The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture

Roger N. Lancaster provides the definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire in this spirited expose of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene. Lancaster links the recent resurgence of biological explanations for gender norms, sexual desires, and human nature in general with the current pitched battles over sexual politics. Ideas about a 'hardwired' and immutable human nature are circulating at a pivotal moment in human history, he argues, one in which dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented normalization of lesbian and gay relationships are challenging received notions and commonly held convictions on every front. "The Trouble with Nature" takes on major media sources - the "New York Times", "Newsweek" - and widely ballyhooed scientific studies and ideas to show how journalists, scientists, and others invoke the rhetoric of science to support political positions in the absence of any real evidence. Lancaster also provides a novel and dramatic analysis of the social, historical, and political backdrop for changing discourses on 'nature', including an incisive critique of the failures of queer theory to understand the social conflicts of the moment. By showing how reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on essentialist ideas about gender, Lancaster invites us to think more deeply and creatively about human acts and social relations.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction. Culture Wars, Nature Wars: A Report from the Front ORIGINS STORIES 1. In the Beginning, Nature 2. The Normal Body 3. The Human Design 4. Our Animals, Our Selves ADAM AND EVE DO THE WILD THING: THE SCIENCE OF DESIRE, THE SELFISH GENE, AND OTHER MODERN FABLES 5. The Science Question: Cultural Preoccupations and Social Struggles 6. Sexual Selection: Eager, Aggressive Boy Meets Coy, Choosy Girl 7. The Selfish Gene 8. Genomania and Heterosexual Fetishism VENUS AND MARS AT THE FIN DE DIECLE: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MODERN ART OF SPIN 9. Biological Beauty and the Straight Arrow of Desire 10. Homo Faber, Family Man 11. T-Power 12. Nature's Marriage Laws VARIETIES OF HUMAN NATURE: THE VIEW FROM ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY 13. Marooned on Survivor Island 14. Selective Affinities: Commonalities and Differences in the Family of Man 15. The Social Body 16. The Practices of Sex PERMUTATIONS ON THE "NATURE" OF DESIRE: THE GAY BRAIN, THE GAY GENE, AND OTHER TALES OF IDENTITY 17. This Queer Body 18. The Biology of the Homosexual 19. Desire Is Not a "Thing" 20. Familiar Patterns, Dangerous Liaisons THE ENDS OF NATURE: THE WEIRD ANTINOMIES OF POSTMODERN MASS CULTURE 21. "Nature" in Quotation Marks 22. Money's Subject 23. History and Historicity Flow through the Body Politic 24. The Politics of Dread and Desire 25. Sex and Citizenship in the Age of Flexible Accumulation An Open-Ended Conclusion Notes Index

About the Author :
Roger N. Lancaster teaches anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, where he directs the Cultural Studies Ph.D. program. He edited (with Micaela di Leonardo) The Gender/Sexuality Reader (1997) and is the author of Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (California, 1993), which won the C. Wright Mills Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize.

Review :
“A terrific critical overview of recent attempts to assert that the complexities of sex, gender and sexuality are reducible to isolatable biological features, such as genes, hormones and regions of the brain. . . . A sharp analysis of American culture's current tendency to gravitate toward the view that gender differences are genetically hard-wired. . . . [and] most effectively arms the reader with the tools we need to understand and deconstruct the fallacious science that promotes silly hetero norms.” “Vivid, sharp, fun-to-read . . . Includes a wide range of examples from the popular culture, carefully analyzed and exposed with witty irony.” “Lancaster is a fluent, often funny, and. . . [a] good-natured writer. He divests constructivist theory and gender studies of their usual obtuse jargon and acknowledges this silliness of some ideological critiques of science.” “The definitive rebuttal of evolutionary just-so stories about men, women, and the nature of desire . . . [A] spirited expose of the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture.” "Among his achievements within this text is to unpack the freight of bioreductivist strains of scientific research in the aforementioned areas and to rebut the essentializing assumptions and normalizing effects of this science and the forums in which its findings are reported. The Trouble with Nature will be of interest to social scientists and to scholars in the humanities working on issues of sex and gender, sexuality, the body, science studies, and US culture."