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The IUD in Me: On Embodying Feminist
Technoscience Studies
Chikako Takeshita

a

a
University of California , Riverside, USA

Published online: 09 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Chikako Takeshita (2010) The IUD in Me: On Embodying Feminist Technoscience
Studies, Science as Culture, 19:1, 37-60, DOI: 10.1080/09505430903558021

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505430903558021

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The IUD in Me: On Embodying Feminist
Technoscience Studies

CHIKAKO TAKESHITA

University of California, Riverside, USA

ABSTRACT This article traces my personal and academic journey through two ‘IUDs in
Me’ interlacing personal encounters with the IUD with formal research findings from
academic work. I demonstrate that reflecting on my own embodiment of the IUD while
conducting academic research on the same technology helped me understand how
social and historical conditions constructed my reproductive choice as an American
consumer of the device and how such ‘choice’ is constrained by the scientific
community’s willingness to develop birth control methods, medical practices, and
corporate profitability. Personally enjoying the IUD and benefiting from studying it
academically, I was faced with a moral dilemma between my own empowerment and
the disempowerment that many other women experienced in relationship to this
technology. As a way to hold my personal body politics accountable towards feminist
struggles for reproductive freedom, this essay scrutinizes my bodily experiences by
reading them critically against socio-historical and political contexts. I contend that
such reflexive embodied scholarship helped illuminate how ‘differences’ among women
were implicitly calculated and actively configured by IUD developers, who constantly
revamped the research and discourse around the device over the last several decades in
response to changes in social interests, political stakes, and scientific findings. I argue
that my reflexive and embodied feminist technoscience studies led to a fruitful
theoretical investigation into how the creation of various ‘ideal’ users mirrors the
transnational political economy of women’s bodies.

KEY WORDS: Intrauterine device (IUD), feminist technoscience studies, reflexive
embodied scholarship, construction of contraceptive users, political economy of
women’s bodies, menstruation regulating technology

Science as Culture
Vol. 19, No. 1, 37 – 60, March 2010

Correspondence Address: Chikako Takeshita, Women’s Studies Department, University of California, Riverside,
900 University Avenue, CA 92521. Email: [email protected]

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/10/010037-24 # 2010 Process Press
DOI: 10.1080/09505430903558021

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Introduction

In the spring of 2002, I went to a Planned Parenthood clinic to get an intrauterine
device (IUD).1 While I was on the examination table in the classic feet-up-in-
stirrups position, the nurse held my hand and said: ‘you might feel a little
cramp’. The doctor carefully slid into my vaginal opening an inserter loaded
with a ParaGardw IUD, also known as the CuT-380A, shaped like a ‘T’ and
bearing 380mg of copper. The perpendicular arms of the T are folded against
the vertical stem when the device is loaded into a 1/8-inch-diameter straw-like
inserter. As the doctor gently pushed the inserter through my cervix up into
the uterus, I squeezed the nurse’s hand and tried to distract myself by looking
at a humorous poster pinned to the ceiling, apparently placed there to make
patients like me feel comfortable. The arms popped open inside the uterus as
the inserter was extracted and the device resumed its T-shape. The IUD would
now sit in my uterine cavity, releasing tiny amounts of copper and preventing
pregnancy for up to 10 years. The insertion was completed in a few minutes.
The cost of the IUD was $250.

This article traces my personal and academic journey through two ‘IUDs in Me’,
interlacing personal encounters with the IUD with formal research findings from
academic work. Reflecting on my own embodiment of the IUD while conducting
academic research on the same technology helped me understand how social and
historical conditions constructed my reproductive choice as an American consu-
mer of the device and how such ‘choice’ is constrained by the scientific commu-
nity’s willingness to develop birth control methods, medical practices, and
corporate profitability. Personally enjoying the IUD and benefiting from studying
it academically, I faced a moral dilemma between my own empowerment and the
disempowerment that many other women experienced in relationship to this
technology.

As a way to hold my personal body politics accountable towards feminist
struggles for reproductive freedom, this essay scrutinizes my bodily experiences
by critically reading them against socio-historical and political contexts. Such
reflexive embodied scholarship helped illuminate in my research how ‘differ-
ences’ among women were implicitly calculated and actively configured by
IUD developers, who constantly revamped the research and discourse around
the device over the last several decades in response to changes in social interests,
political stakes, and scientific findings. I argue that my reflexive and embodied
feminist technoscience studies led to a fruitful theoretical investigation into
how the creation of various ‘ideal’ users mirrors the global political economy
of women’s bodies.

At the time I got my own IUD, I had been researching its history for a few
months for my dissertation project in Science and Technology Studies (STS)
(Takeshita, 2004b). The decision to insert the device in my own uterus was for
both personal and professional gains. Personally I was in a new relationship and

38 C. Takeshita

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I wanted a convenient birth control method. I chose the IUD because it does not
require a daily regimen of pill-taking and it is a cost-effective long-term method
that needs no replacing for many years. These precise features were originally
considered to be ideal for population control when the Population Council in
New York initiated IUD development in the early1960s.2 Developers believed
that the reproductive capacity of women in the global South needed to be
brought under control on a long-term basis and that the pill was unsuitable for
this purpose because it required the users to use it correctly and consistently
(Dugdale, 2000; Onorato, 1990; Tone, 1999). Hence, at its inception, intrauterine
contraception was envisioned as the one-time insertion method that can be forgot-
ten about while the device prevented excess fertility and averted the threat of
population explosion.

