Blind to Sameness Sexpectations and the Social

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 Contents
Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Toward a Sociology of Perception 16

Expectations, Selective Attention, and Social Construction 20

Filter Analysis 27

2 Selective Perception and the Social Construction of Sex 33

Sexpectations and Sociomental Control 34

Sex Difference as a Social Filter 46
Perception and the Social Construction of the Body 51

3 Selective Attention—What We Actually See When

We See Sex 58

Transdar and Transition: Transgender “Expert”

Knowledge of Sex Cues 59
The Sound of Sex 64
A Sex Cue Can Be Anything (as Long as It Provides Information
about Sex) 73
Cognitive Distortions in Seeing Sex 78
Polarization 80

v
 4 Blind to Sameness 87

Transgender Narratives and the Filter of Transition 90

A Blind Phenomenology of Sexed Bodies 99
Sex Differences in Proportion 109

5 Seeking Sameness 113

Sex without Polarization 114

Drawing Textbooks: Sameness Despite Polarization 121
Genitals, Gonads, and Genes 129
Sex Sameness as a Rhetorical Strategy 131

Conclusion: Excess, Continua, and the Flexible Mind 134

Emphasizing Excess 135

The Sex/Gender Continuum 141
Cognitive Flexibility 143

Appendix: Methodological Notes 151

Notes 167 Bibliography 191 Index 207

vi
The body is what it is perceived to be; it could be otherwise if perception
were different.
DAVID ARMSTRONG, “BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE”

Above all the other senses, sight makes us know and brings to light the many
differences between things.
A R I S T O T L E , M E TA P H Y S I C S
Acknowledgments
Although the seeds of my ideas about the social con-
struction of sex were planted long before I met Eviatar
Zerubavel, it was only after he introduced me to cognitive
sociology that I arrived at the particular angle on the sub-
ject I present here. I immediately recognized that the fam-
ily of concepts he discussed—particularly attention and
disattention—provided a powerful way to conceptualize
the social construction of sex that had not yet entered the
ongoing discussion in either gender studies or the sociol-
ogy of the body. I therefore owe a huge debt of gratitude
to Eviatar, who became my friend and mentor, not only
for his inspirational ideas and his detailed, thoughtful
feedback but also for his tireless emotional support and
enthusiasm for this project. He is a model of intellectual
courage and passion. I would also like to acknowledge all
those who took the time to read the manuscript while still
in its formative stages, particularly Judith Gerson, Arlene
Stein, Karen Cerulo, and Lynn Chancer. They each helped
me to sharpen and broaden my thinking. In addition, my
ideas about filter analysis are strongly influenced by col-
laborative work in progress with Tom DeGloma and would
not have been possible without his insights. Sue Visako-
witz provided tons of helpful editorial suggestions, and
Jennifer Lawrence generously created some of the key fig-
ures. At the University of Chicago Press, Doug Mitchell
made my introduction to the world of book publishing a
total pleasure. I am thankful to him, Tim McGovern, my
two excellent readers, copy editor Kelly Finefrock-Creed,
Jeff Waxman, and the rest of the Chicago team for shep-

ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

herding this manuscript through the critical final stages. My husband,

Jeremy Olshan, entered my life just as these ideas were taking form. He
has been a sounding board, an editor, a therapist, and a welcome dis-
traction. I particularly want to acknowledge the many predawn hours
he spent proofreading the manuscript before the final submission. I
also thank the rest of my family and friends—particularly my sons,
Finn and Sawyer—for sustaining me outside of work. Finally, I wish to
thank all the blind people and transgender people who gave their valu-
able time to a young researcher with a lot of strange questions about
male and female bodies.

