Roger Lancaster: The Trouble with Nature

Ebook on Sex in Science and Popular Culture

Roger N. Lancaster exposes "the heterosexual fables that pervade popular culture, from prime-time sitcoms to scientific theories about the so-called gay gene" in his Ebook The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture.

Lancaster, a Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, labels contemporary discourse surrounding issues of gender, sexual orientation, and human nature, with the red stamp of "sexual politics."

Science Invoked to Support Sexual Politics

From Hallmark stereotypes of what women want to tabloid titles asking if real men eat quiche, popular culture reflects the changes occurring in society as we grapple with new ideas, and new technologies, in the realm of human sexuality.

In the U.S. "elections more often than not turn on conflicts over abortion, homosexuality, marriage, family life, and relations between the sexes." The writer of this eloquent and erudite eBook looks through the lens of history at notions of biological "hard-wiring" and psychological programming.

Lancaster argues that in some cases unproven, but supposedly credentialed, claims are used to justify bogus theories about sexual norms: "journalists, scientists, and others invoke the rhetoric of science to support political positions in the absence of any real evidence."

Re-Viewing Sexual Standards

Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture is advertised as "an incisive critique of the failures of queer theory to understand the social conflicts of the moment," but it goes beyond that to show how "reductivist explanations for sexual orientation lean on essentialist ideas about gender."

Reductionism is when a highly complex system or set of principles gets thought of in terms of a simple, overt bias or agenda. Essentialism, in this context, is basically fanaticism, where belief overcomes reason in dictating ultra-specific societal standards regarding maleness and femaleness.

It becomes clear, after closer examination, that the trouble lays not so much with nature, but in our communities whenever we create, or tacitly allow, institutionalized homophobia and other campaigns of ethnological normalization.

Much has changed since the 60s, but there is still a need for books like this one to focus our attention upon the critical debate over sexual identity in society. The work is available for free online viewing at Google.