The IUD indeed met my needs, but it was not something that I could forget
about. Its side effects, namely the heavy bleeding, painful cramping, and longer
menstrual period, were definitely noticeable every month so that I was reminded
each time that I had a foreign object inside my uterus. I often pondered how the
side effects must have been far worse for women who used the method decades
ago. At that time developers had purposely made the devices bulkier, and thus
more irritating to the organ, believing that covering a larger area of the uterine
cavity made the device more effective in preventing pregnancy (Tietze &
Lewit, 1962). I also shuddered at the thought of doctors dismissing female
patients’ complaints when women were actually suffering from serious infections
(Grant, 1992).

I coped with the side effects reasonably well with the help of abundant feminine
hygiene products, ibuprofen, and some self-convincing that my symptoms were
normal and nothing seriously dangerous. Overall, I was quite satisfied with my
ParaGard. But, I wondered, what about women in the global South, who may
not have access to all the modern amenities and may have had the device inserted
against their wishes? How might they be experiencing the device? I felt ambiva-
lent about my personal empowerment brought to me by the IUD, knowing that
numerous women were disempowered by the same technology. I also worried
that women who lost their fertility during the 1970s due to injuries associated
with IUD use might question my commitment to feminist analysis. I was
compelled to ask myself what my responsibility was as a feminist scholar
whose actions and academic work engaged the experiences and exploitation of
other women. This question became a sticking point and, later, a motivation
behind interrogating the issue of inequality more theoretically in my study of
the device.

When I first got the IUD, however, I only had a vague idea of how having the
device inserted would affect my academic work. I thought I might benefit profes-
sionally from an IUD insertion because colleagues I respected also had personal
bodily relationships with the subjects they studied. A fellow PhD candidate,
Wairimu Njambi, had written her dissertation on female circumcision, a

The IUD in Me 39

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procedure she had undergone in her native country of Kenya (Njambi, 2000).
Likewise, one of my mentors, Martha McCaughey, had authored a book on
women’s self-defense training, which she herself practiced (McCaughey, 1997).
They struck me as possessing unique insight and authority to speak about their
research findings as a result of their experiences with the topics at hand. They
were also practicing feminist epistemology, a position that refuses to pose as
value-neutral, objective, unbiased researchers or disembodied knowers
(Harding, 1991; Haraway, 1988). Njambi and McCaughey were literally exercis-
ing embodied subjectivities: they were creating knowledge from perspectives that
come from bodies situated within the very subjects they studied. As someone
aspiring to follow their footsteps, I found their personal and bodily relationships
with their research most appealing.

Following the insertion, I too became an embodied knower. Keeping to a
feminist research methodology that anchors objectivity in accounting for the
researcher’s own values, social positions, and relationship with the research
subject, I had to be reflective about who I was—a satisfied IUD user generating
an academic analysis and a feminist critique of the device. I was naı̈ve, though,
to think that embodiment would somehow turn me into an authoritative knower.
Having a device did not ‘put me in touch’ with other IUD users or help me
know them better. Instead it made it clearer that my situatedness—the historical,
geographical, and social position that I occupy as an educated woman living in
the United States 40 years after the contraceptive method was revived—shaped
my own experience, which was not easily comparable to that of other women
due to our grossly different positionalities. Knowing that classic feminist
critique of the IUD regarded the device as inherently oppressive, potentially
dangerous, and prone to abuse (Grant, 1992; Hartmann, 1995; Tone, 1999), I
felt slightly uneasy with my own positive relationship with the device. Would
I be regarded as betraying women if I cast this technology in a positive light
as it related to my own experience? As I carried on with my academic work
in my IUD body, the nagging question that I struggled with was how to
make sense of my own body politics in my feminist study of the history of
this technology.

My embodiment of the contraceptive method became the ‘personal’ stake in
trying to figure out a way to produce knowledge about a technology that has
affected the lives of numerous women without diminishing their experiences.
As I reflected on the position that my body occupies in the transnational political
economy of contraceptive research, I began to see how my embodiment was
related to that of other women through the history of IUD research. This has
led me to the task of developing a theoretical framework to account for the
body/technology relationship of ‘diverse’ women, who are ‘implicated’ by con-
traceptive development.3 This article, thus, narrates how a reflexive embodied
scholarship emerged from reflecting on the ‘IUDs in Me’ and what I learned
about them through academic studies.

40 C. Takeshita

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Why the IUD?

What is remarkable about the IUD is that it is the first modern long-acting revers-
ible contraceptive method to be broadly distributed. The number of users has
grown to over 150 million in the last 50 years, the majority of them residing in
the developing world. There, the IUD is the second most prevalent method of fer-
tility control after female sterilization, with 21% of contraceptive users relying on
the device. Fourteen percent of contraceptive users in the developed regions use
the IUD, ranking fourth after the pill, the male condom, and female sterilization
(D’Arcangues, 2007).4 The method is alive and well in international family plan-
ning programs; projects aimed at improving IUD distribution in various countries
of the global South are underway (Salem, 2006). In the United States the method
has suffered a negative reputation due to the Dalkon Shield fallout during the
1970s and lawsuits that drove pharmaceutical companies to withdraw their IUD
products from the American market during the 1980s. Nevertheless, the contra-
ceptive method is seeing a resurgence in popularity owing to a recent television
advertisement of the new hormone-releasing device, which I discuss below.

