Anne Fausto-Sterling Dualisms Analysis

Dualism is the major focus of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s (2000) “Dueling Dualisms” with deep discussion on the dichotomy of “sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed.” However, her movement to the concept of intertwined biology and lived experience are insightful. I would like to look at how Fausto-Sterling describes and supports the idea of nature and nurture working together to create gender and sexuality.

Fausto-Sterling (2000) stated “sexuality is a somatic fact created by a cultural effect,” meaning that there is truth to the biological form that creates the body and it still severs a function, but this biological body is altered through the environment. Fausto-Sterling (2000) suggested that the body and culture are always moving together to create individual lived experience and that one “cannot merely subtract the environment, culture, history and end up with nature to biology.” Fausto-Sterling asserted that alone biology is the makeup of the body, but without the social aspects there is nothing, just as there cannot be culture without humans, there cannot be humans without culture. This assertion is supported with the

One can trance the surface…at the beginning of the circular journey the ant is clearly on the outside. But as it traverses the twisted ribbon…it ends up on the inside surface.” Fausto-Sterling uses this puzzle to demonstrate how biology and culture are working together, the outside ribbon representing culture and experience and the inside ribbon as biological and physiological. The two are in constant exchange with each other, the outside experience affects the internal biology and the internal biology affects the outside experience, and this will continue through a person’s entire