicism. Also at issue is the logic thatstructures the presumption that better/corrected biological facts will lead tobetter politics. The sceptical posture that insists that we denaturalise and historicisethe body – that we know it in a better, more critical way – is a posture thatrecapitulates the logic underwriting the notion that biology is a ground for politics.Lena Gunnarsson makes a similar point, observing that the stance requiring thatthe body-as-organism be construed as a discursive formation ‘operates within the

308 Feminist Theory 15(3)



confines of the [. . .] categorical structures’ of biological determinism (2013: 6).Accordingly, embedded in feminist suspicion about the politics that constitutethe biological sciences is also the uncomfortable sense that in accepting a scientificclaim about biology one is being tricked into accepting a noxious assumption orentailment that one certainly would not knowingly or voluntarily affirm.

In this article, I will elucidate and challenge the background assumptions thatevoke in feminist scholars a wary sense that there is a political Trojan horse afootin feminist uses of the biological sciences. The chief of these assumptions is thatfeminists should approach the life sciences as a kind of knowledge that can formthe basis for feminist politics. I will argue that feminists should conceive of the lifesciences not only as a critical factual resource but also as a figural resource. That is,I will propose that feminists think of the life sciences as producing something akinto what Nikolas Rose describes as a ‘philosophy of life’, a philosophy that figures‘what we think we are as living creatures’ (2013: 23). As Celia Roberts notes in herstudy of sex hormones, research in the life sciences that traces ‘the complex inter-relations of the biological and the social’ can provide models for a radical ‘recon-figuring’ of who and what we are (2007: 26, xv). Indeed, I will argue that it isthrough shifting our conceptual orientation from fact to figure that feminists willbe able to displace the ever-persistent fiction that nature and culture are distinctand thereby to imagine and creatively re-imagine the fields and fora of politics.

From fact to figure

Although she does not engage with these particular issues directly, in her critique oftrends in contemporary feminist theory Linda Zerilli provides an analysis thatelucidates the reasons that feminists might feel ambivalent and uncertain aboutwhether and how to incorporate research from the life sciences into their work(2005). In the first instance, and echoing other critics, Zerilli argues that the epis-temological underpinnings of third wave feminism, while productive in manyrespects, have also become politically constraining. The bulk of feminist theoryproduced in the past couple of decades has taken the form of scepticism about thenaturalness or veracity of identity categories and the exposure of the politicalnorms and forms of compulsion through which those identities are elaborated,taken up, and mobilised as real in social and political life. However, as RobynWeigman points out, implicit in the leveraging of scepticism for political purposesis the presumption that ‘knowing will lead to knowing what to do’ (2010: 84). Toimagine that politics could or should follow from verification or doubt about thetruth of an injury or identity is to integrate such claims into an instrumentalist ormeans-ends form of political rationality in which the claim to truth is to be used fora political purpose. Such a logic of entailment obscures what Wendy Browndescribes as the ‘radical contingency of political views and judgments’ and reducespolitics to a contest over truth claims (2001: 120). Accordingly, as identities and theforms of subjectivity constituted around and against them have become increas-ingly historicised and specified, the feminist movement has become increasingly

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fractured. This fracturing, Zerilli suggests, has resulted from a political de-author-isation attendant to the sceptical critique: in making it epistemologically suspectto speak in general terms about ‘women’, the sceptical posture has also made itpolitically difficult to make political claims on women’s behalf.

Zerilli’s critique of this trend in feminist theory suggests that the turn to biologycould be politically problematic in that the focus on the insights and details aboutmaterial embodiment that it is perceived as offering might re-enforce the epistemo-logical orientation that positions knowledge as instrumentally useful. From theperspective of Zerilli’s argument, such a re-enforcement would implicitly endorsethe notion that a well-verified biological fact has a political entailment. And thenotion that a political ‘therefore’ might follow from a finding in the life scienceswould constitute an ironic and ghostly return of the biology-is-destiny logic thatfeminists have worked so hard to dispel. Further, the idea that biology might beused for political purposes might distract feminists from critically engaging andelaborating different political visions by directing our critical apparatus to theevaluation of the veracity or ideological saturation of various scientific claims.Aside from the problem that such a redirection of critical energies is one forwhich only a few feminist theorists are particularly well-prepared, the reaffirmationof a presumptive link between biological and political claims implied by anendorsement of the epistemological orientation could undermine political claimsthat could not be said to have a basis in biology.

But Zerilli’s analysis need not spell a recommendation that feminists repudiatethe life sciences. For in addition to elaborating her concern about the kinds ofpolitical impasse produced by the epistemological orientation of recent feministtheory, Zerilli offers another framework for analysis. This framework orients herdiscussion of the denaturalisation of sex that is part of the feminist sceptical pro-ject. Her intervention here concerns the recalcitrance of the dual-sex system as anorienting reference in discussions about gender and sexuality in spite of the impres-sive critical and historicising arsenal deployed to expose it as a social constructvested with normative and political power. Taking as her examples both JudithButler’s work on performativity and Anne Fausto-Sterling’s research on variationsin sexual morphology, Zerilli notes that the exposure of the seeming naturalness ofthe heterosexual dual-sex system as a ruse of power or as empirically untrue has notactually displaced or destroyed that dualism. To be sure, there have been positivesocial developments emerging at least in part from the appeal of denaturalisationarguments, for individuals with non-normative sexual morphology or gender andsexual identity are treated less punitively by social and medical establishments andsometimes are acknowledged and assisted in their lives generously by an expandingnetwork of organisations. However, echoing analyses by scholars such as Siebler(2012) and Hird (2000), Zerilli asserts that in spite of those champions attending tothe travails of transgender youth or sexual minorities, discussions of intersexualityor transgenderism retain the dualism of male–female as the system of reference,which is to say that the terms of that dualism govern discussions and argumentsabout extraordinary sexes and genders along with the ordinary ones (2005: 40).




