Anne Fausto-Sterling’s book has helped me find the perfect mix. It balances out the Billion Wicked Thoughts (BWT) into a more holistic and well-rounded perspective. Sexing the Body and A Billion Wicked Thoughts do not take the same stance, nor do they support the same arguments. Instead, I view these two books as a team in which to explore the depth of the issues of human desire and sexuality. BWT offers an approach that attempts to strip away the person, the culture, and the experience. It allows “insights” to be gathered from behind a cloak of secrecy. It takes billions of raw data points and attempts to identify what it means about us all. Sexing the Body, takes the opposite. It places the experience, the person and culture well into the mixture of human desire and argues the areas science cannot. I don’t think it is necessary to support one over the other; instead I look to leverage both texts to develop a whole.
A Billion Wicked Thoughts takes on a Freakonomics-eqse style of statistics and matter-of-fact-ness to the situation. Their tone is strong, pointed, and scientific. This contrasts with Sexing the Body as her tone appears to be strong, political, understanding, challenging, and more. Her book is a tool in which to understand MORE, whereas, BWT seems to be a tool to understand MOST.
In Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, Chapter 1, she introduced a story about the Spanish Olympian who was disqualified regarding the presence of a Y chromosome. This reminded me of an interesting story about how humans can be categorized or determined to be human and that is through the presence of 23 pair (46 total) of chromosomes. Different species have different numbers of pairs and so on. Like the Olympic scientist they disqualified her because of the presence of a Y chromosome means she was not female. However this scientific way of organizing species meets a problem again with people with down’s syndrome who have 47 chromosomes. Surely everyone supports the idea that people with down’s syndrome are in fact humans, but according to certain rules of science and classifications of genius and species, they may exist some that do not. Sexing the Body faces culture and science in the face right from the start. One of the major claims comes on page 3 of Sexing the Body by saying, “One of the major claims I make in this book is that labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision.”
Although we have not ventured much into the two texts so far, I look forward to seeing how both books will conflict, support, and expose each other.
I definitely agree that sexing the body is a more personalized look at the entire essence of human sexuality and she seems to excel beyond the capabilities of BWT by bringing that to the light and not just presenting weird and squicky "facts" that are accumulated from search engines. She presents studies and provides much more support and information surrounding them, rather than just stating facts and moving on to more and more weird details and statistics about human behavior. I also agree that I am excited to read more and more into these books and see the arising conflicts that their text will present when deeper in.
ReplyDeleteI also compared the style of BWT to that of Freakonomics, and find it interesting that you did as well. Additionally, I like the point that you made regarding the presence of 23 pairs of chromosomes and the classification of one as "human". I feel that we often try to place things in clearly defined boxes in an attempt to make them easier to understand (for example, describing one as clearly male/female or human/non-human). In reality, I feel these classifications are far too limiting and that many characteristics (perhaps even those pertaining directly to the definition of human/non-human) lie somewhere on a continuum.
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