Playing the "God trick"

I find Fausto-Sterling's admission of her personal biases and explicitly political project to be comforting (surprise!).  When authors (like Stephen Pinker or Ogaddam) attempt to present their work as apolitical or objective, I (as the reader) am forced to do the work of unearthing their inherent biases and underlying assumptions and making them explicit in order to understand the power of their work in a broader social context.  In contrast, when a writer like Fausto-Sterling attempts to make her own biases and sociopolitical objectives explicit from the very beginning, I can more quickly place her arguments in their broader social context and begin the important work of analyzing what her interpretations can contribute to my own personal-political project, that is, the on-the-ground struggle to eliminate political-economic inequalities based on sex and/or gender (and/or race, religion, disability, etc.). 

By revealing her own personal experiences, doubts, and ideological background, Fausto-Sterling attempts to avoid employing the "God trick" of "producing knowledge from above, from a place that denies the individual scholar's location in a real and troubled world" (Fausto-Sterling 6).  Does she succeed?  As an academic, Fausto-Sterling is forced to adhere to a certain style of argumentation built upon a pre-existing body of theory and research.  To gain legitimacy among feminist theorists, she must cite better-known thinkers like Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault to frame her position.  She presents her arguments in a recognizable style within the tradition of feminist theory, summarizing a progression of theories/narratives and then placing her ideas as an advancement for some aspect of this feminist political project.  Both in her summary of previous theories and her presentation of her own experiences and biases, Fausto-Sterling is bound to leave some things out.  However, I believe that the very attempt to reveal herself in a personal manner exempts Fausto-Sterling's book from being just another try at the "God trick."

An example of a minor weakness in Fausto-Sterling's argumentation style can be seen in Footnote 13 (p. 258 in reference to a sentence in paragraph 2, pg. 4), in which she fails to give examples of which "circles" she is referring to in the footnoted sentence, while giving in the footnote some wishy-washy information with an unclear target audience.  In contrast, in Footnote 14 (pg 258, in reference to the sentence beginning paragraph 3, p. 4), Fausto-Sterling gives us some information that I found essential to the strength of her arguments (do read it if you haven't).  In this footnote, by explaining and contextualizing her own aversion to biological explanations of behavior, Fausto-Sterling helps us to bring her political project down to earth and better understand what's at stake in her arguments. 

With both of these footnotes in mind, I am unsure how I feel about Fausto-Sterling's use of footnotes.  The fact that these "footnotes" are not footnotes but endnotes makes the physical process of reading very slow and tedious for me, as I continually lose my place as I attempt to flip back and forth between the chapter and its endnotes.  How did others feel about them?

More than anything, what excites me about Fausto-Sterling as a thinker/writer is that she urges us to explore possibilities.  While Ogaddam seek (under the guise of "scientific discovery") to place boundaries on the possibility of socio-cultural transformation, Fausto-Sterling seeks to break those boundaries and open up a space for envisioning preferable alternative social-cultural-political-economic formulations.

 

[The rest of this is just my attempt to summarize aspects of Fausto-Sterling's position for my own thoughts, but I thought it might be interesting to some of you too]

The basic theory presented by feminists like Fausto-Sterling is that "biological" explanations of behavior are dangerous because they are always produced by scientific institutions which, like any institutions, have inescapable social, cultural, political, and economic biases that lead researchers to equate "the way things are right now" with "the way things always have been and will always inevitably be." 

Individuals who have been favored by the current state of affairs have little to gain by working hard to discover whether or not the status quo is in fact inevitable.  In fact, they might see their pride as being at stake in this enterprise, for if it is demonstrated that another social-cultural-economic-political configuration is indeed possible, their position at the top (or at least as "normal" in the face of abnormality) is denaturalized, and revealed as at least partially the result of societal factors rather than individual, inevitable, biological superiority. 

Since "legitimate" scientific research is conducted by people occupying a mid-to-high status in society and funded by institutions occupying a strong position of political-economic power, it is unsurprising that scientific research projects are often framed in a way that naturalizes certain critical aspects of the status quo.  For instance, in "A Billion Wicked Thoughts," Ogaddam strive to use data on internet porn from search engines to support the theory that men's tendency to sexually objectify women is biologically rooted and therefore unchangeable.  When women struggle to be recognized not for the appearance of their bodies but for the strength of their ideas, men can point to Ogaddam and say "Sorry, but it's natural for me to perceive you and interact with you in this way.  I can't help it, it's in my genes."

On the other hand, individuals who have been marginalized by the status quo have a strong personal stake in demonstrating that another configuration is indeed possible.  A young girl whose schoolteacher explains that women can only be nurses and not doctors will be more personally driven to question that claim than her male classmate whose aspirations are legitimated and encouraged by the status quo.  Thus, social change only comes about when oppressed groups of people develop a theoretical framework (and a corresponding vocabulary) through which to question their oppression and the discourses that uphold it.