There are a number of books on the Dalkon Shield tragedy (Grant, 1992;
Hawkins, 1997; Hicks, 1994; Mintz, 1985; Perry & Dawson, 1985) and several
articles analyzing the inception of the device as a population control tool predi-
cated on the subjugation of underprivileged women (Dugdale, 2000; Meldrum,
1996; Tone, 1999). I explicate the episode in greater detail in the next section.
The lack of comprehensive historical investigation into the IUD is conspicuous
when compared to the abundant scholarship on hormonal contraception (Briggs,
2002; Clarke, 1998; Marks, 2001; Oudshoorn, 1994, 2000; Watkins, 1998). The
pill is understandably more exciting since it involved the discovery of sex hor-
mones, is associated with the birth control movement and the sexual revolution,
and is the most popular method in the global North. For feminist scholars, it
has also been important to critique how the pill was tested in a problematic
fashion on women of color. The IUD, on the other hand, may have been over-
looked by scholars of the global North because its distribution has been primarily
overseas and its scientific aspect is seemingly insignificant. Nonetheless, those
involved in international family planning assistance recognize the important
role that intrauterine contraception plays in the reproductive health of women in
the global South. It was through a conversation with one such person that I
became interested in the IUD as a research topic.

As I came to learn, scientific activities around this device were far from
mundane. In fact, they offered a rich site of analysis for how contraceptive
researchers overcame obstacles for their technology to be widely accepted. IUD
developers had to answer questions about its safety and criticism that the provi-
der-dependent method takes reproductive control away from women. They also
had to shape the device into a marketable product and avert allegations of it
being an abortive method. Thus, in my research I detailed how the acceptability

The IUD in Me 41

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of the IUD had been negotiated over the past four and a half decades. I argued that
IUD developers conducted scientific studies to garner the contraceptive method a
status of properly tested medical device, reasserted the device’s safety after the
Dalkon Shield fallout, maintained its legitimacy in international family planning,
and reshaped it as a contraceptive ‘choice’ for all women and as a consumer
product (Takeshita, 2004b).

A Brief History of the IUD, 1960 to the mid-1980s

At this point, I want to offer an abbreviated historical sketch of the IUD’s devel-
opment to help situate my own experiences and research. The modern IUD was
revived in the early 1960s bolstered by two primary concerns—population and
profit. Population control advocates believed that population explosion in the
global South would lead to famine, economic collapse, environmental demolition,
political turmoil, states converting to communism, and global instability (Hart-
mann, 1995). Hormonal contraceptives had just become available, but IUD enthu-
siasts deemed the pill to be only suitable for Western upper-middle class women,
who they considered deserving of a contraceptive with higher effectiveness and
who were trusted to use it correctly and consistently (Onorato, 1990; Tone,
1999). Promoting the IUD, Alan Guttmacher, a medical doctor and former presi-
dent of Planned Parenthood announced:

As I see it, the IUD’s [sic] have special application to underdeveloped areas
where two things are lacking: one, money and the other, sustained motiv-
ation [to prevent excess fertility]. No contraceptive could be cheaper, and
also once the damn thing is in the patient cannot change her mind (quoted
in Watkins, 1998, p. 70).

In other words, the IUD was thought to make long-term pregnancy prevention
easily achievable; the device was ‘imposable’ by a third party, who only had to
convince a woman once to have ‘the damn thing’ inserted in her (Clarke,
2000). Early IUD developers, hence, imagined inserting the device by the
masses in women of color in order to take control of their fertility. The Population
Council was most instrumental in facilitating the development and scientific
studies of the method for the next several decades.

Feminists have especially been wary of how this technology has been imposed on
women with little attention to individual reproductive desires and health. Some
governments, such as those of Indonesia, China, and Vietnam, have indeed mobi-
lized the contraceptive method to limit each nation’s birth rate using coercive
and semi-coercive means (Gammeltoft, 1999; Greenhalgh, 1994; Hartmann,
1995). Other examples of abuse can be found in healthcare providers who pass
judgments on who should be barred from reproducing. For example, indigenous
women in Mexico were reportedly targeted heavily for IUD use, and medical

42 C. Takeshita

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staff inserted devices without the women’s knowledge or proper consent immedi-
ately after childbirth and abortion procedures (Ortega et al., 1998; Thompson,
2000). In the US, poor teenagers who were deemed unreliable pill users were pre-
scribed the Dalkon Shield during the early 1970s (Rauh & Burket, 1975). Women of
color who gave birth at the Los Angeles County Medical Center during the 1970s
were aggressively recommended to go on the IUD (Gutiérrez, 2008). More recently,
women with addictions have been offered cash in exchange for IUD insertion
(Bland, 2002). Problematic use of IUDs that undermines marginalized women’s
reproductive rights persists beyond historical and geographical boundaries.