x
Introduction
In July 1976 the first class of women arrived at West Point
for cadet basic training. As with all first-year students,
the women were issued uniforms on their first day and
required to visit the campus barber if they were not in
compliance with “hair regulations.” The rules for female
cadets stated that hair had to end above the collar and
could not stick out more than an inch and a half from
any point. Several months later, in early September, the
cadets—now uniformly dressed and coiffed—attended an
annual dance called the Plebe Hop. To the academy’s ad-
ministrators something immediately seemed amiss. With
all the major differences in dress and grooming elimi-
nated, the students looked so much the same that the ad-
ministrators were unable to visually distinguish the males
from the females. As one observer described it, the sight
of “mirror-image couples dancing in short hair and dress
gray trousers” was so unsettling that the officials swiftly
changed the rules: if the female students wanted to dance
in the future, they would have to wear skirts.1
Suppose we all stopped participating in gendered
grooming practices—foregoing gender-specific haircuts,
makeup, and clothing, just as a start. Would there still be
bodily differences between males and females? The short
answer is yes, unquestionably. Some men would still have
pronounced hair loss, most men would still have more
facial hair, many more women than men would have
prominent breasts, and the genitals would of course still
exist. Taking the existence of certain biological sex differ-
ences as a given, however, there remains another equally

1
INTRODUCTION

important question that is often overlooked in accounts of the social

construction of sex: What else exists along with sex differences? For
instance, are eyes, ears, noses, arms, legs, hands, and toes “male” and
“female”? Further, if a significant proportion of the body is not sex di-
morphic, what happens cognitively to ensure that we almost always vi-
sually perceive male and female bodies as more different than similar,
and even experience this perception as unproblematic and self- evident?
Framed in this way, the key question before scholars of the social con-
struction of sex is, not whether sex differences exist, but what else ex-
ists amid sex differences, and why do we not focus on those things in
equal measure?

Although it has been well established by gender theorists that the cre-
ation and display of difference on (and through) the body is an im-
portant aspect of the social construction of gender, highlighting the
ways that cultural norms shape how we present our physical differ-
ences as the objects of perception, the role of the perceiver in sex attri-
bution is much less understood. In light of this, this book explores the
question of how—by what kinds of cognitive and sensory processes—
perception contributes to the social construction of male and female
bodies. That is to say, I highlight the elevation of sex differences not
only through gender normative practices of self-presentation and dis-
play but through social norms of selective perception. This includes
both selective attention to sex differences and selective inattention to
sex similarities. Previously discussed almost entirely in the context of
display, the amplification of sex differences is a well-known feature
of the social construction of gender. The corresponding diminishment
of sex similarities, however, has essentially been ignored.
My central argument is that when we see sex, some parts of the body
are noticed, and others are ignored. In fact, the proportion that is rel-
evant for sex attribution is probably smaller than the proportion that
is disregarded. As I will demonstrate, this is especially evident when we
consider that dominant conceptions of sex are based only, or mostly, on
visual data and therefore exclude all the information available through
the other senses, much of which conveys a great deal of ambiguity. The
sexes, in short, are not nearly as physically different as they typically
seem, yet we are socialized to be blind to their sameness.
Some gender scholars have claimed there are actually between five
and twenty biological sexes,2 while others have suggested that, in an
ideal world, there would be only one gender.3 My approach is not to
argue that there is “really” only one sex but to show that there may be

