The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

sexuality in order to challenge presumptions about gender difference that can shape the findings of biological research. Fausto-Sterling's book Myths of Gender argues that cognitive and physical differences between the genders, particularly the expectation of female weakness, are often presumed to be entirely biological in origin, when they are in fact produced by cultural practice or are misunderstood through scientific bias. Her more recent Sexing the Body focuses on intersexuality, the nature of bodies that defy easy classification as male or female. Binary gender classification is a mechanism for ignoring a significant portion of the population—as much as 1.7%—that does not conform, either genetically or morphologically, to medical expectations for the male or female body. Intersexuality suggests that a binary split between the two genders is a cultural structure rather than a biological fact, and if “nature really offers us more than two sexes, then it follows that our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits” (Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body 31). Because Fausto-Sterling's work specifically invokes the unusual body in order to interrogate an entrenched ideological belief in binary gender, her research reveals both the hegemonic quality of gender categories and culture's struggle to account for physical difference. Building upon this work, disability theorists have argued that many of the premises and categories traditionally used by Western culture to understand the body are in fact culturally constructed oversimplifications.

Fausto-Sterling's research allows for a discussion of culturally constructed gender in the context of material bodies and the history of science, a strength that helps her work to avoid some of the possible criticisms that can be aimed at Judith Butler's work. Susan Bordo has suggested that Butler and other postmodern theorists are too quick to disregard the reality of human experience: their work embodies “fantasies of transcendence of the materiality and historicity of the body, its situatedness in space and time, and its gender” (15). Bordo explains: