Abstract
Friedman’s work contributes to a body of scholarship urging sociologists to center the margins to reveal existing blindspots in our analytic, theoretic, and empiric frames. In this ambitious, well-written text, Friedman works toward three potentially transformative goals: (1) developing a sociology of perception focusing upon attention and disattention; (2) demonstrating the methodological power of filter analysis; and (3) theorizing the social construction of not only gender but sex as well. Friedman’s work offers key contributions to the sociological subdisciplinary areas of body and embodiment; culture; ethnomethodology; race, gender, and class; sex and gender; sexualities; social psychology; and theory. It would be an illuminating supplemental text in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on methods, social psychology, cognitive psychology and sociology, gender, and disabilities.
Underscoring Friedman’s central analysis is the question, What is lost when we become blind to sameness through our relentless focus on perceived sex differences and the imperative to categorize every body as female or male? Friedman describes the gender norms driving such foci as “sexpectations.” Drawing on a cross-section of scholarship spanning from cognitive psychology to postmodernism, Freidman extends the conceptual metaphor of a filter to guide us through her analysis of to what we pay attention as we categorize people as female or male.
Friedman’s filter metaphor allows us to recognize how perceptions about sex are incomplete, distorted through processes of disattention. While much sociological analysis focuses upon what passes through the holes of the attention filter, there remains a gap in theorizing about the bits that never successfully make it to the other side and how the structure of the filter itself facilitates or impedes passage. Friedman’s work highlights social processes that “clog the filter” of sex categorization, robbing us of rich alternative perceptual possibilities and foreclosing opportunities to develop more “flexible minded” (p. 144) approaches for understanding various sex and gender identities and embodiments.
Friedman employs “thick analysis” (p. 155) to synthesize data gathered across in-depth in-person, telephone, and online interviews with 68 participants—41 comprising a transgender subsample and 27 comprising a blind subsample. Friedman chooses a transgender subsample under the hypothesis that members of this population may hold personal understandings of sex categorization that are less biologically essentializing or binary and more nuanced than those who are cisgender. Friedman chooses a blind participant subsample precisely because sex categorization has been theorized as a primarily visual process involving “optical norms” (p. 33) that organize perceptions about bodies, clothing and accessory choices, and bodily movements and interaction with others. Friedman wants to know: What happens when persons cannot rely on optical norms as perceptual information for making sex categorizations? Are sexpectations minimized?
In a finding Friedman did not anticipate, she learns that sexpectations drive the perceptual processes of participants in both the blind and transgender subsamples in ways that are quite similar to those of non-blind and non-transgender people. Both blind and transgender participants reported seeking out perceptual cues they felt would lead toward relative certainty in sex categorization, tended to primarily use binary sex and gender categorizations, and often reported discomfort when the perceptual cues used for sex categorization were absent or ambiguous. Participants in both the blind and transgender subsamples reported broad ranges of perceptual cues used to categorize people as male or female, with none endorsed uniformly by all participants. Friedman’s findings remind us of the power of normative socialization and provide a cautionary note about expectations around counter-normativity.
Friedman notes that mainstream science and social science often fall into the “sexpectations” trap by publishing findings showing sex differences and approaching findings of “no sex differences” as negative or nonfindings. Extending her analysis to instructional textbooks for sketching the human form, as well as various medical x-rays, photos, and interior body scans, Friedman finds far more similarity than difference between bodies categorized as male and female across these texts. I did wonder, while viewing an x-ray of human hands (p. 123), for example, if a radiologist might find the images as devoid of perceived sex differences as a layperson. Even so, Friedman’s central argument remains—that the anatomical structures themselves are predominantly similar, with relatively few differences that are often a matter of degree (e.g., length of the same bone).
What is missing from Friedman’s account is greater exploration of participants’ perceptions of genes and genetics. A scant three pages near the end of the text address genetic mechanisms underlying sex and sex differentiation, and this section is largely disconnected from research participant data. In the cultural zeitgeist, there remains widespread characterization of transgender people as not “real” men and women even when a transgender person is taking hormones, has had sex-reassignment surgeries, is perceived as unambiguously male or female, and has obtained legal sex status consonant with their gender identity. I was left wondering if Friedman’s research participants attribute some fixed and determinative “essence” to sex chromosomes themselves, despite their intangibility in virtually every social interaction. While Friedman’s work sheds light upon the social processes that “clog the filter” with sexpectations, ultimately I wished for more probing into participants’ own meaning-making around their processes of sex categorization.