Zerilli contends that the staying power of sexual dualism is not the result of afailure to denaturalise it adequately: it is not the case that we have not been scepticalenough. Rather, the epistemological assumptions framing the sceptical denatural-isation of sexual dualism delimit the effort to deconstruct it. Drawing on argumentsforwarded by Wittgenstein (1969) and Castoriadis (1987), Zerilli claims that a scep-tical approach towards sex and gender mistakes for knowledge what is ‘a form ofcertainty’, a system ofmeanings held together by the accretion of linguistic and socialpractices (2005: 50). For her, sex and gender are not a form of knowing that is subjectto disruption through doubt. Rather, sex and gender are a form of doing. And by‘doing’ here, shemeans not the form of citational practice central to the performativetheory of gender; that theory’s advocacy of a strategic mis-performance of whatheretofore has been deemed real or true reveals the theory’s roots in the scepticalproblematic. Rather, for Zerilli, the doing is a mundane way of life underwritten bycertainties that orient and organise our perception and experience of the world inwhich we live. As a kind of certainty, the dual-sex system comprises the set of back-ground meanings that enable us to recognise, apply, question, misapply, or multiplythe sex and gender categories under which we subsume various individuals. Indeed, itis precisely because the dual-sex system is compositional, in the sense of providingthe basic coordinates and background meanings within which we can make sense ofwhat we see, that knowledge claims about sex and gender – and sceptical questionschallenging them – can be said to make sense. For Zerilli, since those scepticalquestions make sense only within the meaning-framework of sexual dualism,sceptical denaturalisation falls short of undermining it.

Addressing this point, Zerilli suggests that

if the exception to the rule rarely disrupts our tendency to subsume all bodies under

the rule of sex difference, that may be because what we lack is not an appropriately

denaturalized position from which to doubt what we think we see but an alternative

figure of the thinkable with which to organize anew the very experience of seeing,

that is, of meaning. (2005: 62)

According to Zerilli, in order to disrupt and transform ‘the system of representationin whichwe decide the question of true or false’, we need new forms of imagination orfiguration that can provide ‘a different way of judging and organizing our experience’(2005: 59–60). The challenge, then, is not – or not only – to deploy the non-normativeor the normatively strange to call into doubt the veracity, the givenness, or thedeterminateness of sex. Rather – or in addition – it is to develop ‘a new way ofseeing that allows us to gain a different perspective on an empirical object that hasnot (necessarily) changed’ (Zerilli, 2005: 62). To use the language she borrows fromCastoriadis, for Zerilli new figures of the thinkable would re-organise our sense ofhow the world fits together – and do so in ways that would be fundamentally moretransformative than is possible through the sceptical problematic.

What is useful in Zerilli’s arguments about the need to identify and refigure theframes of reference by which we make sense of the world is that she enables us both

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to understand why the turn to biology may induce theoretical and political queasi-ness and also to conceive of that turn in a different way. If the shift to biology isarticulated as a desire to deprioritise or give a counterbalance to the dominantforms of cultural deconstruction, as is often done, then it is quite possible thatfeminists’ exploration of the biological facets of the body’s materiality anchors orretains them within the sceptical problematic. In other words, the turn to biologymay simply be a (perverse) replication of the sceptical paradigm according to theterms of which one leverages the material or biological to expose social or linguisticreality as merely constructed and therefore subject to doubt. In such a move,biology or matter is both a resource and a reason to doubt the totalising claimsof cultural deconstruction. And of course, true to the epistemological logic thatunderpins the sceptical orientation, to posit the materially or biologically ‘real’ overand against the dubiously socially constructed presumes a political programme asan entailment of the critical insight. And to presume, even implicitly, that a polit-ical programme will emerge from a fact of biological reality is to provoke anuneasiness that elicits a reluctant emesis of a question: what follows? However, ifwe take seriously Zerilli’s contention that we need ‘new figures of the thinkable’,then the turn to biology may be seen in a different light. To elucidate this possi-bility, I would like to use Zerilli’s framework to revisit her analysis of the work ofButler and Fausto-Sterling.

While it is certainly plausible to read deconstructive debates about the dual-sexsystem as falling along the axis of what is determinately real (‘true’) or politicallyfictive (‘subject to doubt’) in sex and gender, it is also possible to read them asengaging questions of aetiology – of what in our identities and selves is naturallyas opposed to socially caused. That is, the practice of denaturalisation at the heart ofthe sceptical project does not turn simply on doubt about the veracity of our under-standings of sex and gender as objects of knowledge (are they, or are they not, whatwe think we know they are?). Denaturalisation can also be conceived as a projectchallenging what we commonly take to be the causal relationship between, or theprocesses peculiar to, nature and culture. Butler (1990), for instance, demonstrateshow we performatively produce (natural) sex and desire as the (natural) causes of(social) gender. In other words, she shows how we cite and thereby performativelyconstitute natural causes so as to produce sex, gender, and desire as logical entail-ments of one another. In her critique, what we have taken to be simple, linear,natural entailments are actually the product of cultural imperatives and politicalpractice. Crucial to her argument is the insight that the direction of the causalrelationship between nature and culture is other than we have thought it to be.

