Gender/Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Identity Are in the Body: How Did They Get There?

Abstract

In this review, I explore theoretical and empirical approaches to the development of gender/sex and sexual orientation (SO). Leaving behind the nature versus nurture opposition, I look at both identities as deeply embodied. My approach intertwines sex, gender, orientation, bodies, and cultures without a demand to choose one over the other. First, I introduce basic definitions, focusing on how intertwined the concepts of sex and gender really are. I affirm recent trends to consider a new term—gender/sex—as the best way to think about these deeply interwoven bodily traits. I introduce several literatures, each of which considers the processes by which traits become embodied. These points of view offer a basis for future work on identity development. Specifically, and selectively, I provide insights from the fields of phenomenology, dyadic interaction and the formation of presymbolic representations in infancy, and dynamic systems in infant development. I consider how thinking about embodied cognition helps to address intersubjectivity and the emergence of subjective identity. Next, I review what we currently know about the development of complex sexual systems in infancy and toddlerhood. Finally, I discuss the few existing theories of SO development that consider the events of infancy and childhood.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful for the resources and assistance provided by the Kinsey Institute, located at Indiana University. The Kinsey Institute houses one of the only libraries in the United States where one can find scientific literature that openly discusses infant sexuality. Liana Zhou, director of library and special collections, and Justin Garcia, research director, went out of their way to provide me with copies of material and show me around the library. I am also grateful for insights provided and struggles to understand offered by the participants in the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, postgraduate seminar on embodiment, held at Brown University in 2002. Two anonymous reviewers helped strengthen the original manuscript submission. Finally, a series of focused e-mail exchanges with Sari van Anders, Canada 150 research chair in social neuroendocrinology, sexuality, and gender/sex (July 2018), helped me to think more deeply about gender/sex and identity formations.

Notes

¹ Stryker (2006, p. 9) wrote, “The subjective identities of transsexuals … and the gender inversion of butches and queens all work to confound simplistic notions of material determinism… . Sex … is not the foundation of gender in the same way that an apple is the foundation of red fruit in the mirror; ‘sex’ is a mash-up, a story we mix about how the body means… . ‘Sex’ is purpose-built to serve as a foundation.”

² Jazz Jennings, at age seven, expressed this idea clearly in a YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XZWF0gP6RY.

³ See Kessler and McKenna (1978).

⁴ By “nonnormative” I mean numerically in the minority. I am not using this word to connote a medical condition; nor does it connote something that, morally speaking, should or should not be.

⁵ The vagus nerve is critical for the control of the parasympathetic nervous system that governs the functions of the viscera, including the lungs and gut.

⁶ Consider that this turning away also shows up in Liben and Bigler’s (2002) path diagrams; refer to their Figure 5.