Franco Castelluccio’s famous sculpture, The Double Helix XX-XY, is considered to depict the history of DNA as a story in which males and females, as two separate entities, celebrate life and save mankind through their growing mutual compassion. The image of a harmonious biological gender order is implicitly opposed by an image of society as a messy, unruly, wild domain, within which reigns a variety of contesting and sometimes confusing manifestations of gender. The ultimate goal, so it seems, is to replace the messy and unruly character of gender with the clear and clean-cut order of biology, thus bringing progress and
salvation. Castelluccio’s sculpture articulates – be it in fact or in hope– that biology is destiny.
Women’s and gender studies have, however, told different stories. For a long time, the core business of women’s studies and women’s history has been to criticize the idea of biology-as-destiny. Gender scholars have repeatedly shown how this idea of biology-as-destiny was socially and historically constructed in biomedical and other sciences, and how socio-cultural norms, ideals and practices have upheld this idea. Authors such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Londa Schiebinger and Judith Butler debunked the early twentieth century theories, which proclaimed that women and men were predominantly determined by sex hormones or sex chromosomes, as simply reflections of specific times, places and power configurations. Women’s studies placed the concept of ‘gender’ centre stage, thus replacing the concept of ‘sexes’.
Yet, ‘the genetic revolution’ which began in the late 1980s brought biology back into gender studies. New studies into the multi-facetted relationship between gender and genes have been undertaken. Evelyn Fox
Keller’s analysis of the role played by British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), in unravelling the double helix structure of DNA, and more significantly, the underestimation of
this role, confirmed the need to examine more critically the importance of gender in the history of genetics, in the Human Genome Project, and in life sciences in general. Moreover, questions related to the (re)production of gender and genes in other scientific disciplines also came to the fore, for example in psychology, epidemiology, health sciences, medicine, life sciences, agricultural sciences and bio-engineering sciences. The notion of mitochondrial DNA (DNA inherited only from the mother) further stimulated intriguing questions about gender-related patterns of inheriting diseases and traits. In his book, The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry (2002), geneticist Bryan Sykes imbues this discovery with a rather feminist twist, stressing the relevance of mitochondrial DNA in understanding the history of the human race: Eve being more important that Adam in terms of our genetic history.
The genetic revolution has also had a major impact on the field of gender, medicine and health care. Today, the website of the World Health Organization (WHO) includes an extensive section on gender and genetics. It highlights gender-related genetic disorders such as Turner Syndrome and Klinefelter Syndrome, and draws attention to ethical issues such as sex selection, genetic discrimination, and genetic exclusion based on
infertility, as well to as the many policies and laws employed to deal with these ethical issues. Whilst we may be accustomed to discussing the ethics surrounding the practices of sex selection in Asia, a global perspective requires that we should also ask whether new reproductive technologies, like pre-implantation genetic screening, encourage sex selection in Western countries too. Many anthropological and sociological
studies demonstrate that gender and genes are interrelated in varying ways across the globe, as local cultures and customs influence and shape different cultural expressions of genetics. For example, in her study of breast cancer and genetic services in Cuba, Sarah Gibbon (2011) shows that Cuban women do not consider breast cancer to be ‘genetic’ or ‘familial’, but related to an external ‘blow’, stressing the rather coincidental nature of the disease. Today we are witnessing a transformation in life sciences, whereby complex biological systems models are used to investigate the interactions between an individual’s biology and environmental factors in order to understand cancer and other diseases, replacing simplistic expectations about the predictability of genetic disorders. Within this context, the question arises as to how gender relates to these new ideas of complexity in systems biology.
The genetic revolution may be situated primarily in medical laboratories, biobanks, knowledge infrastructures, and diagnostic tests, yet social, cultural and political practices produce specific representations of gender and genes as well. The Human Genome Project, for example, stimulated a cultural discourse in which metaphors like ‘the book of life’ and ‘gene-talk’ played an enormous role. The genetic revolution has been articulated through cultural representations, such as science fiction movies (The Cider House Rules, Gattaca), television series like Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) and other visual media. A large number of artists have been inspired by the Human Genome Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project and have strived to represent in artistic form the meaning of DNA technologies for new individual and collective identities. Due to the genetic revolution, notions of inheritance, familiarity, inborn traits, reproductive risks and opportunities have now become part and parcel of our everyday conversations.
This special issue of the Yearbook of Women’s History, guest-edited by Prof. Dr. Klasien Horstman and Prof. Dr. Marli Huijer, is dedicated to the representation, construction, interaction, articulation, enactment, and/or framing of gender & genes in different scientific disciplines as well as in the media, design and the arts, forensics, architecture, legal practices, health care, and daily life across the globe. We welcome historical, theoretical-conceptual, biographical, and/or empirical analyses; comparative perspectives are appreciated.
The Yearbook of Women’s History is a peer-reviewed academic annual covering all aspects of gender, femininity and masculinity connected with historical research throughout the world. The volume is published by Amsterdam University Press. It is supported by The Friends of the Yearbook Society which wants to promote women’s history in particular, a subject that is reflected in papers of each Yearbook.
Please send your paper abstract (maximum 300 words) before 1 January 2013, to:
Evelien Walhout (editorial secretary) e.walhout@let.ru.nl.
The editorial process is scheduled as follows:
Deadline abstracts: 1.1.2013
Deadline first version papers: 1.3.2013
Peer review: 1.4.2013
Deadline second version: 1.5.2013
Final editing: 1.6.2013
Publication: November 2013
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