Running parallel to concerns about population control were desires for profit,
often at the expense of women’s health. During the 1960s, scientists who were
enthused by the idea of using IUDs to restrain excess births were not terribly con-
cerned about potential health risks. They assumed that the infections observed in
some women were unrelated to the device and treatable by antibiotics, and there-
fore should not deter promoting the contraceptive method (Tietze & Lewit, 1962).
After the market success of the pill, several different models of the IUD were
released in the US by pharmaceutical companies anticipating they would make
a profit from another birth control method. In the early 1970s, an especially
poorly designed device called the Dalkon Shield was aggressively marketed to
American women including college students and those who had never given
birth (nulliparous women). The Shield, and to a lesser extent other models,
caused sterilizing injuries to numerous women and killed several users who
suffered overwhelming infections (Mintz, 1985). After the deaths of Dalkon
Shield users were brought to the attention of the US Congress in 1973, a flurry
of health risk studies examining the relationship between IUD use, pelvic inflam-
matory diseases (PID), and infertility finally emerged.

Planned Parenthood recalled the Dalkon Shield and the US Food and Drug
Administration imposed a moratorium on the selling of the Shield in 1974.
More than 300,000 women filed a class action lawsuit against the manufacturer
of the Dalkon Shield during the 1980s (Bacigal, 1990). After several lawsuits
hit other IUD manufacturers, all but one minor company withdrew their products
from the American market by the mid-1980s because they were no longer
profitable (Forrest, 1986).

Objectionable usage of the device, along with concerns about safety and profit-
ability, did not kill the IUD, however. The copper-T device I obtained named
ParaGard is a product that was reintroduced to the American market with the
support of the Population Council in 1988 in order to re-establish public confi-
dence over the contraceptive method.5

My Copper-T: Embodying the ‘Safe’ IUD User

A few weeks before my ParaGard insertion, I called the local Planned Parenthood
clinic to set up an appointment. A friend of mine who volunteered there had told me

The IUD in Me 43

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that the female doctor was ‘really cool’, but on the phone she initially seemed rather
curt. Her immediate response to my request for an IUD was: ‘Are you married?’.
Alarmed by the disapproving tone in her voice, I stumbled while answering ‘no’.
Without missing a beat, she fired more questions in rapid succession: ‘Are you
going to get married? How long have you been with this man? Are you faithful
to each other? Are you two committed to each other for a long term relationship?’.

I was taken aback and scrambled to give the ‘right’ responses while trying to
sound earnest. I got genuinely worried that she was going to refuse to give me
an IUD. Why was she asking me such personal questions about my sex life?
Then I recalled reading about user screening questions that were now somewhere
in my pile of dissertation materials. I vaguely remembered that young childless
women were discouraged from using the device due to an assumption that these
women were more prone to contracting sexually transmitted diseases from
multiple sexual partners.

At this moment, I promptly volunteered the following information in an attempt
to put an end to the doctor’s interrogation: ‘I am in my late thirties. I already have
one child and I do not plan to have another soon. Even if I were to try in the future
and was unable to conceive, I would probably blame my age rather than the IUD’.
This statement, which was not entirely a lie, indeed satisfied her, and she agreed to
put me on the device.

What was going on in this phone conversation? I was rather amazed when I
successfully persuaded the doctor by spontaneously presenting myself as a good
candidate for IUD insertion. Inspired, I returned to work to find out in more
detail what social and scientific factors shaped the formation of the ‘ideal’ user
that corresponded with someone like myself.

Reconstructing the Safe Technology/User

The new profile of an ‘ideal’ user emerged through the process of recovering the
contraceptive method from the Dalkon Shield fallout. The controversy over the
device’s safety started to unravel just as the Population Council was getting
ready to release the Copper-T as the next generation IUD (Dugdale, 1995).
To the dismay of its supporters, the withdrawal of IUD products by American
pharmaceutical companies during the 1980s made an impression upon the
medical community and the public that the contraceptive method must be danger-
ous. Its reputation overseas, where the device played more significant roles in
limiting family sizes, also became vulnerable. The deteriorating image of the
contraceptive method created a need to rehabilitate the IUD as a safe technology.
Redefining who should be considered an ‘appropriate’ user became a major
component in the scientific studies that helped restore the safety of the device.
The rehabilitation involved several steps as I describe below.

The first step in reasserting the overall safety of the IUD involved isolating the
Dalkon Shield as uniquely dangerous. Several epidemiological studies on PID

44 C. Takeshita

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and/or tubal infertility associated with IUD use suggested that the Dalkon Shield
carried elevated risks compared to other IUDs (Cramer et al., 1985; Daling et al.,
1985; Kaufman et al., 1983; Vessey et al., 1981). Furthermore, a study conducted
by Howard Tatum, the inventor of the T-shaped IUD, suggested that the material
used for the tail of the Dalkon Shield served as conduit, or a wick, for bacteria to
travel from the vagina to the sterile uterus (Tatum, 1975).6 It is now widely
accepted that the unique tail of the Shield contributed to the large number of
women who suffered infections. By combining the wicking tail theory and epide-
miological studies that compared different models of IUDs, the Population
Council was able to hold the Dalkon Shield culpable, while legitimizing other
IUDs developed, tested, and promoted by its researchers.

The second step in securing the future of the IUD entailed placing the blame on
the users’ sexual activities. Some epidemiological studies suggested that there
might be some correlations between the number of sexual partners and elevated
risk of contracting PIDs (Burkman, 1981; Cramer et al., 1985). Highlighting
this aspect, IUD supporters concluded that not the device, but sexually transmitted
infections (STI), which are believed to be more easily contracted by women with
multiple sex partners, accounted for the increased health risks found in IUD users.
This notion was used as an intimidation tactic by Dalkon Shield defendant
lawyers, who insisted that the plaintiff reveal private sexual behaviors. While
these studies neatly localized IUD risk to promiscuous sexual behavior, they
also generated a new profile of a ‘safe’ user, namely a woman in a mutually
monogamous relationship with no prior history of PID.

