The Unnatural History of Sex & Gender
We’re happy to live in a time of a great transformation of the society (western, at least), where voices of both men and women start to reach a balance. Still, gender equality is one of the most debated topics in the world today. Some people don’t see the need to change the current state of things and consider feminism too radical, and some think that we still have a lot to do in order to defeat female subordination. This is why there’s always a need to have an open discussion that covers all arguments for and against the state of equality.
Discussion around sex and gender is a product of multiple disciplines, which doesn’t make it easier to tackle. One of the most common approaches to criticize gender equality is bringing evolutionary arguments to the table, namely sexual selection and natural dominance of males. If we take this road, there is always the danger to confuse cause and effect: scientific theories are often used to excuse rather than explain some human traits that we’re not yet ready to change. Deterministic approach to gender roles is one of the most bright examples.
This controversy was the primary inspiration for the Unnatural History: an exhibition project on which I and Kelly Gibbs have been working for the last four months at CRI for Learning By Doing and Game Design courses of M1 EdTech program. For our project, we decided to treat the question of gender roles in a new way. Instead of directly looking for biological causes of pan-cultural patriarchy, we tried to create a product that will help people to reflect on their own position in this debate rather than driving them to a specific point of view. This is why we explored not only biological arguments, but also history and symbolism of gender roles. For the same reason we chose to approach the topic of gender equality through forms of digital art and vulgarisation of scientific data: one helped us to transmit general concepts of gender and sex differences, and the other served to educate the spectator about the scientific data that goes along with them. In simpler terms, we were hoping to make something fascinating and educative while at the same time evoking an open discussion. So we built an exhibition.
One of the inspirations for our approach to the topic of gender equality was the feminist primatology movement. Along with many other fields of science, primatology was majorly biased by the lack of female presence. This imbalance, in turn, distorted our perception of our primate relatives and the origin of our own behaviors. Only in the 60’s did such researchers as Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, Birute Galdikas and others begin to show primatology and anthropology from another perspective.
One of the biggest omissions in the primatology was also happening in 70’s and 80’s and had to do with our closest primate cousins: chimpanzees and bonobos. We’re equally related to both of them, but somehow we hear much less about the latter. This happened for two reasons: first, chimpanzees were discovered earlier than bonobos, and second, chimpanzees fit better with the theories about our societal structure. Having patriarchal, xenophobic and heterosexual chimpanzees as a touchstone of our evolution is more consistent with the social structure that we’re used to considering ‘natural’ for humans. Bonobos reveal a completely different picture: their society is matriarchal and all conflicts are resolved with pan-sexual interactions. If we had discovered bonobos earlier, would we think that first humans behaved in the similar way? This is the question that we raised in the first exhibit in our project, the VR walking simulation Homonoidea. In this VR experience visitors could grasp some key concepts of primate societal structure, the sexual evolution of humans and its symbolism in modern society.
In 1989 Donna Haraway published a book called Primate Visions, which opened a whole new chapter both in primatology and feminist studies; questioning how contemporary theories about family, heterosexuality and gender norms take root in primate research. In the preface of the book, she asks several crucial questions:
What may count as nature for late industrial people? How do terrible marks of gender and race enable and constrain love and knowledge in particular cultural traditions, including the modern science?
The truth is, researchers and media humanize primates as often as they de-humanize humans in order to excuses for injustice in our society.
Primatology is about the life history of a taxonomic order that includes people. Especially western people produce stories about primates while simultaneously telling stories of nature and culture, animal and human, body and mind, origin and future.
Let’s stop for a second at the question of nature and culture. In order to explore the roles that both play in gender differences, we had to first see if they could actually be separated from each other. If by “nature” we mean our innate characteristics, then it is fair to look for answers in evolutionary biology and primatology. But can we say for sure what’s “natural” for us? And if so, can we treat this construct as some sort of universal truth that dominates all aspects of our lives?
Where do we place ourselves on a scale from pure animal nature to pure human culture? One hypothesis proposed by anthropologist Sherry Orthner in her article Is Female To Male as Nature To Culture? finds the core of gender inequality in this question. Female physiology places her in a position where she seems to be closer to nature, while men, free from the childbearing and domestic tasks, are left to perform the acts of culture and to drive humanity towards progress.
Since it is always culture’s project to subsume and transcend nature, if women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it “natural” to subordinate […] them.
The second exhibit of Unnatural History, Mother Nature, explores this intermediary position of females, which places them simultaneously in two positions: in reality females are seen merely as procreators of species, inferior to men, while mythology often places them in role of goddesses and witches, possessing forces of nature.
Most western societies acknowledge women’s rights to decide what to do with her own body and fertility, so the need to procreate is not really a need, but a choice. Still, the association of females with family persists, sometimes even within progressive and feminist communities. To stress this point we have built SpeedAss: an arcade-like machine based on Implicit Association Test, the aim of which is to reveal whether the player has subconscious association of females with family and males with career. We found it a good way to show that even today we’re not yet free from remains of the patriarchy: all the small biases in our everyday actions, words and thoughts contribute to the bigger picture.
The fact that females are free to choose what to do with their ability to give birth doesn’t change the fact that males and females are still physiologically different. Biological differences between sexes (sexual dimorphism) are real and important, but to what extent? Clearly, not to the point of placing females somewhere between non-human primates and “culturalized” humans, but neither can we claim that two sexes are indistinguishable. In Dimorphism we came back to looking at humans as a part of animal kingdom, trying to distinguish between influences of nature and nurture. Sexual dimorphism is much less evident in humans than in other animals, but society contributes majorly to the division of roles. Starting from early childhood, males and females are gradually driven apart, and this rupture cannot be explained entirely by our innate differences. The following exhibit, Who do you think you are?, expands this subject further: it is a simple true/false game that reveals more stereotypes about the significance of sexual differences in humans and other animals.
As we were hoping that our project would spark interest in the roots of gender norms, at the end of our exhibition we offered visitors to have a sort of “guided” discussion on this topic. We offered them a set of questions covering topics of relationships between males and females, sexuality, expectations of the society etc to discuss in groups.
- How do you express affection?
- What kind of biological ‘urges’ do you feel? (i.e. things you feel are specific to being a man or woman)
- Are male friendships different than female friendships?
- What are some easy parts of being a man/woman? What are some difficult things?
- When do you feel the most uncomfortable with members of the opposite sex?
- What things in your life would you do differently if you were a member of the opposite sex?
One of my main personal goals for this project was finding a way to make a difficult subject into a digestible and entertaining form, without losing the essence of it. It turned out to be specifically hard to do it with the subject of gender equality, because more often than not, even very progressive people can be diverted from feminist discourse, claiming that women already have all the rights they need. So in addition to vulgarising the subject, we also had to overcome this aversion. In the end, I think we managed to produce something that is mainly targeted at people who may be slightly biased in topics of gender, but not completely hostile to them. Our next steps are aimed at making our content more immersive as well as adapting it to different audiences.
track the evolution of our project here
