RHETORICAL ANALYSIS
From Believing Is Seeing: Biology as Ideology
i need in this Article to do Rhetorical Analysis
From Believing Is Seeing: Biology as Ideology
Judith Lorber is an internationally renowned scholar and one of the most
widely read gender theorists writing today. She is a professor emerita
of sociology and women’s studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate
School, City University of New York. Her acclaimed book Gender Inequality:
Feminist Theories and Politics is currently in its fourth edition (2009).
This essay is reprinted from a 1992 lecture, and in it she explains an idea
central to her research: that the behaviors we think of as “natural” to men
and women, and that often make men and women seem like opposites to
each other, are actually cultural inventions. Lorber, along with other sociologists
of gender, argues that most of the ideas we hold about men’s and
women’s “oppositional” attributes are not traceable to biological differences
but are the result of a social need to justify divisions of labor and
activity. Further, she notes that this division of assumptions about men
and women most often favors traits perceived to be masculine over those
perceived to be feminine. In this essay, she uses examples from sports and
technology and what she calls the “bathroom problem” (think about where
the lines are longest!) to help us reconsider our assumptions about gender.
In all her writing, Lorber is interested in helping her readers see with
fresh eyes the many small cultural activities we engage in every day that
reproduce these oppositional gender categories so that they come to seem
natural. She argues, “It is the taken-for-grantedness of such everyday
gendered behavior that gives credence to the belief that the widespread
differences in what women and men do must come from biology” (para.
9). Here, she opens with some historical background on changing understandings
of biological differences between male and female humans, noting
that as those understandings changed, we can see culture stepping in
torejustify gender differences, even if they do not make sense biologically.
So, for example, Lorber asks us to rethink our assumptions about who
should compete against whom in athletic competitions. (For some sports,
weight class may be a better categorization method than sex parts, for
example.) She also helps us revisit any assumptions we might have about
who might be “naturally” better at technology, offering historical examples
that reveal why certain gender myths are launched at particular moments
in history, to open or close doors of opportunity to particular groups.
As you read, pay attention to places where Lorber anticipates skeptical
readers, as in paragraph 12, where she clarifies: “I am not saying that physical
differences between male and female bodies don’t exist, but that these
differences are socially meaningless until social practices transform them
Judith Lorber
Lorber From Believing Is See ing 727
into social facts.” Lorber’s point is that gender assumptions are so central
to our understanding of what is “normal” that it can be confusing — even
downright frightening — to reimagine the world without these limiting stereotypes
in our heads. In particular, if the male body is still the universal
standard, as she argues (para. 14), what might the world look like if we free
ourselves from the assumption that masculine standards are best? A world
of possibility might open up for both men and women to imagine ourselves
as humans, instead of lumping ourselves into limiting categories of “men”
and “women.” Lorber’s examples offer ways to think about what such a
future could look like for all of us.
Until the eighteenth century, Western philosophers and scientists
thought that there was one sex and that women’s internal genitalia
were the inverse of men’s external genitalia: the womb and vagina were
the penis and scrotum turned inside out (Laqueur 1990). Current Western
thinking sees women and men as so different physically as to sometimes
seem two species. The bodies, which have been mapped inside and out for
hundreds of years, have not changed. What has changed are the justifications
for gender inequality. When the social position of all human beings
was believed to be set by natural law or was considered God-given, biology
was irrelevant; women and men of different classes all had their assigned
places. When scientists began to question the divine basis of social order
and replaced faith with empirical knowledge, what they saw was that
women were very different from men in that they had wombs and menstruated.
Such anatomical differences destined them for an entirely different
social life from men.
In actuality, the basic bodily material is the same for females and
males, and except for procreative hormones and organs, female and male
human beings have similar bodies (Naftolin and Butz 1981). Furthermore,
as has been known since the middle of the nineteenth century, male and
female genitalia develop from the same fetal tissue, and so infants can be
born with ambiguous genitalia (Money and Ehrhardt 1972). When they
are, biology is used quite arbitrarily in sex assignment. Suzanne Kessler
(1990) interviewed six medical specialists in pediatric intersexuality
and found that whether an infant with XY chromosomes and anomalous
genitalia was categorized as a boy or a girl depended on the size of the
penis — if a penis was very small, the child was categorized as a girl, and
sex-change surgery was used to make an artificial vagina. In the late nineteenth
century, the presence or absence of ovaries was the determining
criterion of gender assignment for hermaphrodites because a woman who
could not procreate was not a complete woman (Kessler 1990, 20).