The third step involved eliminating women who have never had children from
the IUD user base—at least in the United States. What was particularly tragic
about the Dalkon Shield …

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Rhetoric Society of America

How Bad Science Stays That Way: Brain Sex, Demarcation, and the Status of Truth in the
Rhetoric of Science
Author(s): Celeste Condit
Source: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4, The Rhetoric of Science (Autumn, 1996), pp.

83-109
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Celeste Condit

How BAD SCIENCE STAYS THAT WAY: BRAIN SEX,
DEMARCATION, AND THE STATUS OF TRUTH IN THE
RHETORIC OF SCIENCE

T here is a long-standing tension between the scientific community and rheto
ricians of science with regard to the status of “truth” and the objectivity of

“knowledge.” While neither the scientific community nor the community of rhe-
torical scholars can be said to be monolithic in their views, the “scientific” view
ascribes objective, permanent, and universal status to the facts produced by scien-
tists, whereas the “sophistic” view supported by many rhetoricians describes facts
as products of social conditions, and therefore marked by inter-subjectivity, tran-
sience, and situational delimitations. The classical scientific account thus sees facts
as “discovered,” whereas the sophistic rhetorical account portrays them as “con-
structed” (e.g., Fuller; Gaonkar; Gusfield; Latour; Latour and Woolgar; Lessl;
Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey; Taylor, Defining Science).’

As a variety of scholars have suggested, this bifurcation of views can be re-
solved into a unified perspective that accounts for the major arguments advanced
by those supporting each of the classical orientations (Bambrough; Bernstein;
Laudan, “Explaining Success”). It is possible, in other words, to see facts as
both objective and situated-both faithful to material realities and responsive to
social conditions (Howe and Lyne). From this unified perspective, scientists
can make errors either because their contact with asocial material realities are
flawed (e.g., “cold fusion”) or because there are flaws in their application of the
linguistic and social codes that convey the character and meaning of the contact
they have made with material realities. This essay explores the persistence of
“bad science” of the latter sort by reporting and interpreting an interaction be-
tween scientists and a rhetorician, one that occurred when I sent a letter to the
journal Science responding to a publication on brain sex research by Gur et al.
(“Sex Differences”), which appeared in that journal. I was later interviewed by
a reporter for a major newspaper with regard to my letter and the Gur research.
The texts for this study therefore include the Gur research article, my letter, a
reply to my letter by the authors of the Gur article, the two reviews of my letter
solicited by the editor of Science, and the journalistic account of my letter and
the scientists’ publications.

This essay interprets the response of these scientists and the integration of
their work into the public sphere through theories of scientific demarcation. It
suggests that “bad science,” at least that which supports an ideology that is
hegemonic in the social sphere,2 is maintained by a complex relationship be-

RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
83 Volume 26, Number 4 Fall 1996

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84 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY

tween science and society in which a set of scientists demarcate an autonomous
sphere of action through which they seek simultaneously to insulate themselves
from social control and to exercise social influence. The insulation of the “scien-
tific sphere” closes off consideration of alternative hypotheses and methodological
possibilities, while the integration of scientists into the social sphere in the role
of “conveyers of truth” amplifies their scientific products into public facts, even
when those products are admitted to lack the standing of full scientific facts.

The treatment of brain sex research by the reviewers of my letter and the
authors of the scientific research illustrates the tensions between the sophistic
and scientific views of the products of scientific research. Before addressing the
case of brain sex, therefore, it is necessary to explain briefly the tensions over
rhetoric and truth that ground the controversy.

What is Truth? (in 500 words or less)
I have neither the space nor the interest to give here a full proof of the relation-
ship of rhetoric to objectivity presumed by this study. It is necessary that I ex-
plain the perspective from which I am operating, but to provide an appropriate
theoretical treatment would displace the case study-a form of deferral that seems
all too prevalent in rhetorical studies, and far too costly from a feminist perspec-
tive. Consequently, I will summarize rather than prove (though the theoretical
under-pinnings of my perspective are available elsewhere: see Condit, “Crafting
Virtue” and “Kenneth Burke”; Railsback, “Beyond Rhetorical Relativism”; and
others working with related assumptions, e.g., Bernstein; Laudan “Explaining
Success”).

A major intellectual current of the twentieth century has been an exploration
of the ways in which language operates as a structural-material network with its
own internal dynamics, such as a tendency toward hierarchy/perfection, bivalence,
and reification through the copula “is” (Condit, “Kenneth Burke”). Observing
the strong power of these dynamics has led many scholars to conclude that state-
ments have meaning only with reference to this internal linguistic system. Con-
sequently, they argue that any claims toward factual status deriving from the
“referentiality” of language are misleading. Words do not refer to an external
world, but rather they reflect an arrangement of the linguistic network. Some
scholars have tied this linguistic network back into the social body. Language
usage thus references social arrangements (e.g., access to economic resources or
social status), rather than material realities (e.g., “the sun”). Both the socio-
linguistic and purely structuralist accounts of language are compatible with a
sophistic view of rhetoric and with the sophistic rhetorician’s view of scientific
facts as social constructions.

