Fausto-Sterling - Sexing the Body

Notes 347
kind of struggle against inherent trends toward femaleness’’ (Jost 1965, p.
612). Finally, in 1973, Jost wrote: ‘‘masculine characteristics . . . have to be
imposed in males by the fetal testicular hormones against a basic feminine
trend of the mammalian body. Female organogenesis results from the mere
absence of testes, the presence or absence of ovaries being unimportant’’ (Jost
et al. 1973,p.41).
When computer terminology entered the language in the 1980s, researchers
updated Jost’s description of an inherent trend toward femaleness into a
metaphor of female development as a ‘‘default pathway.’’ The earliest use I can
find of the phrase ‘‘default sex’’ to describe female development is 1978.The
editors of the journal Trends in Neuroscience use the term in the introduction to
Döhler 1978.
31. Jost et al. 1973. Jost was French, and I have not looked at the specifics
of such discussions in France after World War II. But his ideas were known
and discussed internationally and gained rapid acceptance in the United
States. The production of scientific knowledge not only involves doing experiments
and interpreting results, but being in the right place at the right time
for a particular result and interpretation to be culturally intelligible. For more
on this issue, see Latour 1987.
The mono-hormonic theories also echo nineteenth-century views of
women, children, and nonwhites as being closer to nature. All races and sexes
developed identically up to a point, but only white males continued developing
into true adulthood. For a full treatment of these nineteenth-century
views, see Russett 1989 and also Herschberger 1948.
32. Aristotle wrote: ‘‘The female is a female by virtue of a lack of certain
qualities. We should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’’
St. Thomas thought that women were imperfect men, incidental
beings. In the oedipal drama of becoming (à la Freud), the female psyche must
accommodate to the absence of a penis, while the male psyche must adjust to
the fear of its loss and thus a return to some basal female state (quoted in de
Beauvoir 1949,p.xxii).
Additional explanations for the acceptance of the female = absence,
male = presence theory may include the difficulty of the necessary experiments,
the time needed to fill in difficult-to-get details, which could be obtained
only by diverting attention from easier and more immediately productive
(in terms of publications) experiments. One component of scientific
success is the ability to balance a forward-moving program against the importance
of digging into a recalcitrant problem.
Some of the unresolved experimental results included: (1) the possibility
that Jost’s castrations were not done early enough to detect an effect of removing
the fetal ovary; (2) that injected estrogens could feminize male development
and stimulate the growth of female organs; (3) while Jost tried substituting
injected testosterone for the removed testis, he never performed parallel