From within this causal or process-oriented interpretive framework, Fausto-Sterling’s work on variations in sexual morphology is not simply a doubt-inducingcorrective to our commonplace ideas about the givenness of two sexes – replacing atruth about two sexes with a different truth about five (2000, 2012). It is not asupplement providing grist for the sceptical mill. In her analysis, there are multipleand variably-influenced biological and cultural processes that together contributeto the development of sex and gender identity. Biology and culture are patterns of




activity that inter-penetrate and work together differentially over time: Fausto-Sterling tackles questions of process and causation. And rather than effecting areversal of the common understanding (‘culturally as opposed to naturallycaused’), she challenges our implicit sense of their distinction. The point here isthat rather than being confined by the logic of the sceptical problematic, Butler andFausto-Sterling can be seen as engaged in projects of refiguration, efforts to rear-range or re-organise our implicit sense of the relationships between phenomena.

Figuring the turn to biology

Drawing on Zerilli’s mode of analysis, we can read Butler’s and Fausto-Sterling’sprojects as working both within and against the background meanings or systemsof representation according to which natural causation and social causation are thetwo meaningful options for thinking about the processes that constitute sex andgender. Generally, these two discrete options map the topography of possibilitiesfor understanding where sex comes from and why gender happens. To call intoquestion the claims that emerge from the one or the other of these two options isnot necessarily to disrupt the terms that define that topography. Such criticism mayfunction simply to shift the weight of explanation from one side of the dualism(natural) to the other (social) while maintaining the integrity of the dualism as awhole. In a sense, the dualism is something of a zero-sum game: to make a claim forone side is to compel the other to concede explanatory ground. To shift the fulcrumof explanation one way or the other, to propose more of either nature or culture asthe provenance of objects and identities, does nothing to refigure that backgroundset of meanings according to which nature and culture are discrete alternatives. Butwhile Butler and Fausto-Sterling are variously constrained by the confines of thatsystem of representation, they also endeavour to refuse and transform it.

We can see just how this framing constrains and disconcerts analysis if we readButler’s rehearsal of the ‘what about hormones?’ challenge to her account of thematerialisation of sex in Bodies that Matter (1993). In the introduction to thisbook, Butler elaborates her argument that the sex of bodies is materialised andmade real through the discursive citation of the norms of sexual difference: throughreferencing and operationalising what we expect to be its sex, the body and itsfeatures are made to matter, in the sense of being attributed significance, and madematerially intelligible, in the sense of becoming perceptually and conceptuallyapprehensible. One of the virtues of Butler’s argument is its account of how thesocial and the material interact. Within this argument, it is not the case that thesocial acts upon the material merely as a veil of attributed significance whosemeaning is interpreted and, through that interpretation, reflects society back toitself. The weight of causal explanation shifts more profoundly such that the mater-ial – the body – actually incorporates the norms and imperatives, becoming,through gesture, comportment, and various practices and habits of self-identifica-tion, what the norms and imperatives specify. Indeed, it is the very depth to whichthe social is seen to inform and shape the natural that can be seen as provoking the

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‘what about hormones?’ question. Having argued that discursive imperatives andthe normative practices they incite saturate as they constitute the material sexedbody, Butler finds herself compelled to address those of her critics who insist thatshe admit ‘that there are, minimally, sexually differentiated parts, activities, capa-cities, hormonal and chromosomal differences that can be conceded without refer-ence to ‘‘construction’’’ (1993: 10).

As this question – or injunction – is posed, it does seem to invoke the scepticalproblematic identified by Zerilli. ‘What about hormones?’ calls into question whatthe constructionist claims to know; the challenge seeks to force an acknowledge-ment that not everything is constructed or materialised in the way the materialisa-tion argument claims. These critics can be seen as reversing the terms of scepticalinquiry to suggest that hormones and chromosomes are aspects of the sexuallydimorphic biological body that are beyond the range of discursive materialisation– they are simply there, working in and affecting the body whether or not they arecalled into intelligibility by the normative regime of heterosexuality. In otherwords, some elements of the body’s sex are ontologically prior to or outside ofthe discursive regime that would render bodies intelligible according to the matrixof heterosexuality. Those elements, the question implies, cannot be doubted,deconstructed, or otherwise denaturalised. Within this interpretive framework,then, the critics can be seen as calling into doubt constructionist claims to knowthat the body is a thoroughly cultural object.

