ABSTRACT
Two bifurcated images: a bathroom sign with universal appeal, and a depiction of human life on Earth with cosmic aspirations.You have probably seen them before, and you know instantly what to make of them. In an effort to pare us, humans, down to our essence, these images represent the sexed state of our affairs: there are women, and there are men.This difference not only shows up on bathroom signs and information bulletins for aliens in outer space; it organizes the
sociological imagination, defining the basic dimensions in which human interactions and behaviors can and must be understood.There are men, and then there are women, and for many intents and purposes they are different from one another. Or are they? Perhaps yes. Importantly, yes. In the social and medical sciences, sex is the
differentiator by default; the first box to fill out on a survey and a standard dimension in almost any statistical procedure in human research.The recognition of the importance of sex difference has had an enormous, overwhelmingly positive impact on the medical and sociological practices that affect women’s (and men’s) lives. But the predilection to rely on sex difference in research procedures and treatment protocols hides the normative and performative effects of its use (Fausto-Sterling 1992, 2000, Epstein 2007, Hamilton 1995, Jordan-Young 2010). A forceful categorizer, sex difference not only eclipses other dimensions, it also, in certain circumstances, produces sexed bodies where in the absence of sex-based statistical operations they would not exist – which you may find a counter-intuitive contention precisely because sex difference is such a pervasive statistical “fact.” But, as thirty years of research and debate in Science and Technology Studies have shown over and again, facts – even the most thoroughly naturalized ones – are made; invariably, they have a history and conditions of production. So let’s examine the practices, statistical and everyday, through which sex differences are made to be meaningful, and normative, facts of life. Created by German graphic designer Otl Aicher for the Olympic Games in Munich in
1972, the first sign directs everyone, everywhere, to the lavatory. While it does not reveal specifics about restrooms in the various locales in which the sign is used – one might find them uni-sexed or segregated, depending on the moral and geographical economies of place and space; plumbed and connected to a sewage system, or covering a hole in the ground, depending on other social materialities – this sign does lend an odd particularity to the human bodies that these lavatories serve.Triangular or rectangular, humans appear to be of two – and only two – types. So, the sign divides and conquers: sorting humans – but not necessarily lavatories – into sexes, it commands its constituents with unassailable authority where to go. Equally forcibly, it orders how to categorize, and how to think about bodies.Triangular humans, after all, are not the same as rectangular ones. Much like the first image, the second insists on sorting humans according to sex, and, like
the first, it insists on universality.3 Sent into the voids of the universe on unmanned spaceships Pioneer 1 and 2 in the 1970s, it informs target aliens about life on Earth. A representative image, indeed, standing in for lively human beings, it tells, somehow or other, of what such beings are like.This universal is particular, too.Without visiting Earth, aliens might imagine us all naked, buff, fair-skinned, and operating in oddly coupled pairs. Of all diverse life on the planet, this image draws a telling set of types, informing “us” about ourselves as much, perhaps, as alerting “them” to what and who “we” are. For we know how to read this man and woman. Or do we? As we see them, do we take note of what they are not? Do we notice that they
are adults – and not children or seniors?That they are not injured or disabled in obvious ways? That they are white – not of other races, and athletic instead of obese or anorexic? That they have shaved bodies, and uncovered, groomed, flowing hair – so are not Muslim or Orthodox Jewish? Do we register their unmarked-ness; their nakedness? Do we question whether, in their unmarked nakedness, they can be representative of anything at all? There is much more to be said about these images, but for now let’s note that each has
designs, accomplishments, agency, intended and unintended consequences, and that both foreground sexual characteristics as a central categorizing factor, upon which a moral economy rests.While you may agree with us, authors, that the first image, if it were sent into space,might somewhat mislead our extra-terrestrial interlocutors about what and who humans are, some
among us – NASA engineers in the 1970s – were hopeful that the second one would not. Aicher’s icon categorizes; its sexed representation of a generic human necessity helps us find our way.The Pioneer image illuminates this human proclivity for categorization. Rather than providing our alien friends a handle on how to act once they find themselves in our midst, it teaches them about this particular proclivity, giving them precisely the handle on us that they need. Images do things.They move us and, as they embody how we think, they move others to
