Wild Animal Sex: How the Study of Non-Humans Broke the Binary

• In Event: Nonhuman Innovations, Nonhuman Disruptions - II: Care & Mattering

Abstract

Around the turn of the twentieth century, researchers in the United States looked to the animal world for insights into human sex difference. Many of them employed a eugenic framework that sought to distance white humanity from its non-human roots, with degree of sexual dimorphism as their metric. Instead of providing the clarity of a male/female norm, their effort created more problems of taxonomy than it solved, blurring the lines between human and non-human, male and female, and ultimately contributing to what Julian Gill-Peterson has called “sex in crisis” by the mid-twentieth century. Scholarship in STS has examined how “sex itself” and maleness and femaleness have been increasingly narrowly defined over time—I build on that work bringing the perspectives of trans history to STS’s rich tradition of exploring the construction of sex. Looking closely at animal science demonstrates that ambiguity and uncertainty have persisted throughout the study of sex, even when nature is supposed to provide evidence for the naturalness of human social orders that privileged maleness and whiteness. Rather than describe a relatively steady march towards increased disciplining of non-normative forms, and an ever-smaller unit of sex determination from genitals to hormones to chromosomes, I use a primary source-based historical methodology to suggest that the outcome of sex research in this period wasn’t one of hegemonic disciplining so much as a failure to achieve order. Through this lens, the sex binary comes to look less like a truth systemically taken for granted and more like a fleeting aspiration.

Author

• Beans Velocci, Yale University