What is interesting in Butler’s response is her refusal to give an answer thatmight participate in a sceptical regress that would chase the ‘reality’ of biologydown to the level of the biomolecular. Indeed, she sidesteps the sceptical problem-atic and instead considers the limitations of the terms we use to talk about thenatural: the problem, she suggests, is a linguistic or figural one. Butler concedes thepoint about the reality of hormones and chromosomes. However, she notes thatwhile ‘at this moment I want to offer an absolute reassurance to my interlocutor,some anxiety prevails’ (1993: 10). The anxiety that makes her concession a reluctantone concerns not the inevitable force of the sceptical impulse but rather the con-straints of our metaphysical grammar – or to put it in the terms that Zerilli mightuse, the system of background meanings that make possible and delimit our appre-hension of the world. As Butler explains, the grammar we have at our disposal issuch that we cannot talk about the putative reality of biology without naturalisingit. If we concede the existence of hormones – as Butler suggests inevitably we must– we thereby, through that concession, reconstitute a domain of extra-discursivereality. Moreover, and paradoxically, that extra-discursive domain, designated as itmust be through language, recaptures biology within the very discursive regimethat the objectors hoped to circumscribe with their petition. As she puts it, ‘there isno reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further formation of thebody [. . .]. In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degreeperformative’ (Butler, 1993: 11). So, while Butler wants to reassure her challengersabout hormones and chromosomes and such, the failure of the concession to realiseits delimiting purpose produces a nagging, anxious sense of dissatisfaction.




There are a couple of moments I would like to draw out of this staged exchangebetween Butler and her critics. First, the assumptions that inform the question thatButler re-poses to herself construe discursive regimes as normatively driven and thenorms that animate those regimes as valences of meaning. At root, then, the ques-tion can be seen as one of how meaning can have a formative effect on the materialof biology. Implicit in this question is a sense that social meaning is of a differentorder of causation than that which shapes organic matter. Biology is that which isbeyond the reach of human meaning and doubt, a realm of physical-physiologicalactivities whose causal arc is outside of human intention and political determin-ation. What is ironic, here, is that Butler’s argument about materialisation is oneaimed at challenging just such a quarantine of the biological body from socialforces. But, per the question as well as Butler’s concession, hormones are perceivedas so chemical and chromosomes as so tiny and buried in somatic cells that theyserve as a synecdoche of the biology that is out of the reach of normative impera-tives. In what must be a rhetorically-induced amnesia about the use of hormones toinvigorate masculinity (Roberts, 2002) or to enable women to engage in non-repro-ductive sexual activity (Pinto et al., 2012), the question posed to Butler asks howwe can imagine that hormones are constituted or materialised through the demandsof a discursive regime. As Celia Roberts glosses this issue, ‘[w]hilst it is clear thatdiscourse shapes our understanding of and relation to’ chromosomes or hormones,‘it is another thing to argue that discourse or the repetition of norms producesthem’ (2007: 10, emphasis in original). For the interrogating member of Butler’saudience, it is not clear how the materialising, citational practices productive ofsexed bodies could constitute androgens in any specific or determined way. So,framing the posed question is a circumscribed concept of biology: quite literally, wecannot imagine that there could be a formative interaction between these seeminglypure bio-phenomena and the strictures and vagaries of language and culture(Davis, 2009).

A second moment concerns Butler’s acknowledgement that the problem is notthe ontological existence of hormones – about that she wants to give ‘an absolutereassurance’ – but rather the fact that we lack the linguistic tools to make referenceto those hormones without producing them, discursively, as purely biological.Constraining Butler’s reassurance about the reality of hormones, and framingher reticence, is her recognition that, as a discursive object, biology is set offfrom the social. According to the terms of argument Butler advances to explainher anxiety, the biological dimensions of the body can be ‘purely’ biological only ifthey are not marked or made meaningful as such by a perceptual and discursiverendering. However, in order to encounter that biological body, it must be percep-tually intelligible, which is to say that it must be marked, and through that markingno longer ‘pure’ in the sense of being unsullied by the social qua language.Paradoxically, then, to try to acknowledge a form of biology outside of meaningis to render such a biology a-topic, something that exists, perhaps, but in noadmissible place or form. According to the logic of materialisation, the social asmeaning, the discursive as reiterative practice, is the means by which ‘pure’ biology

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comes into our existence. And since this object ‘biology’ is discursively produced asoutside of language and sociality, and thereby the stuff of a body natural, the onlyconceptually coherent response for a theorist like Butler to give to a question abouthormones is to refuse that object – to acknowledge its existence, yes, in a reluctantconcessionary aside, but also to be bound by the necessity of refusing (the terms of)its naturalisation and thus of refusing it.

There are a couple of things revealed in this dance of petition and reluctantconcession. In the bid to upbraid Butler for ignoring the putative reality of theorganismic body, the petitioners section and disaggregate the biological body, as ifthe normative or discursive appeal would be made to the chromosomes or hor-mones themselves rather than to the embodied subject who is partially composed ofthose chromosomes or hormones. My point here is not to decry the implicit anthro-pomorphisation of discrete bodily organs. Rather it is to foreground the way thatthe insistence on the ‘reality’ of biochemistry or discrete organs occludes and evenerases what Lynda Birke describes as ‘the whole organism’ and the inter-embeddedbiological systems and biochemical processes through which organisms engagetheir world (Asberg and Birke, 2010: 417). It is only in erasing ‘the whole organism’in this way that an interpellative appeal that affects hormones and chromosomescan be construed as absurd. Accordingly, and as Celia Roberts (2007) also pointsout, Butler’s interlocutors not only evince our lack of resources to figure the bio-logical as engaged or interacting with the social in other than a normatively drivenor meaningful way but also show that that lack of resources rests in part upon theocclusion of the body engaging the world as an organism. Similarly, even as Butlerchafes against the seeming explanatory fullness of the discursive account of thebiological body, the terms of the exchange as she retells it position what is beyondmeaning as beyond the purview or reach of the social. It is as if, in our conceptualplayground, social effects can only be those constitutive of meaning.

