now overlap with patterns of behaviour displayed by female bodies, for we now have female executives and female boxers. Moreover, as the American anti-slavery and women’s suffrage campaigner Sojourner Truth made clear more than a hundred years ago at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, the norms of femininity for women vary profoundly with class and colour:
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? (Truth 1851)
From the earliest feminist campaigns in the West, there has been a recognition of the very different material conditions, and consequent gender norms, experienced by middle- and upper-class women and by the working classes. The higher class women were supposed to display gentility, not to be exposed to physical or mental exertion, to cultivate prettiness in their persons and their houses, and to display high codes of chastity and propriety. Working-class women were required above all to be strong, to carry the burden of work inside and outside the house. They were less constrained by the demands of chastity and propriety (McClintock 1995).
There are, therefore, widely variant norms of gendered behaviour across classes, cultures and geographical locatedness. This variation was seen as indicative of a distinction between sex (thought of as biological) and gender (in the sense of behavioural norms). It also supports the view that, in understanding the construction of gender (in that sense), we are understanding a social process and not a biological one. Masculinity and femininity are categories the content of which is socially variable. Both the scope of the categories (i.e. to whom they apply) and their content (i.e. what is required to be masculine or feminine) are therefore susceptible to modification and change. They are able to float free of attachment to specific bodily form, despite being normatively attached to bodily form in different ways in different socio-historical contexts.
Nonetheless, this highly significant point does not necessarily support the distinction between sex and gender which feminist theorists of the 1980s suggested. The problem with the view is not the part which stresses the way gendered patterns of behaviour are socially mediated but the opposition that it sets up between gender and sex. There is an assumption within these theories that the sexed binary is simply a given, a consequence of biology. Many writers problematize the sex/gender distinction, not because they think gendered behaviours have a biological base, in the way discussed above, but because our understanding of the biological division into male and female is itself culturally influenced (Butler 1990a; Gatens 1996).
How many sexes are there?
Much late twentieth-century work in the philosophy of science (Haraway 1991; Martin 1987; Harding 1992, 1993, 1998; Laqueur 1990) has drawn our attention to the ways in which our scientific theories, models and metaphors are influenced by the cultural framework in which we are placed. It is recognized that there is no unmediated access to the world. The concepts and frameworks of interpretations in terms of which we organize our observations mediate all our encounters. There are no raw facts, as it is often said. They all come to us cooked in some way. Consequently, what scientists see in the results of their experiments is influenced by the framework of interpretation which they bring to them. And this reflection has been borne out by research into the history of sex difference research. The biological theories which give an account of sex differences are the products of particular historical and culturally specific moments of production. Such a recognition has allowed biological accounts of sex differences to be revisited with an eye as to where cultural assumptions have influenced them. Of key importance in this regard has been the assumption that there are simply two sexes, male and female, a model which has come increasingly under challenge in recent work.
For thousands of years male and female bodies were considered to be fundamentally similar (Martin 1987). Women were thought to have the same genitals as men, only hidden inside the body. In the eighteenth century, however, there was increasing emphasis on bodily differences between the sexes. The concentration on genital sexual difference and secondary sex characteristics such as breasts and facial hair became expanded so that more and more parts of the body were seen as sexualized. By the late nineteenth century male and female bodies were viewed as opposites, and the female body became a central focus of medical attention. First the uterus and then the ovaries were regarded as the seat of femininity. Early in the twentieth century the essence of femaleness and maleness came to be located not in bodily parts but in chemical substances: sex hormones. Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) excavated the history of the theory whereby the essence of sex differences was seen as being fixed by hormones. As work progressed, the original assumption that each sex was governed by its own hormones gave way to the recognition that ‘male’ and ‘female’ hormones are present in both sexes. Here was a possibility for dualistic notions of male and female to be abandoned and a variety of sexed positionalities to be introduced. Given the cultural context, however, traditional classifications prevailed, yielding a theoretical framework within which the hormones work in distinct ways to produce two discrete categories. Where it is not possible to assign a body to one of these categories, then something is seen to have gone wrong and as requiring medical intervention to rectify.
Hormones are, of course, only one way of marking sexed difference. Alice Stone suggests:
A human being is biologically male if they have XY chromosomes, testes, ‘male’ internal and external genitalia, relatively high proportions of androgens, and ‘male’ secondary sex characteristics. A human being is biologically female if they have XX chromosomes, ovaries, ‘female’ internal and external genitalia, relatively high proportions of oestrogen and progesterone, and ‘female’ secondary sex characteristics .… ‘male’ and ‘female’ here … being used as a shorthand … and could be replaced by a list of the relevant genital parts … and characteristics. (2007: 34)
Linda Alcoff suggests that ‘women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body’ (Alcoff 2012).
What has become clear, however, is that the several distinct biological markers of maleness and femaleness – visible morphology, hormones and chromosomes – are not always found together. The biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) has drawn attention to the fact that bodies which possess the usual male (XY) or female (XX) chromosomal make-up can have a variety of external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. Her work identifies at least five possible classificatory types suggested by different patterns of biological clustering.2 Were we interested in classifying in relation to fitness for reproduction, this wider range of categories would seem to serve this purpose more accurately. Some clusterings facilitate reproduction and some do not. There will be bodies fit for reproduction who contribute to the process in one way and bodies who are fit for reproduction and contribute to it in another way. Then there will be bodies that are not fit for reproduction and do not fit into either of these categories. There will, moreover, be added complications. The contributions to reproduction, which Alcoff associates with the female body, can come apart. The body that can gestate might not be able to suckle. The body that produces eggs might not gestate. Moreover, with developing technology, there will be a shift in which bodies can make contributions of differing kinds to reproduction. What does seem clear is that a classification in terms of possession of properties causally relevant to reproduction does not map neatly onto our everyday binary classification into male and female. Of course, many male and female bodies can make no contribution to reproduction.
Fausto-Sterling (1993) points out that the existence
