Ideas Matter Lecture Series - Winter 2006

February 2, 2006

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Professor of Biology and Gender Studies,
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry
Brown University

"Born and Raised: A Critical Analysis of Sexuality and the Nature/Nurture Debate"

Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. She has done pioneering scientific work on the complex reciprocal influences of biology and culture in the development of sex and reproduction in various animal species and human beings and has been one of the few biologists to consider the role that gender plays in shaping human development. Inversely, Anne is also one of the few gender theorists who includes cutting edge biology in the work she has done on how scientific and medical discourses have shaped institutional approaches to a variety of sexual issues. She has written two influential books, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Men and Women, which appeared in a revised and augmented version in 1992, and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, published by Basic Books in 2000.

Both these books advance the argument that nature produces more variation in human biological sex than the gender systems of most societies have been willing to acknowledge, and that we need to completely reconsider the biological, social and historical relationship of sex, gender and sexuality. In her lecture Fausto-Sterling will address how we must move away from an either/or position on the influence of nature and nurture to an interactive and dynamic one that considers how experience trains the body in the course of the life process.