"By now it has been pretty well established that sex differences in spatial
abilities are innate and controlled by the level of testosterone at various
developmental stages.
There are developmental anomalies in hormonal development that cause some
girls to get too much testosterone and some boys to not get enough. Their
level of spatial ability reflects these differences."
I have a difficulty with this sort of logic and its conclusions, not
because the experimental evidence claimed may be flawed (though of course
that does sometimes turn out to be the case years after), but because the
focal phenomenon, in this case "spatial abilities", tends to get defined,
or operationalized, in ways that both maximize the statistical effect and
illegitimately strip it out of its sociocultural contexts in the first place.
I certainly don't have the same 'spatial ability' in culturally familiar
and culturally unfamiliar contexts, nor in domains of interpersonal
interaction space vs. object-interaction space, nor in taboo or affectively
more loaded activity contexts as in more culturally neutral ones, etc., etc.
I don't doubt that hormones play a role in brain maturation in early
development, or that some basic brain structures play a role in how we
operate in space visually, tactilely, kinesthetically, etc. But all that
can be observed is how we behave under various conditions, and if we
privilege certain, especially controlled and artificial conditions as the
indices of any 'ability' (remember IQ?), it may be easier to make facile
generalizations that appear to be supported by data obtained under these
same constrained conditions -- but it will be correspondingly more
difficult to apply these generalizations in any socially and culturally
meaningful way outside their domain of origin. As we mature and our
behavioral repertoires become more diverse and more context- and meaning-
sensitive, what may be a plausibly generalizable 'spatial ability' in
infancy diffuses into these rich and not necessarily correlated repertoires
of spatial behaviors.
Development is about trajectories of change over longish time-scales. I
would imagine that longitudinal studies of how individuals actually acquire
and differentiate their repertoires of spatial behavior in various activity
contexts might lead to the most useful generalizations about the
interaction between gendered lives and spatial behaviors.
JAY.
PS. The same sorts of critique apply equally to oversimplifications of
categories like gender or race, or of focal phenomena like 'intelligence'
or 'sexual orientation'. None of these are uni-dimensional, none can be
adequately analyzed by privileging single simplistic index criteria or
index behaviors; all dissolve into complexity when treated seriously rather
than pseudo-scientifically. How much personal grief and political mischief
has been done in these ways, when all that is really needed is a little
less faith in simplicity and a lot more courage in the face of complexity!
PPS. When I finally got to the later 'space and gender' messages I saw that
Diane had made some of these same points more simply and pointedly! but
perhaps my version will still be useful to some of you ...
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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