Yet in Western societies, we see two discrete sexes and two distinguishable
genders because our society is built on two classes or people,
“women” and “men.” Once the gender category is given, the attributes of
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the person are also gendered: Whatever a “woman” is has to be “female”;
whatever a “man” is has to be “male.” Analyzing the social processes that
construct the categories we call “female and male,” “woman and men,” and
“homosexual and heterosexual” uncovers the ideology and power differentials
congealed in these categories (Foucault 1978). This article will . . .
show how myriad physiological differences are transformed into similarappearing,
gendered social bodies. My perspective goes beyond accepted
feminist views that gender is a cultural overlay that modifies physiological
sex differences. That perspective assumes either that there are two fairly
similar sexes distorted by social practices into two genders with purposefully
different characteristics or that there are two sexes whose essential
differences are rendered unequal by social practices. I am arguing that
bodies differ in many ways physiologically, but they are completely transformed
by social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society, the
most pervasive of which are “female” and “male” and “women” and “men.”
Neither sex nor gender [is a] pure [category]. Combinations of incongruous
genes, genitalia, and hormonal input are ignored in sex categorization,
just as combinations of incongruous physiology, identity, sexuality,
appearance, and behavior are ignored in the social construction of gender
statuses. Menstruation, lactation, and gestation do not demarcate
women from men. Only some women are pregnant and then only some
of the time; some women do not have a uterus or ovaries. Some women
have stopped menstruating temporarily, others have reached menopause,
and some have had hysterectomies. Some women breastfeed some of the
time, but some men lactate (Jaggar 1983, 165fn). Menstruation, lactation,
and gestation are individual experiences of womanhood (Levesque-
Lopman 1988), but not determinants of the social category “woman,” or
even “female.” Similarly, “men are not always sperm-producers, and in
fact, not all sperm-producers are men. A male-to-female transsexual, prior
to surgery, can be socially a woman, though still potentially (or actually)
capable of spermatogenesis” (Kessler and McKenna [1978] 1985, 2).
When gender assignment is contested in sports, where the categories
of competitors are rigidly divided into women and men, chromosomes are
now used to determine in which category the athlete is to compete. However,
an anomaly common enough to be found in several women at every
major international sports competition are XY chromosomes that have
not produced male anatomy or physiology because of a genetic defect.
Because these women are women in every way significant for sports competition,
the prestigious International Amateur Athletic Federation has
urged that sex be determined by simple genital inspection (Kolata 1992).
Transsexuals would pass this test, but it took a lawsuit for Renée Richards,
a male-to-female transsexual, to be able to play tournament tennis as a
woman, despite his male sex choromosomes (Richards 1983). Oddly, neither
basis for gender categorization — chromosomes nor genitalia — has
anything to do with sports prowess (Birrell and Cole 1990).
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In the Olympics, in cases of chromosomal ambiguity, women must
undergo “a battery of gynecological and physical exams to see if she is
‘female enough’ to compete. Men are not tested” (Carlson 1991, 26). The
purpose is not to categorize women and men accurately, but to make sure
men don’t enter women’s competitions, where, it is felt, they will have the
advantage of size and strength. This practice sounds fair only because it is
assumed that all men are similar in size and strength and different from all
women. Yet in Olympics boxing and wrestling matches, men are matched
within weight classes. Some women might similarly successfully compete
with some men in many sports. Women did not run in marathons until
about twenty years ago. In twenty years of marathon competition, women
have reduced their finish times by more than one-and-one half hours; they
are expected to run as fast as men in that race by 1998 and might catch up
with men’s running times in races of other lengths within the next 50 years
because they are increasing their fastest speeds more rapidly than are men
(Fausto-Sterling 1985, 213–18).
The reliance on only two sex and gender categories in the biological
and social sciences is as epistemologically spurious as the reliance on
chromosomal or genital test to group athletes. Most research designs do
not investigate whether physical skills or physical abilities are really more
or less common in women and men (Epstein 1988). They start out with
two social categories (“women,” “men”), assume they are biologically different
(“female,” “male”), look for similarities among them and differences
between them, and attribute what they have found for the social categories
to sex differences (Gelman, Collman, and Maccoby 1986). These designs
rarely question the categorization of their subjects into two and only two
groups, even though they often find more significant within-group differences
than between-group differences (Hyde 1990). The social construction
perspective on sex and gender suggests that instead of starting with
the two presumed dichotomies in each category — female, male; woman,
man — it might be more useful in gender studies to group patterns of
behavior and only then look for identifying markers of the people likely to
enact such behaviors. . . .