2
 INTRODUCTION

one sex or there may be twenty, depending on the particular lens one
uses to perceive the human body, what details one considers relevant,
and why. That said, I cannot deny the number two has unique—and
uniquely distorting—cognitive properties. Binaries invite oppositional
logic, rigid thinking, and disproportionate attention to differences (and
therefore disproportionate inattention to similarities). Any number be-
yond two, on the other hand, is inherently multidimensional, does not
lend itself as easily to bifurcation, and forces us to contend with more
ambiguity, making the cognitive and perceptual work of categorization
much more apparent. In light of this, I am committed to unsettling
the binary opposition between male and female, not to make the point
that sex sameness is the more empirically correct view but to promote a
more complex, flexible-minded understanding of sex.
For the most part, in this book, I use the term gender when refer-
ring to normative cultural discourses about maleness/masculinity and
femaleness/femininity, and the term sex when discussing bodily differ-
ences. Ultimately, however, one of the key implications of my argument
is that the sex/gender distinction is a false dichotomy, based on the
mistaken idea that what separates sex from gender is that sex is purely
biological. Sex is also a sociocultural product. Looked at one way, the
sex/gender distinction was meant to capture that fact—to acknowledge
the cultural dimension of maleness and femaleness—but because of its
conceptual structure, it partitions off a terrain of “sex proper” that is
defined as purely biological. Vital to our understanding as they may be,
biological contributions to the study of sex are certainly not the entire
story.
Further, while sex attribution is my case, I also have a broader
agenda, which is to present a general sociological theory of sensory per-
ception. Just as Simone de Beauvoir analyzed gender as a case study in
phenomenology, I propose that gender, particularly as it manifests as a
cognitive schema for seeing human bodies, is a powerful case study in
social perception. The fact that our perceived reality is constructed is
pretty well-worn territory. I am much more interested in what I see as
the next question, which is to examine the mechanisms of social con-
struction. As a result, I mostly restrict my focus to the how questions
of the social construction of reality. Building on perceptions of sex, I
argue that the social construction of visual perception is a key mecha-
nism of the social construction of reality in general, and that attention
and disattention are among the primary sociocognitive processes in-
volved. I make this argument in part by showing that some notion of
selective sensory attention underlies five of the major concepts scholars

3
INTRODUCTION

have previously developed to describe the social construction of reality

(frame, schema, habitus, perspective, and thought style).
Distilled to a generic sociological principle, the point is that we al-
ways see things through one or more lenses, or filters, that shape and
package the world around us. More specifically, there is always “excess”
visual information that, while equally real and technically perceptible,
remains unnoticed because we are primed—whether by language, so-
cial expectations, prior experience, or social norms—to focus on other
details. In short, we visually attend to what we have learned is salient,
sometimes even to the point that social forms of salience totally ob-
scure the logic of the biological information.
Consider the familiar concept of the “opposite” sex, which implies
the sexes are not just different but different to the greatest degree pos-
sible. While some amount of biological difference—which we might
think of as complementarity—is required for sexual reproduction, Ray-
mond Birdwhistell’s research analyzing sex differences in nonverbal
communication proposes that humans are actually one of a number
of “weakly dimorphic” species.4 Genetically speaking, males and fe-
males are in fact 98 percent identical.5 Yet the cultural notion of “op-
posite” sexes expands that 2 percent difference to 100 percent. Indeed,
when we pointedly attend to the specificity and complexity of human
bodies, it becomes immediately evident that it is social, not biological,
logic that leads us to see male and female bodies as “opposites.” Only
by social measures are we more different than similar.

Following Erving Goffman, I conceptualize perception as an active

social process. However passive the role of the audience may seem,
the perceiver constantly makes “inferences” and interprets the infor-
mation provided by the performer, since these signs are never suffi-
cient in and of themselves to define the situation.6 As human beings,
in Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul, and Simon Gottschalk’s words, we
simultaneously sense and make sense of what we perceive. “To see, for
example, entails more than opening our eyes to allow light passively
to bounce off our retinas. We must actively perceive that which is seen
and thus make sense of somatic experiences. . . . In this way, sensing
and sense-making are necessarily conjoined, codetermined, and mutu-
ally emergent in active and reflexive practices in which we are both
the subject and object of the sensations we perceive or, for that matter,
fail to recognize.”7 The concept of perceptual work8 both foregrounds
those aspects of sensory perception that make it an active cultural pro-

