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Sex Itself: The Search for Male & Female in the Human Genome, by Sarah S. Richardson

Sex Itself: The Search for Male & Female in the Human Genome, by Sarah S. Richardson. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013. vii, 311 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). We live in an age when genetic science promises insights into our health, our ancestry, and even what it means to be male and female. However, as Sarah S. Richardson reminds her readers, this scientific information is produced within, and affected by, its contingent social and cultural contexts. In her monograph Sex Itself Richardson traces the social and theoretical frameworks surrounding the discovery and evolution of our understanding of the X and Y chromosomes and how they have come to stand as a shortcut for all that is male and female within the human genome. Her book does an excellent job of introducing and explaining her scientific subject matter which makes it accessible to a nonspecialist audience, and these descriptions are aided by a number of (often humorous) illustrations. The theoretical framework clearly orients it more toward those engaged in studying gender and science and the philosophy of science rather than those engaged in the history of genetics or medicine. Richardson begins her analysis with the study of how those chromosomes that we now call the X and Y were first discovered by cytologists in 1890s and how they later became widely known as the sex chromosomes in the 1920s. At first cytologists were unsure what to make of these "odd chromosomes" (p. 23) but, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Dr. Nettie Marie Stevens provided the evidence that the presence of an extra X chromosome produces females while the presence of a Y chromosome produces males in a number of species. Richardson provides a detailed discussion of Stevens' work, which she sees as often overlooked in other historical accounts. However, it took some time for the notion of "sex" determining chromosomes to be adopted due to the then-dominant metabolic theory of sexual determination. These aberrant chromosomes did not become known as the "sex chromosomes" until they became vital examples supporting the chromosome theory of inheritance. Richardson argues that dissent on this question was not silenced until the 1930s, after the notion of "sex chromosomes" was incorporated into the framework of the powerful new hormone theory of sex determination advocated by the American embryologist Frank R. Lillie. By the middle of the twentieth century, researchers had begun to ascribe a variety of masculine and feminine biological traits (both positive and negative) to the presence or absence of two X chromosomes in an individual. In the next two chapters Richardson explores the ways in which gender conceptions influenced how the fields of cytogenetics, behavioural genetics, and sociobiology invested the essence of femaleness and maleness in theories regarding the nature of the X and Y chromosomes. These theories have in turn been reflected in the media and popular culture. Assumptions that the presence of two Y chromosomes would lead to a double dose of "male" attributes (rather than the sort of developmental issues common with chromosome imbalances like trisomy 21) helped to lead to the now notorious and discredited XYY super-male theories of the 1960s and 1970s. …