There are strong reasons, however, for avoiding an acceptance of the equation
of rhetoric and sophistic. This equation discourages rhetoricians from analyzing
the possibility that scientific accounts are false. If the material realities of hu-
man bodies are irrelevant to the question of brain sex, there is no reason for brain

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CELESTE CoNmITmHow BAD SCIENCE STAYS THAT WAY 85

sex researchers who are socially advantaged by dimorphic accounts of brain sex
to choose polymorphic accounts of brain sex. Thus, for feminists, there are strong
reasons for preferring accounts of reality that retain the possibility of portraying
dimorphic accounts of brain sex as “false” in a strong sense.3 There are also a
host of standard philosophical arguments in favor of retaining some modified
account of the descriptive and moral functions of language (Bambrough; Cherwitz
and Hikins).

It is not necessary to choose between the insights of theories of reference and
structural theories of language. It is possible to fuse the accounts offered by
traditional materialists and by contemporary sophists. That is, it is possible to
portray language usages, including statements of “fact,” as being responsive to a
complex interplay among the three components of external material forces, so-
cial forces, and linguistic structuration. Such a view of the source of meaning-
fulness in statements produces an account of rhetoric as the deployment of ethos,
pathos, and logos, where logos can be substantive and reasonable without re-
quiring syllogistic rationality. This is to accept a fuller vision of rhetoric, that
built not exclusively on the sophists, but upon a combination of Aristotelian and
Isocratean insights as well (see Poulakos for the vision of these categories em-
ployed here).

Healing the Ramistic dissection that assigned style to rhetoric and logic and
truth to philosophy (and later to science) changes the scope available for inves-
tigations of the ways in which science is rhetorical. No longer need the would-
be rhetorician of science choose between the belief that science is not rhetorical
or that science has no denotative moment. Instead a full rhetoric has accounts to
give of parts of the process of denotation. Rather than merely reversing the “ei-
ther truth or sophistry” divide offered by traditional epistemologies, a full rheto-
ric can be described as a particular combination of truth and style. Such an ac-
count of rhetoric assumes that both “material reality” and the complex network
of language have their own internal structure and forces, and that these are mu-
tually interactive and responsive. From this view, to say that a statement is “true”
is not to say that it offers the one and only possible description of an external
phenomenon. Rather it is to say that a statement employs the linguistic structure
of a community to make an appropriately tight analogy to the phenomenon be-
ing addressed. From this view, there are false findings and wrong answers, but in
general truth admits of degrees. Some accounts are flat-out wrong (“the sun
rotates around the earth”), but also some accounts are relatively poor (“the earth
is round”) and others more rich (“the earth is an oblate spheroid”).

From this tripartite account of the sources of meaningfulness, scientific con-
clusions can, at times, offer us useful information, solidly based in a particular
kind of contact with the material world and appropriate linguistic forms. Scien-
tific findings are, however, also open to challenge-not only for evident failings
in the practices by which they contact the material world (e.g. errors in labora-
tory procedure), but also for linguistic insufficiencies. Testing of would-be sci-

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86 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY

entific claims on both dimensions is necessary because the truth of a scientific
claim is a product not of the interface of an objective language with an objective
material reality-nor merely a product of discursively mediated social forces-
but rather it is the interface of a socially imbricated linguistic code structure
with a selected material reality. Bad science can be bad, therefore, either be-
cause its material procedures are faulty or because its linguistics are errant.4
While problems in material procedures will be highly field-dependent, the lin-
guistic problems are more general. The language that scientists choose to use to
construct their hypotheses, frame their research designs, or convey their results
may contain inappropriately narrow, slanted, or misleading components. While
all members of a culture may not have the tools to access the pre-selected mate-
rial reality in the ways in which scientists do, all members of the culture have
access to the code structure.

Scientists have attempted to sidestep the linguistic problems in scientific re-
search by building disciplinary languages independent of common language
codes.5 These specialized codes are nonetheless accessible to any interested party
willing and able to engage in study, even though the materiel for scientific ac-
cess to the selected material reality is not. More importantly for feminists and
others interested in the interfaces between science and society, scientists cannot
be completely successful in relying on an exclusively disciplinary code, espe-
cially if their science is to have common purchase. For scientific findings to be
culturally employable, the language of science must make use of the common
language. In some arenas, scientists are largely successful in fiating this need for
linkage through the production of technologies. Technologies like the VCR can
be employed (more or less well) by those who do not understand electronics.
However, in regions where science would work on the social basis of society
(explaining the universe, influencing social policies on crime control, account-
ing for race and gender), such a side-step cannot be successful. In such cases, in
order for the scientific conclusion to be understood-to make literal sense to the
society’s members-there must be a bridge with common language. Scientists
must therefore incorporate the common idioms into their language in order to
have influence.6

I call this approach to the rhetoric of science a “broad” program because it
requires incorporation of the material, social, and linguistic components of sci-
ence. It requires a full-bodied view of rhetoric as including ethos, pathos, and
logos. A rhetoric of science that would apply and flesh out these broad assump-
tions is methodologically demanding. In contrast to the “anthropological” stance
of ignorance of subject matter and practice advocated by Latour and Woolgar,
this methodology requires that one understand sufficiently the scientific claims
being made qua science. Such understanding is made necessary because the
goal of this program in the rhetoric of science is not simply to explain how
scientific facts get made, but rather to judge the facts and influence their re-
construction by using rhetorical methods to reveal particular linguistic inadequa-

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CELESTE CoNDIT/How BAD SCIENCE STAYS THAT WAY 87

cies in the accounts offered by scientists in specific cases. This broad program
suggests that the work of rhetoricians of science should, indirectly or directly,
reform bad science. It suggests that understanding the social biases we harbor
can help us to recognize linguistic biases in research and produce scientific find-
ings less hobbled by linguistic short-comings, and thus more appropriate for our
frames and interests.

