Biology and the Metaphysics of Sex Difference

Abstract

Recently, in feminist scholarship, there has been a return to an interest in biology, part of a project of bringing ‘the materiality of the human body and the natural world into the forefront of feminist theory and practice’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 1). The narrative surrounding this return has sometimes been articulated like this. Feminists have been suspicious of biological accounts of the body, because they associated them with a form of determinism which suggested the inevitability, not only of a binary sex difference, but also of the psychological features, social roles and bodily styles, which are taken to accompany them. In their flight away from biology, however, they have ignored the materiality of our bodily life and suggested our everyday sexed categories are exclusively the result of our classifkatory practices. Such practices are conceived of as unconstrained by nature and therefore subject to modification if this is deemed politically desirable. But this end point is problematic, for, it is suggested, it makes our categorisation of the world float free of constraint, threatening idealism. Therefore we need to return to biology to explore our bodily materiality and its intersections with our classification into sexed kinds.¹ Biology is viewed here as offering us an account of the constraints within which we must work. ‘There is a certain absurdity’, suggests Elizabeth Grosz, ‘in objecting to the notion of nature, or biology itself, if this is (even in part) what we are and will always be.