Perhaps what animates the ‘what about hormones?’ question is not a desire tocapture or hold on to some kind of pre- or extra-discursive realm. Another way toread the question is as a query about whether the interaction between biology andculture is exhausted by the ‘for-us’ of the phenomenological encounter. Perhapswhat troubles feminists in the face of the biological body is not necessarily or onlyits discursive naturalisation but also an inability to talk about the social in inter-action with the body outside of the framework of meaning. The imagined exchangebetween Butler and her interlocutors has the effect both of bolstering the sensethat the social is a domain of meaning and of sequestering the biological in muteand inapprehensible isolation if it is not illuminated and made real through dis-cursive representation. Eclipsed, here, are the interactions between the social andthe biological that are not, or not only, linguistic or discursive. The point of sayingso is not to deny that biology is discursively naturalised nor to preserve somedomain of the biological as undetermined by the normative imperatives ofthe discursive regimes we inhabit. The point, rather, is to remember, to grant toourselves, and to consider what it means to say that we, as biological organisms,are alive.1




Well, of course we are alive. Why go through all this theoretical rigmarole onlyto say something so obvious? It is obvious in an everyday way. But as Birke pointsout, given our sceptical, historicising habit of ferreting out the meanings given formin various bodies, the fact that we are alive is not obvious theoretically (Birke,2000: 145). However, if we can grant that our bodies – we, as embodied beings – arealive, there are an additional number of very obvious insights that follow.

If we can grant that we are alive, that we develop, grow, and die, then we alsoimplicitly grant that living bodies grow within, and cannot grow without, habitats.Our habitats are quite literally the conditions of our persistence in living. Giving anod to our theoretical proclivities, we can acknowledge that these habitats aremeaningful, constituted by the long and tortured histories of our social and sym-bolic practices. They are also substantial, composed of the nutritive and toxicchemicals and foodstuffs, the ground, the obstacles, the resources and shelterswithout which we cannot survive (Guthman and Mansfield, 2013). Of course, theenvironmental dimensions of bodily habitats are shaped ineluctably by social-sym-bolic processes: buildings, neighbourhoods, parks, food production and distribu-tion networks, waste disposal systems, war, energy production, famine, these are allproducts of cultural codes and normative practices as they accrete in policy, regu-lation, and law. But however much our habitats are constituted through social andsymbolic processes, they are not reducible to them. They are social, and in theirphysicality, in the ways in which they are absorbed, negotiated, exploited, used,transformed, and excreted by living bodies, they provoke, shape, and derail theactivities and processes through which living continues or desists. Bodies live anddie precisely because of the physical as well as symbolic dimensions of the social.

To acknowledge that and how we live and die is to have to come to terms withwhat Guthman and Mansfield describe as ‘the fundamental permeability of thebody’ (2013: 496). This permeability, and the processes, traffic, and flow of sub-stances and energy that it implies, entail that we figure the environment in which abody lives not simply as a meaningful context but as something that ‘actuallycomes into the body’ and shapes what and how it becomes (Guthman andMansfield, 2013: 495). If we can acknowledge this influx and efflux that is thebasis of living creatures’ persistence in living, we can begin truly to appreciatethe transfiguration of background meanings that underpins Anne Fausto-Sterling’s claim that humans are ‘100% nature and 100% nurture’: it is not oneor the other alone but both nature and nurture, body and culture, that constitute usas living creatures (2005: 1510).

Reconfiguring our imagination

Although she does not use Zerilli’s conceptual language to do so, Evelyn FoxKeller provides a fascinating elaboration of the ways in which the nature versusculture frame of reference structures the way we talk about, and even supersedes,what we claim to know about biology. In her book The Mirage of a Space betweenNature and Nurture (2010), Keller elucidates the linguistic slippages and conceptual

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habits that perpetuate the internalisation and substantialisation of the ‘natural’ inthe body. According to Keller, mid-nineteenth century scholars typically conceivedof the distinction between nature and culture in the temporal terms of the distinc-tion between pre-birth and post-birth. What were termed the innate and theacquired were both conceived as ‘influences acting over different periods of time’(Keller, 2010: 22). Within this temporal framework, the innate was conceived asopen, promissory, a potential that, upon and many years after birth, will andsometimes must be elaborated and redirected according to social need or fortune.While Keller is critical of birth as ‘a point of demarcation’ given that developmen-tal changes occur prenatally as well as post-natally, what she appreciates within thisframework is the way that the innate and the acquired, the pre- and the post-natal,are conceived in a long temporal frame as a continually changing variable nexus ofcondition, occasion, provocation, and modification (2010: 75).

