Nancy Tuana, “Coming to Understand”

Posted: Tue, Oct 29, 2024

An Epistemology of Ignorance

Standard picture from the philosophy and sociology of science: scientists accept true beliefs because they are true; it is only when our science goes wrong that social factors are needed to explain how that came to be.

Ignorance is sociologically but not philosophical interesting: it is “a passive gap in what we know, awaiting scientific progress and discovery” (p. 196).
Knowledge is philosophically but not sociologically interesting: social factors do not figure in explaining how we come accept true beliefs as true.

Tuana’s counterclaim: social factors are at work in the production of both ignorance and knowledge.

Ignorance is not just a passive gap waiting to be filled by knowledge; rather, it’s something that can be actively produced, preserved, and disseminated—sometimes, it can even take on the form of unlearning.
The production of ignorance is a social practice whose explanation requires appeal to social factors; sometimes, these social factors are political. “What was once common knowledge or even common scientific knowledge can be transferred to the realm of ignorance not because it is refuted and seen as false, but because such knowledge is no longer seen as valuable, important, or functional” (p. 195).
So, then, “We must also ask the question . . . of who benefits and who is disadvantaged by such ignorance” (p. 196).

Tuana’s case study: “what ‘we’ do and do not know about women’s orgasms, and why” (p. 197).

What is the clitoris?

The historical understanding (popular until the 18th century)

The one-sex model: “men’s bodies were believed to be the true form of human biology and the standard against which female structures . . . were to be compared” (p. 199).

Clitoris as inferior, diminutive version of the penis: “Medical science held the male genitals to be the true form, of which women’s genitals were a colder, interior version” (p. 199).

In the 16th century, an Italian surgeon Renaldus Columbus thought he first “discovered” the clitoris:

The clitoris is the “protuberances, emerging from the uterus near that opening which is called the mouth of the womb” (p. 200). [Tuana: “Columbus’s clitoris and mine are not located in the same place” (p. 215).]
It is the “the seat of women’s delight” (p. 200); when aroused, it will get “a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself a sort of male member” (p. 200).
It is a largely internal organ: “Columbus, a man of his time, viewed female genitalia as homologous to male genitalia but marked by a lack of heat that resulted in them remaining, for the most part, inside the body” (p. 216).

The contemporary mainstream understanding

The two-sex model: “the female [is understood] not as an underdeveloped male but as a second gender with distinctive gender differences” (p. 200).

Clitoris as the inessential “nub”: from 1940s to the 1970s, it was simply omitted in anatomical illustrations of women’s genitalia; more recently, even though the clitoris has been included, it is “seldom fleshed out or made a focus of attention . . . at a time when displays of the penis are becoming ever more complex” (p. 200).

The contemporary feminist understanding (emerging from second-wave feminism)

Clitoris as a complex, largely internal structure: includes “the shaft, the glans, and the crura”; “the lower two-thirds of the clitoris is hidden beneath the skin of the vulva” (p. 203).
Attention to the function of clitoris and other structures in women’s orgasm.

Why Is The Clitoris Not Common Knowledge?

Tuana: ignorance about the clitoris is politically motivated.

Politics of reproduction

The connection between male sexual pleasure, the “male seed,” and reproduction is well-understood.
Historically, some scientists also believed in the existence of “female seed”—required for reproduction, and requires female sexual pleasure. “The infertility of prostitutes, for example, was often explained as due to a lack of pleasure in intercourse” (p. 210).
But on the prevailing contemporary view: female sexual pleasure is not essential to reproduction, whereas the purpose of sex is reproduction.

Politics of sex

Women are viewed (by men) as inherently dangerous, lustful.
- Many myths can be, and might have been implicitly understood as, sexual: Eve seduces Adam to commit the original sin. Pandora unleashes her box which contains all the evil.
- Tuana on David Hume: “Hume argues that women have such a strong temptation to infidelity that the only way to reassure men that the children their wives bear are their own biological offspring is for society to ‘attach a peculiar degree of shame to their infidelity, above what arises merely from its injustice’” (p. 228 n. 15).
- Women’s desire is dangerous to men and mankind and so must be controlled (by men).
On the other hand, controlling women’s sexuality also just so happens to serve men’s interest in heterosexual intercourse: “repressed female sexuality increases male desire” (p. 216).
So, it’s not just that “[t]here is no good reason to pay attention to the clitoris, given that it allegedly plays no role in reproduction and that sex is to be studied (only) in order to understand reproduction”; it’s that “there is good reason to not pay attention to the clitoris,” given “women were more lustful than men and that their sexuality was a danger to men” (p. 210, my emphasis).

Politics of race and homosexuality

Scientific racism: signs of racial inferiority are manifest in the body; “Scientists believed that enlarged clitorises were both a result of and a reason for hypersexuality, and both sex deviants and racially ‘inferior’ women were viewed as sexually deviant because of heightened sexual ‘excitability’” (p. 229 n. 16).
Same for gay women: “the genitals of inverts [“those who mixed with members of their own sex”] were a symbol of their deviance, arguing that their genitals were different from those of ‘normal’ women—their vulvae, larger; their clitorises, notably erectile; their labium, longer and more protruding; their vaginas, distensible; their hymens, insensitive; and their uteruses, smaller. . . . As an aside, it should be noted here that Dickinson’s gynecological studies included only so-called inverts. (the “normal” vulva, he apparently drew from memory.)” (p. 211)