Dirty Little Secrets
. . . Technology constructs gendered skills. Meta-analysis of studies of gender
differences in spatial and mathematical ability have found that men
have a large advantage in ability to mentally rotate an image, a moderate
advantage in a visual perception of horizontality and vertically and in mathematical
performance, and a small advantage in ability to pick a figure out
of a field (Hyde 1990). It could be argued that these advantages explain why,
within the short space of time that computers have become ubiquitous
in offices, schools, and homes, work on them and with them has become
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gendered: Men create, program, and market computers, make war and
produce science and art with them; women microwire them in computer
factories and enter data in computerized offices; boys play games, socialize,
and commit crimes with computers; girls are rarely seen in computer
clubs, camps, and classrooms. But women were hired as computer programmers
in the 1940s because
the work seemed to resemble simple clerical tasks. In fact, however, programming
demanded complex skills in abstract logic, mathermatics, electrical circuitry,
and machinery, all of which . . . women used to perform in their work.
Once programming was recognized as “intellectually demanding,” it became
attractive to men. (Donato 1990, 170)
A woman mathematician and pioneer in data processing, Grace M. Hopper,
was famous for her work on programming language (Perry and Greber
1990, 86). By the 1960s, programming was split into more and less
skilled specialties, and the entry of women into the computer field in the
1970s and 1980s was confined to the lower-paid specialties. At each stage,
employers invoked women’s and men’s purportedly natural capabilities for
the jobs for which they were hired (Cockburn 1983, 1985; Donato 1990;
Hartmann 1987; Hartmann, Kraut, and Tilly 1986; Kramer and Lehman
1990; Wright et al. 1987; Zimmerman 1983).
It is the taken-for-grantedness of such everyday gendered behavior
that gives credence to the belief that the widespread differences in what
women and men do must come from biology. To take one ordinarily unremarked
scenario: In modern societies, if a man and woman who are a
couple are in a car together, he is much more likely to take the wheel than she
is, even if she is the more competent driver. Molly Haskell calls this takenfor-
granted phenomenon “the dirty little secret of marriage: the husbandlousy-
driver syndrome” (1989, 26). Men drive cars whether they are good
drivers or not because men and machines are a “natural” combination
(Scharff 1991). But the ability to drive gives one mobility; it is form of
social power.
In the early days of the automobile, feminist co-opted the symbolism
of mobility as emancipation: “Donning goggles and dusters, wielding tire
irons and tool kits, taking the wheel, they announced their intention to
move beyond the bounds of women’s place” (Scharff 1991, 68). Driving
enabled them to campaign for women’s suffrage in parts of the United
States not served by public transportation, and they effectively used
motorcades and speaking from cars as campaign tactics (Scharff 1991,
67–88). Sandra Gilbert also notes that during World War I, women’s ability
to drive was physically, mentally, and even sensually liberating:
For nurses and ambulance drivers, women doctors and women messengers,
the phenomenon of modern battle was very different from that experienced by
entrenched combatants. Finally given a change to take the wheel, these post-
Victorian girls raced motorcars along foreign rods like adventurers exploring
new lands, while their brothers dug deeper into the mud of France. . . .
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Retrieving the wounded and the dead from deadly positions, these oncedecorous
daughters had at last been allowed to prove their valor, and they
swooped over the wastelands of the war with the energetic love of Wagnerian
Valkyries, their mobility alone transporting countless immobilized heroes to
safe havens. (1983, 438–39)
Not incidentally, women in the United States and England got the vote for
their war efforts in World War I.
Social Bodies and the Bathroom Problem
People of the same racial ethnic group and social class are roughly the
same size and shape — but there are many varieties of bodies. People have
different genitalia, different secondary sex characteristics, different contributions
to procreation, different orgasmic experiences, different patterns
of illness and aging. Each of us experiences our bodies differently, and
these experiences change as we grow, age, sicken, and die. The bodies of
pregnant and nonpregnant women, short and tall people, those with intact
and functioning limbs and those whose bodies are physically challenged
are all different. But the salient categories of a society group these attributes
in ways that ride roughshod over individual experiences and more
meaningful clusters of people.
I am not saying that physical differences between male and female
bodies don’t exist, but that these differences are socially meaningless until
social practices transform them into social facts. West Point Military Academy’s
curriculum is designed to produce leaders, and physical competence
is used as a significant measure of leadership ability (Yoder 1989). When
women were accepted as West Point cadets, it became clear that the tests
of physical competence, such as rapidly scaling an eight-foot wall, had
been constructed for male physiques — pulling oneself up and over using
upper-body strength. Rather than devise tests of physical competence
for women, West Point provided boosters that mostly women used — but
that lost them test points — in the case of the wall, a platform. Finally, the
women themselves figured out how to use their bodies successfully. Janice
Yoder describes this situation:
I was observing this obstacle one day, when a woman approached the wall in
the old prescribed way, got her fingertips grip, and did an unusual thing: she
walked her dangling legs up the wall until she was in a position where both
her hands and feet were atop the wall. She then simply pulled up her sagging
bottom and went over. She solved the problem by capitalizing on one of women’s
physical assets: lower-body strength. (1989, 530)
In short, if West Point is going to measure leadership capability by physical
strength, women’s pelvises will do just as well as men’s shoulders.