This is a “broad” approach to the rhetoric of science, therefore, not only be-
cause it sees rhetoric as richly deploying the resources of ethos, pathos, and
logos, but also because it requires a repudiation of the monastic definition of
academic practices that has been identified with the philosophical tradition. A
full rhetoric of science not only analyzes the deficiencies of particular rhetorics
of science for publication in academic journals, but also seeks to change errant
practices by engaging in public and interdisciplinary discourse about those prac-
tices. This broad program for the rhetoric of science thus requires that one be not
only a rhetorician, but a rhetor.

Brain Sex
For the past two decades, a variety of feminists have worked to demonstrate
fallacies in the research of those who have purported to use the scientific method
to declare that women are fundamentally different from men (Bleier; Haraway;
Hubbard; Tavris). Theirs has been a losing battle. Today, the belief that women
are fundamentally different from men is at least as strong, in both public and
scientific spheres, as it was when Bleier began this line of research. The rea-
sons for this failure are in part a product of social forces independent of basic
practices of science. I contend, however, that a major reason for the failure to
broaden visions of sex difference is that the biological research in this area is
“bad science.”

Bad science occurs when a set of research practices produce, in a sustained
fashion, conclusions that are insufficiently rich to account for the material phe-
nomenon under investigation in terms of the resources available in the linguistic
code and with the available scientific resources. The reasons why I believe that
human brain sex research constitutes science that is more impoverished than it
ought to be will become evident as the essay proceeds. The goal of the essay is
not to argue this point explicitly, but rather to describe a set of rhetorical forces
that help “bad science” to resist revision. To begin, however, we must note the
character of brain sex research and track the sources of its deficiency.

I. Hypotheses About Brain Sex
A spate of biologically based empirical brain sex research has been produced
and published in the past decade. There is a fairly wide variety of methods and
objects to this research: glucose metabolism counts (Gur et al. “Sex Differences”),
cerebral blood flow (Gur et al., “Sex and Handedness”), and measures of vari-
ous volumes (Witelson; Allen et al.) and morphologies (Allen and Gorski). How-

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88 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY

ever, these research programs all share a central framing hypothesis, that “men
and women’s brains are significantly different.” This research hypothesis is clearly
drawn from commonsense understandings of the nature of the dispute about
male and female sex and gender. In the public sphere, that dispute has usually
been framed as a question as to whether women and men are equal in capacities
and therefore ought to be treated as equal by law. While historically this ques-
tion arose as a contest between feminists and anti-feminists, today there are
feminists who take both sides on the issue. Liberal feminists argue that men and
women are fundamentally similar and ought to have the same opportunities avail-
able to them (Jaggar), while cultural feminists argue that men and women are
fundamentally different in their capacities and ought to be treated differently,
although women should not be treated less well than men (Foss and Foss).

That the scientists currently producing brain sex research rely on these domi-
nant public frames when formulating their hypotheses is evident in their own
accounts of their practices. In reply to my challenges, Gur et al. responded with
an appeal to what “makes sense” in common understanding. They replied that,
“It made sense to us to ask the simple question of whether men and women are
different, albeit ‘on average”‘ before asking other questions. In an interview for
Newsweek magazine they likewise described their interests from a common sense
background. Newsweek (Begley 51) reports that “The pair got into the field of
sex differences when they were struck by their own temperamental differences.
He is more intrigued by numbers and details, she likes to work with people; he
reacts to a setback by taking a deep breath and moving on, she analyzes it.”
These scientists thus decided that the relevant research question was whether or
not their own perceived differences could be verified by their science, that is,
whether gender was monomorphic (no differences between men and women) or
dimorphic (men and women are different).

The choice of this hypothesis is not, however, a necessary choice, nor even the
most academically sophisticated choice. As opposed to the “common sense” of
the public arena, in the academic realm a third option is widely viewed as offer-
ing more rich and precise conceptualizations of gender. Gender deconstructionists
argue that sex and gender are inadequately understood via a bipolar model (But-
ler; Kessler; Moi; Tavris). They suggest that human sexuality is multi-dimen-
sional and that the bipolar model is an insufficient, procrustean cultural imposi-
tion upon a biological foundation that is highly diverse. To illustrate the ways in
which human biology is sexually diverse, gender deconstructionists draw atten-
tion to a variety of biological phenomena. They point out the biological facts:
first, that XY and XX chromosome types do not exhaust the genetic character of
human beings (there being XXY, XYY, XXX types as well as various mosaics
with other multiples); second, that chromosomal sex and morphological sex are
not always the same; and third, that some individuals are “intersexed.” Most
importantly, advocates of the gender diversity perspective emphasize that all
measurements of biological genders are wide-ranging distributions rather than

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CELESTE CoNDIT/How BAD SCIENCE STAYS THAT WAY 89

simple dichotomous qualities or quantities. Consequently, most men and women
fall in a common numerical range on these measured quantities. Finally, gender
deconstructionists also suggest that if recent research indicating that there are
biological substrates to homosexuality is further substantiated, this means that
there are at least four biological genders.