4
 INTRODUCTION

cess and connects the sociology of perception to conceptual models

in other sociological subfields that highlight the interplay of cultural
constraint and agency in seemingly personal processes, as exemplified
by the concepts of identity work, body work, memory work, autobiographi-
cal work, and emotional labor.9 More broadly, what underlies the con-
cept of perceptual work is the idea that sensory “objects” are never self-
evident and require interpretation and meaning construction by the
perceiver. This insight has a long history in symbolic interactionism
and ethnomethodology, perhaps most famously illustrated in Howard
Becker’s study on marijuana use, in which he argues that perceiving
and interpreting the effects of marijuana are far from purely physiolog-
ical, since socially learned reflexive work is required to understand how
the otherwise “vague impulses and desires” should be experienced and
interpreted.10
Indeed, a key theme of the epistemology of the past few decades
has been the discrediting of the idea of a raw perceptual “given,” com-
pletely unmediated by concepts.11 This growing agreement that per-
ceptions are always at some level conceptions is also becoming visible
within cognitive science; for instance, the new field of social cognitive
neuroscience aims to relate brain mechanisms to the typical concerns
of social psychologists, challenging the presumption that scientists
are not interested in culture or the social world.12 One common cri-
tique of brain mapping is that it is reductionist, looking only at brain
matter and wiring. Yet at the same time, the field is becoming quite
inclusive of things like culture and nurture—particularly when they
show up as visible differences in the brain.13 However, recent social
scientific research on imaging technologies (which is how neuroscien-
tists typically study perception) shows that brain scientists are often
not very self-reflexive about the interpretive work involved in visual
perception—the complexities of “seeing” and “not seeing” when read-
ing brain images, as well as how the cultural contexts of visuality and
disciplinary boundaries influence how interpretations circulate and are
received.14 This research points out that a comprehensive understand-
ing of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission to-
mography (PET) images requires an account of the environment of pro-
duction and reception of such images, and more generally that social
scientists offer a sophisticated understanding of the norms, patterns,
and conventions involved in perception—what Vannini, Waskul, and
Gottschalk refer to as the “sensory or somatic order.”15
For example, there is an emerging collection of research beginning

5
INTRODUCTION

to coalesce around a sociology of the invisible.16 This includes work on

social norms and patterns of ignorance, denial, erasure, and disatten-
tion. When analyzing visual perception, it is essential to study what
goes unseen, not because of particular properties of the stimulus it-
self, which brain scientists do explore,17 but because it is “irrelevant”
to the perceiver. These spaces of invisibility have their own patterns
and shapes, and complement what is seen to create social order as we
know it.18 More broadly, cultural sociologists and cognitive sociologists
are interested in the ways that norms of attention and relevance, as
well as norms of inattention and irrelevance, cause us to see and not
see certain social realities. A sociology of the senses therefore offers an
understanding of perception that is important and distinct from tradi-
tions of research on perception in other disciplines, such as psychol-
ogy, philosophy, and neuroscience; yet there is currently no coherent,
codified subfield of sociology devoted to perception.
While cognitive and cultural sociology can provide a rich concep-
tual vocabulary to address perceptual norms, perceptual patterns, and
processes of perceptual enculturation, sociologists are traditionally less
sure-footed when it comes to accounting for the role of materiality in
social processes, though this has changed significantly in the last sev-
eral decades with the rapid growth of the sociology of the body and
embodiment. Although I do not focus on the neuronal aspects of visual
processing, a key thread of my argument in chapter 2 and throughout
the book is that social scientists need to develop better metaphors and
conceptual systems to capture the interaction of biology and culture,
and I propose filter analysis as one promising possibility.
When using the term filter I specifically have in mind a mental
“strainer,” or “sieve,” through which visual stimuli pass before they are
consciously perceived, letting in culturally approved details while sift-
ing out the culturally irrelevant. This approach, which directly engages
with the body’s fleshy materiality by seeking out this “perceptual resi-
due” or “bodily excess,” avoids lapsing into overly textual and disem-
bodied accounts of the social construction of the body. This has been
correctly identified as a limitation of many theories of the social con-
struction of the body (and sex in particular), especially those rooted
in queer theory and poststructuralist philosophy—for instance, Judith
Butler’s argument that sex is always already gender.19 The filter meta-
phor provides a more grounded approach to analyzing the social con-
struction of the body by highlighting those features of the materiality
of bodies that are normatively disattended.