However, Keller points out that as Darwin’s evolutionary theory was taken upby breeders and agricultural scientists eager to investigate and exploit specieschanges as they manifest at the level of the individual, the temporal frameworkgoverning the distinction between innate and acquired was displaced. As theseearly scientists of heredity endeavoured to identify which proportion of physicalmutations might be attributable to changes in genes and which to changes in socialenvironment, the notion of the innate ‘[gave] way to heredity, and acquired toenvironment’ (Keller, 2010: 22). In the place of the temporal distinction cameone ‘that cuts along a different axis, a division between internal and external,and concomitantly between the kinds of substances belonging to these differentspaces’ (Keller, 2010: 22). In other words, what was heritable was substantialised,spatialised, and internalised as the ‘natural’ in the body.2

As Keller observes, when the internal realm of the body is conceived in such asubstantialised form, it differs from what is external to the body in ‘the ensemblesof distinct and causal elements’ that contribute to the formation of personality(2010: 24). On the one hand, there are natural substances subject to biologicalforces; on the other, social phenomena driven by social forces. Since these twosubstances are essentially distinct, interactions between them take the form ofconfrontation between opposing forces. Roberto Esposito suggests that such asubstantialised account of the natural fosters a sense that deep within the bodythere is an untouchable core of biological-ness ‘not only to which we remain tied,but which is usually bound to resurface’ (2008: 23). The social may work upon theouter layers, kneading and moulding the body superficially so that it correspondsto historically specific cultural norms and forms. Yet, the natural core, unreachablein the body’s interior, continues to work in cultural oblivion, exerting its influenceuntil it either leaks or explodes through the constraints of what ends up being atemporary cultural veneer.

Crucially, Keller points out that scientists know that this account of the natural,the biological – the hereditary – is not true. She notes that ‘it is widely accepted bycontemporary biologists and lay readers alike [. . .] that genes and environment mustinteract to produce any biological trait, that nature (understood as hereditary) and




nurture (understood as environment) are not alternatives. And yet. And yet, theimage of separable ingredients continues to exert a surprisingly strong hold onour imagination, even long after we have learned better’ (2010: 30). EchoingDaniel Dennett, Keller explains that ‘‘‘everyone knows’’’ that nature and nurtureare not distinct causes of development and yet they continue to talk as if theyare (2010: 30).

Drawing on Zerilli’s analysis, we can see that the issue highlighted by Keller isnot epistemological in the sense that ‘everyone’ is mistaking the facts or doubtingthe scientific findings. Rather, the issue is figurative: our capacity to talk, writeabout, and imagine the body is caught in a set of background meanings accordingto which nature and nurture are discretely distinct. Against this background, itdoes not really matter what the facts indicate about the relationship between thebiological and the cultural because our representational schema organises anddelimits the meaning we can give to or take from those facts. As Celia Robertsobserves in a similar analytical situation, to present and showcase precisely correctrenditions of the facts does not do much to budge or transform the backgroundcertainty that nature and culture are substantively different phenomena shaped bysubstantively different causes (2002: 8).

It is in the context of Keller’s analysis that we can appreciate what Fausto-Sterling is up to in her recent work. Like Keller, Fausto-Sterling perceives thatthe staying power of the notion that nature and culture are distinct depends upon‘time [being] held constant’ (2008: 683). Against the notion that the body is spa-tially indifferent and temporally static, she situates the body in (its) historical time,insisting that we conceive of the body as a collection of processes of growth, trans-formation, and dynamic re-stabilisation both within individual organisms andacross generations. In arguing thus, she brings into consideration the various spa-tial and temporal scales of the permeable body’s inescapable engagement with itssocial and material environment. The conceptual re-introduction of the body’svarious temporalities enables her to show that environmental substances andsocial signals trigger, circumscribe, and magnify the biochemical conditions,molecular pathways, and cellular productions that provoke, delimit, and elaboratethe growth, mobility, and success of individuals within a material and social con-text. Through an ongoing series of provisions, provocations, and adjustments atbenign and critical moments, the living body and its material and social contexttogether elicit and produce a (continually changing) identity, body, and form.From before conception through birth and adolescence to menopause and death,biological processes, environmental conditions, and social imperatives are insepar-able forces (Fausto-Sterling, 2005: 1495).

What is important to note here is that Fausto-Sterling’s work figures the socialnot only as a field of meanings but also as a field of possibility, provocation, andconstraint for the body’s processes of growth and decay. The social and materialenvironment is not a mere context, not ‘an external, blank, or inert space’, butrather, as Stacy Alaimo claims, ‘the active emergent substance of ourselves andothers’ (2012: 563–564). Presuming a broad and temporally deep account of social

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forces, Fausto-Sterling argues that ‘[n]urture, culture, environment, geography,experience, and history – however we wish to describe it – shape nature’ (2008:683). Making a similar point, Merrill Singer observes that ‘the course of humanbiology’ is elicited and delimited by cultural forms and symbolic practices as well asby the long and recent ‘history of hierarchical social structures’, the habitats andenvironments that we have constituted through ‘the changing political economy ofhuman society’ (1996: 497).

And of course, as is implicit in the notion that the living body engages with itsenvironment, Fausto-Sterling invites us also to recognise that ‘nature influenceshow such shaping proceeds’ (2008: 683). As our bodies encounter, engage with, andgrow within human habitats, they do so as responsive organisms, imbibing, absorb-ing, consuming, resisting, and transforming the contexts of their development andgrowth. Leaning on the presumption that bodies are alive, Fausto-Sterling remindsus that ‘it is in our biological nature to generate physiological responses to ourenvironment and experience’ (2004: 31). Again, to say this is not to preserve someaspect of biology ‘beyond’ the social. Instead, it is to point to a dimension of theliving body’s temporality, to the carried-forward living history that enables andconstrains an organism’s physiological responses (Papoulias and Callard, 2010).