Gender deconstructionists conclude from these biological facts that the choice
to raise the categories of “male” and “female” to central cultural facts (i.e. through
the construction of a fundamentally gendered language) is a cultural option, not
a biological predestination. The culture might, for example, make a four-part
gender scheme central (male-homosexual, female-homosexual, male-hetero-
sexual, female-heterosexual). It might make individual variation across ranges
central. Or, it might hierarchicalize intersexed individuals as the “most com-
plete” human beings (as some cultures appear to have done), as opposed to re-
ducing such persons to a single sex through surgery and hormones, as our cul-
ture prefers to do (Kessler). Gender deconstructionists conclude further that there
is an almost infinite range of cultural genderings of human beings possible, and
they tend to suggest that promoting diversity of gender is preferable to reinforc-
ing the cultural categories of “male” and “female” that have been inherited from
other cultural formations. Gender deconstructionists have in these ways col-
lected substantial reasons for testing the hypothesis that human sexuality is
multimorphic (rather than monomorphic, and rather than or in addition to being
dimorphic). If the multimorphic hypothesis has reasonable potential to be sup-
ported by the material facts of biology and is also linguistically more rich and
appropriate to an increasingly diverse social body, then to continue to ignore
that hypothesis constitutes bad scientific procedure.

It is possible that some scientists interested in brain sex research have enter-
tained the possibility of gender diversity and resisted the proposition of gender
dimorphism. There is, however, no published evidence that would suggest that
human brain sex researchers have entertained structured polymorphism as a hy-
pothesis.7 There are a variety of reasons for this. The most important is that
biological scientists are more likely to be familiar with the public debate be-
tween those supporting a monomorphic view and those defending the older di-
morphic view than they are to be familiar with academic work in the humanities.
In their reply to my letter, Gur et. al noted that “‘gender deconstruction,’ re-
ferred to in Condit’s letter, held no meaning for us.” Simple exposure therefore
is probably the major determinant of the linkage between scientific practice and
the hegemonic public ideologies.

Exclusive exposure to the public accounts of human sexuality appears, how-
ever, also to be reflective of a shared belief in one version of that ideology (di-
morphism) among those currently publishing most brain sex research. That such
a shared belief exists among the current controlling members of the brain sex
research area shows up in the selection of studies for publication and the ways in
which these studies are framed. The published studies on human brain sex tend

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90 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY

to be cast as reporting that there are differences in men’s and women’s brains.
This frame is used even when the overwhelming results of the study demon-
strate that differences are minor and subsidiary to similarities. Gur et al., for
example, close their article by noting that “the brains of men and women are
fundamentally more similar than different” (530), but they have framed the study
as proof of dichotomy, rather than as proof of similarity (as in their title, “Sex
Differences”).

There is no scientific reason why findings of “no difference” or of polymor-
phism could not be reported as a central research frame. Both the topics of “dif-
ference” and “fundamental similarity” are viewed as worthy of publication in a
variety of scientific disciplines on a variety of topics, and in an earlier era were
published in brain sex research (Byne and Bleier). Scientific articles focusing on
sexual polymorphism have been published in other research areas (Gowaty and
Bridges). 8 Moreover, there is no scientific reason why the location of a few
isolated examples of dimorphic difference should count as fundamental dimor-
phism or as innately important. This is especially true given that any fishing
expedition for differences in means set at the x=.05 level is likely to find differ-
ences in 1 out of 20 cases merely by chance, and many of these studies have
measured multiple means in order to locate differences in only a few means.

The linguistics of hypothesis-formation are therefore crucial. Why is it that
the hypotheses for brain sex research are framed in such a way that any finding
of dichotomous difference outweighs all findings of similarity? Even were one
to work within the confines of the monomorphic vs. dimorphic hypothesis, an
alternative way of framing the research would be to ask whether the number of
differences in male and female brains is greater than the number of similarities;
that is, on total, are male and female brains more similar or more different? Such
a frame would produce reverse results. Therefore, the process of hypothesis for-
mulation has been such that it favors not only a particular range of alternatives
(monomorphism vs. dimorphism; excluding the consideration of polymorphism),
but also a particular ideological outcome (dimorphism). It is not solely exposure
that accounts for this framing, but also these scientists’ own prior beliefs-that
any differences in brain sex must manifest themselves in putatively significant
behavioral differences between those persons assigned to the two genders (rather
than, say, merely differences in the reproductive systems; see discussion below).
My effort to introduce an alternate perspective revealed strong control mecha-
nisms against both outsiders and consideration of alternative possibilities.

II. Science Resists Critique
Scientists seeking to understand biological sex differences should, according to
the tenets of the prevailing objectivist philosophy of science, test multiple hy-
potheses about sex. They should not merely test the culturally hegemonic propo-
sitions of sexual dimorphism or monomorphism, but also the other possibility of
morphological diversity. In response to the publication of the Gur et al. analysis

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CELESTE CONDIT/HOW BAD SCIENCE STAYS THAT WAY 91

of glucose metabolism, I made that suggestion in a letter submitted to Science
(see appendix I; note that the journal specifies a …