know about us. Perhaps it is of significance to let “them” know that “we” are divided into two distinct shapes, with triangular folks very different from rectangular ones. For while Star Trek and StarWars may suggest aliens to be ordered in sexes as much as we “are”; to groom in the same way, to similarly privilege fit adults low in body fat, and to love classification even more than we do, it is precisely this latter characteristic that is salient in humans: the tendency to value ideal-types over variation; to figure three-dimensional things in two dimensions; to rigorously categorize. To classify is human, to quote Bowker and Star’s argument in Sorting Things Out (2000).This is why we are paying attention to the categorization practices that inform statistical operations – perhaps what matters is not so much the knowing that is represented in our categorical imagery, but the practices of knowing that shape these images as the telling icons we think they are. Statistical operations, then. Each of our two signs tames variety; both trade variation for
straightforward types or trends.They are thus the exact opposite of diversity: the artifact, and the iconic representation, of a statistical practice that orders variation to the extent that only ideal types remain.We argue in this chapter that images such as the ones above epitomize the work of statistics: they are the end result, the product, and the goal of the statistical graph. At the same time, the power of statistics to sort unruly humans and produce tables, charts, and graphs that map for example caloric needs and baby growth norms – our examples, below – take for granted sex differences, and depend on the pervasiveness of sexed imagery.There is nothing sinister here, and this is not an accusation, allegation, or dismantling of a plot; the problem of how to streamline and order variety is precisely what demographic and other graphs are made to solve. We take this argument one step further, however, to suggest that these bifurcated images translate into sexed and, as such, idealized practices of objective self-fashioning: biometric and demographic statistical operations are agents, in that they perform idealized, typed bodies and selves (Dumit 2012). Again, we are pointing to effects, rather than schemes or plots. But that is not to say that the statistical operations we have in mind are not, at times, pernicious in their consequences. So, we must ask what the path is from population variety via graph to bifurcated image to
sexed practices of the self. It is not a hard sell or a counter-intuitive argument that the graphs that illustrate demographic distributions in biometric and social scientific accounts are, themselves, the products of distinct and intricate laboratory operations. It is perhaps less evident, however, that such graphs, as they articulate trends and extrapolate tendencies into solid and stable truths, produce the very bodies that populate the accounts which are illustrated by the graphs. No ordinary self-fulfilling prophecy, but rather a body-shaping practice, these graphs shape the physical substance that we live with, in, and through. That is precisely what this chapter aims to demonstrate: how, and to what effect, graphs do
their body-sculpting work.We discuss two cases in which normative distributions produce very specific, normed, and sexed, bodies: calorie counters and baby growth charts; we explain how sex, sexed bodies, and normative comparative logics are the product of the graphs that document them, as much as they form their frame. So this is our point: that while graphs are products with histories and specific, local, and material conditions of production – the outcomes of certain,
by now very well documented, practices – they are also, at the same time, performative and productive; material prompts for how to act. As artifacts to live by, they lay people out along a line, so dividing them into categories; showing a range, while making the middle of the distribution typical.They are normative, in the sense that they make the norm and make us take it into account.This is precisely what “norming”means: the graph defines, enacts, and so at once produces the abnormal. Both the normal and the abnormal body are a result of statistical operations; and (ab)normality is an artifact – the material and semiotic product – of the norm, and of the graph, itself. As much as charts and graphs make the body, in as much as they make us forget that things
might be imagined differently, and in as much they suggest that variability can be tamed, it is by looking at their material effects and the conditions of their production that we learn to disrupt and destabilize them. As we shall see, it is precisely the normative work of statistical operations that points up how variability remains at large.
