SEX, SCIENCE, AND PSEUDOSCIENCE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Recent years have witnessed the resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general. This article traces the course of genomania (the reduction of social traits to genetic causes) and evolutionary psychology (the justification for supposedly universal institutional arrangements via speculative evolutionary scenarios) from the early 1990s to the present, drawing out their connection to institutional shifts, social struggles, and a changing political economy. It underscores the irony of biological reductionism's triumph in the public sphere: Ideas about a “hardwired,” immutable human nature circulate at a decidedly odd moment in human history, a period marked by pitched struggles around the politics of sex and by dramatic changes in gender roles—a time, in short, when not much really seems certain about the nature of men, women, and others. Contemporary bioreductivism is thus analyzed as an instance of fetishistic or magical thinking and as the basis for the spread of ever more dangerous forms of irrationalism in American political culture. In this context, relations among science, critical science studies, and the serious public sphere are reexplored, and a few practical propositions are offered in conclusion.

Some passages in this article appear, in various contexts, in Lancaster (2003) and in ‘The Place of Anthropology in a Public Culture Reshaped by Bioreductivism,’ an article given an initial test run by colleagues in Cultural Studies and Anthropology at George Mason University. It was subsequently presented at the 101st annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 20–24 November 2002, as part of a panel on ‘The Force of a Thousand Nightmares: Global Inequalities and the American Scene.’ Versions were also presented to the Cultural Studies program at the University of California, Davis; to an audience at the Lavender Languages conference; to diverse audiences at Northwestern University; as part of a ‘Meet the Author’ plenary panel at the meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of North America; and as part of an Social Science Research Council (SSRC) web forum on race and genomics (see also Lancaster [2004, 2005]). I would like to thank colleagues and students in these forums for helpful feedback and encouragement. The editors and three anonymous reviewers at Identities provided encouragement and helpful suggestions. Lastly, thanks to all the usual suspects, for good conversation and good ideas: Denise Albanese, Samuel Colón, the late Dwight Conquergood, Marcial Godoy, Micaela di Leonardo, Bill Leap, Jonathan Marks, Jeff Maskovsky, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Smith, Daniele Struppa, and Brett Williams.

Key Words:

• sociobiology
• evolutionary psychology
• bioreductivism
• genetics
• genomania
• public sphere
• critical science studies

Notes

Some passages in this article appear, in various contexts, in Lancaster (2003) and in ‘The Place of Anthropology in a Public Culture Reshaped by Bioreductivism,’ an article given an initial test run by colleagues in Cultural Studies and Anthropology at George Mason University. It was subsequently presented at the 101st annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, 20–24 November 2002, as part of a panel on ‘The Force of a Thousand Nightmares: Global Inequalities and the American Scene.’ Versions were also presented to the Cultural Studies program at the University of California, Davis; to an audience at the Lavender Languages conference; to diverse audiences at Northwestern University; as part of a ‘Meet the Author’ plenary panel at the meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of North America; and as part of an Social Science Research Council (SSRC) web forum on race and genomics (see also Lancaster [2004, 2005]). I would like to thank colleagues and students in these forums for helpful feedback and encouragement. The editors and three anonymous reviewers at Identities provided encouragement and helpful suggestions. Lastly, thanks to all the usual suspects, for good conversation and good ideas: Denise Albanese, Samuel Colón, the late Dwight Conquergood, Marcial Godoy, Micaela di Leonardo, Bill Leap, Jonathan Marks, Jeff Maskovsky, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Smith, Daniele Struppa, and Brett Williams.

1. Adorno's (1994) essay on astrology and the Frankfurt School's general attempts to disentangle critical reason from “instrumental rationality” and pseudo-rationality (Horkheimer 1974; Horkheimer and Adorno 1995 [1972] [1944]) make for especially apposite reading today, in the wake of a decade of pseudoscience and at a time when various forms of irrationalism are on the rise in American culture. I return to these questions in the final two sections of this article.

2. The idea of a singular, timeless same-sex desire or homosexual identity squares poorly with comparative research on sexual cultures from history and anthropology. The methods of social constructivism have thus dominated research on sexuality, especially homosexuality, since the close of the 1970s (D'Emilio 1983; McIntosh 1968; Weeks 1977). For critiques of “the gay brain” and “the gay gene,” see Lancaster (1992: 314–319; 10, 11); Fausto-Sterling (1992: 223–259); Byne (1995, 1997); Zicklin (1997); Stein (1999); and Lancaster (2003: 240–281).

3. Preliminary airings of contrary research, accompanied by misgivings about the “gay brain” and “gay gene” studies, appeared in print by the mid-1990s: see Marshall (1995); Finn (1996); and Sciencescope (1997).

4. As Jonathan Marks concurs (personal communication), this morphing also permitted bio-reductivists to shift the emphasis from fake alleles for variable behaviors (the old sociobiology) to fake genes for universal behaviors (the new evolutionary psychology).

5. Eugenics is, in fact, everywhere dissimulated in both evolutionary psychology and genomania (see Lancaster 2003: 42, 45–46, 74, 89, 117, 130–131).

6. Admittedly, Wade's most recent articles on race (2004a, 2004b) have been more nuanced than the earlier ones; they give space to prominent critics of the idea that race is a sound genetic concept. But this comes too late to substantially alter the shift in climate that the reporter helped to perpetuate.

7. The main exceptions to this trend are themselves indicative: Culture of poverty theories abounded in the public sphere, as did other alarmist claims about the harmful social effects of marital or family breakdown (di Leonardo 1998: 112–127). In these pseudosociological discourses, the main implicit or explicit indices of social pathology were innercity poverty and high incarceration rates for African Americans. Poverty is undoubtedly in itself a bad thing, but it would seem to be a necessary consequence of our system of social stratification, rather than a consequence of something poor people do or fail to do. As for incarceration rates: Americans do not consume more drugs than Europeans, but the United States is unique among industrial democracies in its penal policies, which send people to prison for long terms if they are convicted on even minor drug offenses. The explosion of “crime” in the American cities thus has little to do with family pathologies and everything to do with how we define and treat crime. This, in turn, has everything to do with racism—with a long American history of locking up black and brown men. (See http://www.sentencingproject.org/pdfs/pub9036.pdf for prison and race data.)

8. My arguments in these notes will partly overlap with and partly diverge from Bourdieu's famous essay, ‘The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason’ (1999 [1975]).

9. See ‘Statement on Marriage and the Family from the American Anthropological Association,’ available at http://www.aaanet.org/press/ma_stmt_marriage.htm (accessed 4 March 2005).

10. See Bourdieu (1999 [1975]: 45). I hope I am not misunderstood here: I refer not to specialist language that usefully gathers complex information into wieldy shorthand, but to terminologies that substitute apparent for actual analysis or are designed to give the appearance of careful scholarship to otherwise commonplace ideas. “Bioreductivism” is a good contraction of biological reductivism; “heteronormativity” briskly captures certain arguments about the historical invention of heterosexuality and its coercive power as the social norm; and terms such as “habitus,” “doxa,” and “reification” all do a certain useful work. But when all used together in one sentence, or strung along an evasive or imprecise line of declamation, even these useful words can make for complacent analysis or give the impression that an argument has more substance than what is actually present. On this question, Mills (1959: 25–49) demolition of Talcott Parsons is more timely today than ever.

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