RHETORICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY
RHETORICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY
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From Believing Is Seeing: Biology as Ideology
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From Believing Is Seeing: Biology as Ideology
Judith Lorber is an internationally renowned scholar and one of the most. RHETORICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY
widely read gender theorists writing today. She is a professor emerita
of sociology and women’s studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate
School, City University of New York. Her acclaimed book Gender Inequality:
Feminist Theories and Politics is currently in its fourth edition (2009).
This essay is reprinted from a 1992 lecture, and in it she explains an idea
central to her research: that the behaviors we think of as “natural” to men
and women, and that often make men and women seem like opposites to
each other, are actually cultural inventions. Lorber, along with other sociologists
of gender, argues that most of the ideas we hold about men’s and
women’s “oppositional” attributes are not traceable to biological differences
but are the result of a social need to justify divisions of labor and
activity. Further, she notes that this division of assumptions about men
and women most often favors traits perceived to be masculine over those
perceived to be feminine. In this essay, she uses examples from sports and
technology and what she calls the “bathroom problem” (think about where
the lines are longest!) to help us reconsider our assumptions about gender.
In all her writing, Lorber is interested in helping her readers see with
fresh eyes the many small cultural activities we engage in every day that
reproduce these oppositional gender categories so that they come to seem
natural. She argues, “It is the taken-for-grantedness of such everyday
gendered behavior that gives credence to the belief that the widespread
differences in what women and men do must come from biology” (para.
9). Here, she opens with some historical background on changing understandings
of biological differences between male and female humans, noting
that as those understandings changed, we can see culture stepping in
torejustify gender differences, even if they do not make sense biologically.
So, for example, Lorber asks us to rethink our assumptions about who
should compete against whom in athletic competitions. (For some sports,
weight class may be a better categorization method than sex parts, for
example.) She also helps us revisit any assumptions we might have about
who might be “naturally” better at technology, offering historical examples
that reveal why certain gender myths are launched at particular moments
in history, to open or close doors of opportunity to particular groups.
As you read, pay attention to places where Lorber anticipates skeptical
readers, as in paragraph 12, where she clarifies: “I am not saying that physical
differences between male and female bodies don’t exist, but that these
differences are socially meaningless until social practices transform them
Judith Lorber
Lorber From Believing Is See ing 727
into social facts.” Lorber’s point is that gender assumptions are so central
to our understanding of what is “normal” that it can be confusing — even
downright frightening — to reimagine the world without these limiting stereotypes
in our heads. In particular, if the male body is still the universal
standard, as she argues (para. 14), what might the world look like if we free
ourselves from the assumption that masculine standards are best? A world
of possibility might open up for both men and women to imagine ourselves
as humans, instead of lumping ourselves into limiting categories of “men”
and “women.” Lorber’s examples offer ways to think about what such a
future could look like for all of us.
Until the eighteenth century, Western philosophers and scientists
thought that there was one sex and that women’s internal genitalia
were the inverse of men’s external genitalia: the womb and vagina were
the penis and scrotum turned inside out (Laqueur 1990). Current Western
thinking sees women and men as so different physically as to sometimes
seem two species. The bodies, which have been mapped inside and out for
hundreds of years, have not changed. What has changed are the justifications
for gender inequality. When the social position of all human beings
was believed to be set by natural law or was considered God-given, biology
was irrelevant; women and men of different classes all had their assigned
places. When scientists began to question the divine basis of social order
and replaced faith with empirical knowledge, what they saw was that
women were very different from men in that they had wombs and menstruated.
Such anatomical differences destined them for an entirely different
social life from men.
In actuality, the basic bodily material is the same for females and
males, and except for procreative hormones and organs, female and male
human beings have similar bodies (Naftolin and Butz 1981). Furthermore,
as has been known since the middle of the nineteenth century, male and
female genitalia develop from the same fetal tissue, and so infants can be
born with ambiguous genitalia (Money and Ehrhardt 1972). When they
are, biology is used quite arbitrarily in sex assignment. Suzanne Kessler
(1990) interviewed six medical specialists in pediatric intersexuality
and found that whether an infant with XY chromosomes and anomalous
genitalia was categorized as a boy or a girl depended on the size of the
penis — if a penis was very small, the child was categorized as a girl, and
sex-change surgery was used to make an artificial vagina.