6
 INTRODUCTION

In trying to capture the process of sex attribution, I faced a method-

ological challenge shared by anyone who studies these taken-for-
granted processes informing social life: How to examine a perceptual
process that is largely automatic and subconscious, and that most peo-
ple believe is self-evident? My solution to this problem was to bring
together two groups who represent extreme cases in relation to the vi-
sual perception of male and female bodies. I adopt the perspective of
“outsiders,” people who either do not participate in visual sex attribu-
tion or do it very differently, and “experts,” people who are unusually
self-conscious and deliberate about sex attribution.
I chose to interview blind people because, given the centrality of vi-
sual information to sex attribution among the sighted, their narratives
provide access to a perceptual experience of sexed bodies that is totally
different in sensory content from the typical sighted experience. Draw-
ing on twenty-seven in-depth interviews, I highlight the primary cues
blind people use to attribute sex, as well as several distinctive features
of the nonvisual process of sex attribution (including salience, speed,
and diachronicity). What I found, in brief, is that while blind people
are unable to perceive certain sex differences that seem visually obvi-
ous, the sighted are equally unaware of many sensory aspects of sex
that are obvious to blind people. Their rarely foregrounded nonvisual
modes of perceiving bodies thus bring to light aspects of the process of
visual sex attribution that we may otherwise take for granted as sighted
people, and clarify the extent to which our dominant understanding of
sex is specifically “sex seen,” as opposed to “sex sensed” more broadly.
In a way, then, I studied blind people to show that the sighted are ac-
tually “blind” too. More generally, in light of the exceptional social
prominence of visual perception, sociologists can gain great insight
into the social construction of reality by bracketing the visual and ex-
ploring other modes of sensory perception.
I describe these respondents as blind rather than using other terms
such as visually impaired, because almost without exception, this is the
word they use and prefer. As with any term, however, there are com-
plexities obscured by the category blind. Some of the respondents never
had any visual perception, while others were born with varying de-
grees of sight that later disappeared or significantly worsened: just over
half the participants were born blind or lost their vision in the first
year of life; three participants became blind between ages 1 and 10; the

7
INTRODUCTION

remaining ten became blind at age 11 or older. Further, even within

each of those groups, blindness manifests in different ways. Some re-
spondents see absolutely nothing—one person described this as trying
to see through your elbow. At the other end of the spectrum are those
respondents who have a very limited amount of useable visual percep-
tion (only in one area of their field of vision, for example, or only when
holding something very close to their eyes). I did not predefine who
would qualify as blind for the purposes of this study, allowing any-
one to participate if they understood themselves as blind. I initially
thought there might be interesting differences between those respon-
dents who never had vision or lost their vision at a very early age (and
thus were never exposed to visual sex differences) and those who were
sighted into late childhood or adulthood. Despite looking across these
groups for patterns of variation, I did not observe significant system-
atic differences in their descriptions of how they currently attribute
sex. None of the respondents currently had enough visual acuity to use
visual information to assign people as “male” or “female” in everyday
interactions.
While blind people made interesting informants primarily because
they do not participate in visual sex attribution, transgender people
possess varying degrees of “expert knowledge” about seeing sex. Many
transgender people actively and consciously present themselves as fe-
male (if they were assigned “male” at birth) or male (if originally as-
signed a “female” sex). As a result, they are deeply aware of the dif-
ferences between male and female bodies—as well as their underlying
similarities. This is not to say that transpeople are more deliberately
“doing gender”20 than the rest of us (with the attendant implication of
falsehood or fabrication). At least in part, their elevated awareness arises
because non-transgender (cisgender) people look so hard at them, and
then in turn they look hard at themselves as they try to avoid drawing
the focus of that disciplining gaze. This perspective gives them differ-
ent sensitivities to how they attribute bodies as male or female, as well
as to how, when, and why they are—or are not—“read” as male and
female by others.
I use transgender as an umbrella term to capture a continuum of “dif-
ferently” sexed and gendered identities that encompasses transsexuals,
cross-dressers, and anyone else who self-identifies as transgender or
whose gender identity does not correspond normatively with his or her
birth sex.21 When referring to specific respondents, I use whatever ter-
minology they used to describe themselves to me. These terms included