The social transformation of female and male physiology into a condition
of inequality is well illustrated by the bathroom problem. Most
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buildings that have gender-segregated bathrooms have an equal number
for women and for men. Where there are crowds, there are always long
lines in front of women’s bathrooms but rarely in front of men’s bathrooms.
The cultural, physiological, and demographic combinations of
clothing, frequency of urination, menstruation, and child care add up to
generally greater bathroom use by women than men. Thus, although an
equal number of bathrooms seems fair, equity would mean more women’s
bathrooms or allowing women to use men’s bathrooms for a certain
amount of time (Molotch 1988).
The bathroom problem is the outcome of the way gendered bodies are
differentially evaluated in Western cultures: Men’s social bodies are the
measure of what is “human.” Gray’s Anatomy, in use for 100 years, well
into the twentieth century, presented the human body as male. The female
body was shown only where it differed from the male (Laqueur 1990, 166–
67). Denise Riley says that if we envisage women’s bodies, men’s bodies,
and human bodies “as a triangle of identifications, then it is rarely an equilateral
triangle in which both sexes are pitched at matching distances from
the apex of the human” (1988, 197). Catharine MacKinnon also contends
that in Western society, universal “humanness” is male because
virtually every quality that distinguishes men from women is already affirmatively
compensated in this society. Men’s physiology defines most sports, their
needs define auto and health insurance coverage, their socially defined biographies
define workplace expectations and successful career patterns, their
perspectives and concerns define quality in scholarship, their experiences and
obsessions define merit, their objectification of life defines art, their military
service defines citizenship, their presence defines family, their inability to get
along with each other — their wars and rulerships — define history, their image
defines god, and their genitals define sex. For each of their differences from
women, what amounts to an affirmative action plan is in effect, otherwise
known as the structure and values of American society. (1987, 36)
The Paradox of Human Nature
Gendered people do not emerge from physiology or hormones but from
the exigencies of the social order, mostly, from the need for a reliable division
of the work of food production and the social (not physical) reproduction
of new members. The moral imperatives of religion and cultural
representations reinforce the boundary lines among genders and ensure
that what is demanded, what is permitted, and what is tabooed for the
people in each gender is well-known and followed by most. Political
power, control of scarce resources, and, if necessary, violence uphold the
gendered social order in the face of resistance and rebellion. Most people,
however, voluntarily go along with their society’s prescriptions for those of
their gender status because the norms and expectations get built into their
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sense of worth and identity as a certain kind of human being and because
they believe their society’s way is the natural way. These beliefs emerge
from the imagery that pervades the way we think, the way we see and hear
and speak, the way we fantasize, and the way we feel. There is no core
or bedrock human nature below these endlessly looping processes of the
social production of sex and gender, self and other, identity and psyche,
each of which is a “complex cultural construction” (Butler 1990, 36). The
paradox of “human nature” is that it is always a manifestation of cultural
meanings, social relationships, and power politics — “not biology, but culture,
becomes destiny” (Butler 1990, 8).
Feminist inquiry has long questioned the conventional categories of
social science, but much of the current work in feminist sociology has not
gone beyond adding the universal category “women” to the universal category
“men.” Our current debates over the global assumptions of only two
categories and the insistence that they must be nuanced to include race
and class are steps in the direction I would like to see feminist research go,
but race and class are also global categories (Collins 1990; Spelman 1988).
Deconstructing sex, sexuality, and gender reveals many possible categories
embedded in the social experiences and social practices of what Dorothy
Smith calls the “everyday/everynight world” (1990, 31–57). These emergent
categories group some people together for comparison with other
people without prior assumptions about who is like whom. Categories
can be broken up and people regrouped differently into new categories for
comparison. This process of discovering categories from similarities and
differences in people’s behavior or responses can be more meaningful for
feminist research than discovering similarities and differences between
“females” and “males” or “women” and “men” because the social construction
of the conventional sex and gender categories already assumes differences
between them and similarities among them. When we rely only
on the conventional categories of sex and gender, we end up finding what
we looked for — we see what we believe, whether it is that “females” and
“males” are essentially different or that “women” and “men” are essentially
the same.
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Judith Lorber is an internationally acclaimed professor of sociology and women studies at the Brooklyn College, the graduate school and the City University of New York (Collins, 1990). Her book Feminist Theories and Politics tries to explain that the behaviors that come natural to both men and women and often make them two genders different are actually cultural inventions. This essay is derived from her 1992 lecture which tries to shed some light on the above subject (Donato, 1990).
Alongside other sociologists, she claims that the opposite……………………..
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