What we have tended to construe as the ‘biological’ or organismic body is thematerial trace of prior generations’ responses to their habitats, responses throughwhich organisms incorporate the ‘nurture, culture, environment, geography,experience, and history’ that compose those habitats. For as one generation ofcreatures engages with their habitat, their responses to that habitat engagementare carried forward in the next generation, in genes and other biochemical regula-tors, in such a way that the next generation is ‘better prepared to survive andreproduce in that environment’ (Champagne, 2011: 10). The incorporated habi-tat-responses of prior generations are the enabling and constraining conditions ofthe current generation’s engagement and response to its own habitats (West-Eberhard, 2005). What this means is that the body is an embodiment of interge-nerational response-to-habitat histories. In working with what Guthman andMansfield describe as a ‘dynamic, iterative, and open-ended model of relationsbetween environment, genes, cells, [and] bodies’ (2013: 487), in insisting that werecall the various temporalities and histories that compose the body, Fausto-Sterling’s work brings into view the mix of cultural and political practice, socialhabitus, biochemical reactions, and cellular activities that together constitute anorganism’s growth and decay.

What is so useful and remarkable in Fausto-Sterling’s research on bone densityand sexual development is not that it gives a myth-busting accounting of what isnatural and what is cultural in the aetiology of race, sex, and gender but rather thatit composes a refiguration of the relationship between nature and culture. Inreminding us that we are alive, that we are living organisms who live culturally,that we are biocultural creatures, Fausto-Sterling recalibrates our sense and ourimagination of the relationship between the social and biological dimensions of ourexistence.




Working the figure

Fausto-Sterling’s research refigures the relationship between body and culture. Indoing so, it highlights the fact that in our analyses of how culture shapes bodies,contemporary feminists have developed wonderfully complex figures and tropes fortalking about social, political, symbolic, and linguistic forms of inter-relatedness,influence, and association – and that we do not yet have an equivalent set oflanguages, models, logics, and concepts to think expansively or incisively acrossthe porous boundaries of cells, organisms, and their environments. We are amplyfamiliar with different theories of how language, norms, psychic formations, orgroup identities shape our interactions and influence our behaviour, but we arenot nearly as familiar with the electro-chemical signals, the hormonal or steroidalfloods, the nervous-system adjustments, and the reflex actions that constitute ourbodily response to and recalibration in the encounter with our lived and imaginedenvironments. If we do not know how to talk about the processes that constituteand link the biochemical, the cellular, the genetic, the organismic, and the envir-onmental, then we are also unable to capture in language or concepts the waysthese manifold processes inform and are informed by socio-political processes andphenomena. To be sure, we can and often do make recourse to the language ofcomplexity: that complex interplay between biology and culture! However, giventhat often there are few referents, specifics, logics, or processes to which the termsrefer or attach, the language of complexity, intricacy, and complicatedness turnsout to be empty: we fall back upon the framework in which two separate anddistinct entities – biology and culture – come together to interact, an interactionin which culture is as complex as we know it to be and biology is construed as‘articulate only in [its] capacity to signal that complexity is to be found elsewhereand later on’ (Wilson, 2004: 3).

Fausto-Sterling’s work provides the beginnings of the conceptual vocabularyand the logics-of-process that feminists need to be able to work their way out oftheir impasse and into a more generative frame of reference. Through her research,she demands that we let go of the spatial figure in which the substances we callbody and environment map topologically onto the distinction between inside andoutside. Instead, she offers a process-oriented figure in which the permeable bodycontinually absorbs and responds to an environment as it engages and changes it.If we take on such an alternative figuration, then, as Keller’s analysis intimates, thedistinction between nature and culture, body and environment, becomes a matterof temporalities and intergenerational histories rather than of spatially proximatebut obdurately discrete substances.

It is particularly important to see Fausto-Sterling’s work as a project of refigura-tion rather than critical re-grounding. If, against my caution, we were to take herwork as a re-grounding, as an effort to produce a veridical empirical account of thebiological dimensions of social and political behaviour, we would thereby positionher work as a corrective truth within the logic of the sceptical problematic. Thislogic demands not only that doubt be given a reply of truth but also that that truthserve as the grounds for action. In other words, the epistemological assumptions

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that underpin such a re-grounding would direct us to use knowledge of biology asthe basis for public policy and law, the train of entailments here pushing us from abiological account of what is to an account of ‘what is to be done or what is to bevalued’ (Brown, 2001: 117). However, as mentioned earlier, to ground politics inbiology in this way, as if ‘political principles or decisions can be strictly derivedfrom their ontology’, is to integrate biology into a means-ends form of politicalrationality (White, 2000: 7). Researchers in one recent such effort to explore thepolitical entailments of biological research found themselves speculating about ‘thepublic and policy-makers’ who might work to mitigate malicious uses of biologicalknowledge while at the same time developing ‘tailored programs designed to pro-duce more effective results in more cost-efficient ways’ (Hatemi and McDermott,2011: 329, 327). As this language of ‘tailored programs’ and ‘effective cost-efficientresults’ suggests, to conceive of politics as a logical or necessary entailment of(corrected) biological fact is to reduce politics to a technocratic mastery of politicalpopulations – an objectionable reduction, however well-intentioned such an aspir-ing mastery might be.3

