How to Have Sex without Women or Men

Abstract

In the first line of the last chapter, Charles Darwin described The Origin of Species as “one long argument” (1998: 346). The same can be said of the present book, that it is “one long argument” concerning the limits of “common sense” and scholarly assumptions about the “nature” of “sex.” This book had two aims. The first aim was to outline the social study of science and nature in relation to “sex,” sex “differences,” and to a certain extent, “sexuality.” I argued that our understandings of “sex” are based less upon biological knowledge of morphology and more on a sociocultural discourse that emphasizes sex dichotomy. In Chapter 2, I outlined the development of this sociocultural discourse as both an epistemic shift from knowledge through revelation (religion) to knowledge through systematic observation and induction and deduction (science), and a political shift toward sex complementarity through which a hierarchical order of privilege was maintained between women and men. I reviewed scholarly work that argues women and men were governed according to a “one-sex” model, in which femininity and masculinity appeared on the same axis. I argued that while women and men were not “free” from regulation, the “one-sex” model allowed a more fluid and less rigid understanding of “sex.” The Enlightenment project undertook a fundamental revision of the meaning of “sex” such that femininity and masculinity eventually appeared as mutually exclusive entities. Through both epistemic and political shifts, a hegemonic discourse of “sex complementarity” figured women and men’s morphology, intellects, emotions, and behaviors as opposite to each other and therefore complementary. For instance, the political development of the middle class notion of “the family” heavily utilized sex complementarity insofar as women became associated with the emotional and physical (childcare, cooking, and house cleaning) labor of the home and men became associated with the intellectual (decision making) and income generating (paid work) labor. Combining the proclivities of women and men together produced a complete, functional home. I detailed the shift from the “one-sex” to “two-sex” model in order to emphasize the point that our current understanding of sex “differences” was made possible through this significant epistemic and political shift.