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Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
By Ann Fausto-Sterling
Basic Books
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One of the great threats of long hair in the 1960s was the fear that you couldn't tell "if it was a boy or a girl." The fear has subsided in our post-La Cage aux Folles, post-Madonna world, but persists still. "Is it a boy or girl?" is usually the first question asked about a baby, and in other situations as well. In Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (Basic Books, cloth, $30), a collection of interwoven essays, Ann Fausto-Sterling-- a molecular biologist at Brown University-- exposes how this fear of uncertainty about what constitutes a "man" or a "woman" has affected science and medicine. Scientists have long gone to extreme lengths to make sure that we know exactly what "sex"-- an individual's anatomical attributes-- and "gender"-- the internal conviction of one's maleness or femaleness-- should be. Are boys always boys? Are girls always girls? What about people born with ambiguous or mix-matched external and internal organs? What about men who "feel" that they are really a "woman?"

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Fausto-Sterling delivers a wealth of scientific and medical information in easy-to-read and understandable language. She also bring in social, anthropological, and feminist theory to make the case that what we call science is a body of knowledge dependent on the given understandings and limitations of the society in which it exists. Beginning this with belief, Fausto-Sterling argues that in much scientific inquiry and research "our beliefs about gender affect what kind of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place." Fausto-Sterling notes how "sex hormones" were "discovered." Scientists began working from the presumption that there were "male hormones" and "female hormones" and that they were what made men "men" and women "women." But they quickly discovered that both men and women have estrogen and testosterone-- though in very differing degrees-- and had to constantly reevaluate their research to account for facts that countered their original boy/girl theories. Fausto-Sterling counters that there are no "sex hormones" but simply "hormones" that have different functions in differently-sexed bodies. Her work on the cultural history of hermaphrodism and the recent medical interventions used to "cure" it is both chilling and provocative. Fausto-Sterling challenges us to rethink what we have learned about sex, gender, and sexual orientation.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com