However, if we see Fausto-Sterling’s work as a project of refiguration, as invit-ing us to re-imagine ourselves as biocultural creatures, as permeable organismswhose living processes compel us to ingest, absorb, and respond to the variouslymaterial and social dimensions of our habitats, then our task is to respond to thatinvitation and put our theoretical imaginations to work. We do not necessarilyneed to know all the details of the biochemical reactions taking place within the cellwalls, the signalling pathways that trigger particular forms of cellular activity, orthe finely tuned regulatory systems that keep our sugar and salt levels well-enoughbalanced for us to live and think. But we do need to become familiar with the kindsof movements, flows, and trajectories, the inroads, mechanisms, attractions, andaffinities that enable our porous bodies to perceive, assess, anticipate, respond to,and change the environments in which they live and move. To be able to trace andgive theoretical life to such pathways, to understand the logics animating thoseprocesses of absorption and response, would be to gain a stronger theoretical andanalytical purchase on the ongoing mutual shaping of the biological and the social.

What I mean by this is that, generally speaking, we do not need to know exactlyhow many different kinds of glucose channels (twelve (Lodish, 2008: 443)) or sero-tonin transporter gates (maybe fourteen (Nakamura et al., 2000)) there are or inwhich types of tissue the different kinds are located. Such information is importantto specialists but not necessarily to feminist scholars interested in elaborating arefiguration of the body. But to know that there are such pores, that they make cellmembranes selectively permeable, and that such permeability enables the organ-isms as a whole to respond to the social stressors and chemical provocations oftheir environments: this we do need to know (Roberts, 2003). Cell membraneporosity and the kinds of influx and efflux it makes possible both throughoutorganisms and between organisms and their habitats is what can help us to undothe figurative spatialisation that maps the inside and the outside respectively ontobody and culture.




Similarly, we do not necessarily need to know exactly which biomolecules are atwork in the development of memories in and between neural cells. Actually, on thispoint, the jury’s still out. But if we come to know some of the neural processesthrough which perceptual information travels, and some of the processes throughwhich the autonomic system provokes the production and release of steroids andhormones to regulate the body’s response to perceptual stimuli, we can attend tothe biochemical processes that originate in the kidneys and liver and that provokethe gut and the enteric system so as to generate the biochemicals that make itpossible for neurons in brains to do their work (Viau, 2002). We can therebycounter some of the ‘the brain is it’ scholarship and reintegrate the brain, in itsmultifaceted wonder, with the rest of the living organism as it engages its habitat(Wilson, 2011).

Again, what is at issue here is not necessarily or only ‘more accurate readings ofhow nature works’ (Asberg and Birke, 2010: 417–418). What is at stake is notfactual correctness and the use of facts as a basis for ‘better thinking’ or for ‘pol-itics’. Rather, what is at issue is a refiguration of the body, of encultured biologicalorganisms, of biocultural creatures. In shifting our focus to processes and activities,such a refiguration enables us to challenge the parcelling of genes and brains as thepieces of matter that matter for understanding cultural embodiment and to reinte-grate genes, neurons, and hormones into the manifold biochemical processes thatenable embodied beings to live responsively in their environments. Indeed, if wewere to refigure the environment as ‘coming into the body’, we can counter apolitics derived from ‘the molecularization of life’ with a politics attentive to ‘theenvironmentalization of the molecule’ (Guthman and Mansfield, 2013: 491). Whichis to say that we could mitigate a biopolitics premised on individualised bio-iden-tities (Rose, 2007) by repositioning social and material habitats – environments – asprocesses integral to our development, growth, and social and political well-being.

Research of the kind undertaken by Fausto-Sterling and some of her fellow-travellers brings the body and the social into relation in a way we have previouslynot allowed ourselves to imagine. It pushes us to rearrange our sense of the spatial,temporal, and causal relationships that make us and constrain us as we grow, live,and die in particular historical contexts. Within the figurative framework that suchwork offers, the biological sciences do not provide information that should beconstrued as a guide to best political practice or an answer to the question ‘whatshould we (therefore) do?’ Rather, in combination with all the imaginative andcritical expertise that feminists have to offer, the turn to biology enables feministsto begin to re-imagine feminist politics.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the many who worked through these ideas with me, especially the participants atthe ‘Matter Matters’ conference at the University of Lund, the Political Theory Colloquiumat the University of Virginia, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the

University of Illinois, the ‘Life, Matter, Resistance’ conference at the University of Kent,and the ‘Materialism and New Materialism Across the Disciplines’ seminar at the Rice

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University Humanities Research Center. Thanks also to friends and colleagues who engagedthese ideas extensively, particularly Antoinette Burton, Stephanie Foote, Andrew Gaedke,Brandon Jones, Chantal Nadeau, Gene Robinson, Bruce Rosenstock, and Michael Uhall.

Funding

I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Illinois ResearchBoard whose funding supported this work.

Notes

1. It is important to note that Stephen White finds in Butler’s oeuvre an implicit philosophy

or ‘weak ontology’ in which life, as a directed force or impetus, underpins the forms ofcompliance and resistance that Butler examines (White, 2000).

2. In a similar analysis of the ways that what is considered natural has shifted from a

temporal to a spatial topology, Sarah Franklin observes that the manipulation ofgenes by scientists leads to ‘the respatialisation of genealogy’ (2000: 218).

3. Thanks to my students Christopher Boidy, Kevin Lardner, Jacob Marshall, and Victoria

Thompson for an insightful discussion about this.

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Reconsidering the turn to biology in feminist theory

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