"The Nature of the Body": Anatomizing Heterogender in Sexual Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper draws on feminist science studies to critique the construction of women's sexual bodies in contemporary sexual medicine. As female sexual has become a widely circulated disorder, the intensified medicalization of sexuality has entailed its reduction to physiological processes, and disturbances in these processes are assumed to have potential pharmaceutical solutions. Through an analysis of research in sexual medicine, I demonstrate that the underlying assumptions about genital anatomies, and about sexual function and dysfunction, reflect deeply entrenched cultural notions abut how properly heterosexualized bodies should act, Conclusions suggest that the contributions of recent feminist science studies are helpful in rethinking sexual medicine's deep ontology of sexual difference. ********** The nature of the body is the beginning of medical science--Hippocrates A few summers ago, I was doing research in the archives of the Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana. Each day, as I walked there from my hotel, I passed the medical school, which had the epigram above carved into the grey stone over the entranceway. Yet as I spent my days researching historical and contemporary works in sexual medicine, precisely the opposite seemed true--that specifying the nature of the body was really the endpoint, not the beginning of medical science. Medical discourses and practices--what Foucault has called the clinical gaze (Foucault, 1975)--construct the body and its truths, rather than just discovering them. As I will demonstrate in this paper, analysis of the construction of sexual bodies through sexual medicine, which both invents and seeks to remedy pathologies of heterosexuality, provides some fertile ground for pursuing a feminist problematization of the complex discursive nexus of sex/gender/sexuality. The literature on sexual dysfunction provides a fascinating example of a site where cultural expectations of gender (here, as heterosexual performance) seem deeply rooted in the body, resolutely presocial and not open to contestation. With the aid of some conceptual tools from feminist science studies, I hope to contribute to prying the lid off the black box of anatomized sexuality, re-opening some of its assumptions to political critique. Anatomies of difference Biomedical approaches to sexual dysfunctions invariably begin with a genital anatomy lesson. As Masters and Johnson insisted, ... all of medical science is based on understanding anatomy and physiology before meaningful advances can be made in treating abnormalities (Masters, Johnson et al., 1985, p. 21). Two studies have provided a critical historical reading of sexual anatomies: Alan Petersen's (1998) survey of representations of sex difference in Gray's Anatomy from 1858 to 1995, and Lisa Moore and Adele Clarke's (1995) review of representations of the clitoris in anatomy textbooks from 1900 to 1991. In brief, both of these studies find: (a) the construction of universalized models of sex organs in medical anatomy, enhanced by the development of new visualization techniques, but which always construct the normal as normative; (b) more emphasis accorded to the penis (as measured by both the number of citations and the space allotted to pictorial and textual representations of each); (c) a consistent emphasis on the between the penis and the clitoris (1); and (d) differences between the clitoris and the penis characterized by lack in the former (especially as it is rendered in medical texts). These features continue to characterize the scientific research that has emerged in the years since these studies. New technologies of visualization--especially the use of Doppler imaging in both animal and human studies--have rendered normal genitals and their deviations with increasing precision. The basic homology of the penis and clitoris remains intact--similarities, both anatomic and embryologic, are duly noted, and the clitoris is regularly referred to as an erectile organ. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".