Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/ Toward a Sociology of Perception: Sight, Sex, and Gender

Asia Friedman Cultural Sociology 2011 5: 187 originally published online 28 March 2011 DOI: 10.1177/1749975511400696 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cus.sagepub.com/content/5/2/187

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Article

Toward a Sociology of Perception: Sight, Sex, and Gender

Asia Friedman

Cultural Sociology 5(2) 187206 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975511400696 cus.sagepub.com

UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Somerset, NJ, USA

Abstract
Many theories of social construction make some reference to sight, yet few offer sustained examinations of perception. In light of this, I highlight the visual dimension of the social construction of reality by analyzing visual perception as a process of socio-mental filtration. Building on theories of social construction most notably those using the concepts frame, paradigm and schema in which expectations are the organizing force of experience, I focus on how social construction happens. One key effect of expectations is to enact selective attention, which is evocatively captured by the metaphor of a filter. Drawing on the case of sex and gender, I demonstrate that using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of socio-optical construction adding a concrete analysis of visual perception to the general idea of social construction may help scholars to more effectively account for some of the hard problems of constructionist theory, such as the body.

Keywords
body, cognition, gender, perception, sex

Introduction
The central question that motivates this article is how does perception work sociologically? Although it is arguably one of the most important mechanisms of the social construction of reality, there are very few sustained sociological examinations of perception. Drawing on a cognitive sociological perspective, I highlight selective attention as a key process in the social construction of perception and propose filter analysis as a conceptual framework for the development of a sociology of perception. The primary analytical benefit of using the metaphor of a filter is that it brings attention to what is normally

Corresponding author: Asia Friedman, Research Division, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 1 Worlds Fair Drive, Somerset, New Jersey, 08873 USA. Email: friedmam@umdnj.edu

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disattended or filtered out. One of the advantages of highlighting disattention is that it facilitates a more productive conceptualization of the relationship between social constructionist perspectives and material reality. In the penultimate section, I draw on the case of sex and gender to help illustrate these unique insights of the filter metaphor.1 By bringing analytic attention to normally disattended unsexed features of bodies, filter analysis allows for a constructionist account of bodily sex that does not require denying all physical differences, and as such helps to complicate ongoing debates about biology and culture.

Foregrounding a Sociology of Perception

There is always more than one way to see something. For instance, Malinowski (1929: 204) famously observed that the Trobriand Islanders perceived children as resembling their father, even in cases where he clearly saw stronger resemblances to the mother. More recently, Nisbett and Masuda (2003: 11163) have documented differences in visual perception between East Asians, who tend to maintain a broad perceptual field, and Westerners, who are more likely to center their attention on a focal object. Such optical diversity is not just cross-cultural, however. Different historical periods can also constitute distinct optical communities (Zerubavel, 1997: 33). Lowe (1982: 85) and Laqueur (1990) both maintain that people saw very different things when looking at the human body in different historical eras. Kuhn (1996 [1962]: 117) similarly argues that scientists perceive the exact same materials differently under different historical paradigms.2 Visual perception of the same sensory information also varies within the same culture and the same historical period. Gender, race, class, occupations, and even hobbies can all entail distinct perceptual conventions and forms of visual expertise. Studies of eyewitness accounts, for instance, have found that males and females tend to notice different aspects of a scene and thereby remember somewhat different details (Powers et al., 1979). In the case of occupations, Mills (1963: 460) argued that different technical elites possess different perceptual capacities, an assertion underscored by Hansons (1965: 17) observation that [t]he infant and the layman can see: they are not blind. But they cannot see what the physicist sees; they are blind to what he sees. In his ethnography of recreational mushroom hunters, Fine (1998: 102, 113) likewise found that mushroomers can perceive amazing amounts of sensory detail invisible to the uninitiated, who lack the relevant template for looking. Despite the existence of these and other accounts of distinct optical communities, very few sociological theories of perception have emerged. Each of the optical communities alluded to above gives rise to different perceptual patterns that are neither individual and idiosyncratic nor universally human. Rather, these patterns are the result of optical socialization, constituting a uniquely sociological dimension of visual perception.3 Distinct from both perceptual individualism and perceptual universalism, the sociology of perception emphasizes that perception is a culturally constructed process, and seeks to identify the perceptual conventions, perceptual traditions, perceptual norms, and processes of perceptual enculturation associated with membership in different perceptual communities. Given what we already know, the most interesting questions facing the sociology of

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perception do not have to do with whether culture influences perception, which has been at least preliminarily established, but with how that influence plays out. What are the cognitive and perceptual processes that bring about this optical diversity? While very few works sail under the banner of the sociology of perception4 taking the social construction of perception as their central object of analysis one can find passing references to sensory perception throughout classical and contemporary sociology. For instance, Cerulo (2002: 283294) locates traces of what she calls a sociology of sensation in the work of Durkheim (1966 [1951], 1995 [1912]), Marx (1978), Cooley (1962 [1909]), Schutz (1951), and Weber (1946). Perception also plays a central role in much of Goffmans (1963) thinking, for instance the concept of civil inattention, and in Garfinkels (1967 [1964]: 3575) work on background knowledge. Simmel (1924 [1908]: 356361) offers one of the more extended discussions of the sociological importance of the senses in which he makes the argument that vision plays a unique sociological role because [t]he union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances (1924 [1908]: 358). Other sociologists who have explicitly argued for the centrality of perception to sociological inquiry include Child (1950), who claims that perception buttresses the sociology of knowledge, and Lowe (1982), who offers that perception is the link between the content of thought and the structure of society. Given this long history of nods to the role of perception in social life not to mention the outright statements of its sociological significance the topic seems ripe for an extended treatment. Among the most important reasons to advance a sociology of perception is that it challenges the normally taken-for-granted view that our visual perceptions are unfiltered and veridical (Fiske and Taylor, 1991: 99). We typically assume that seeing is a passive input process in which sensory images overwhelm the viewer (Burnett, 2004: 3234). In this understanding, seeing does not involve thinking or interpretation but is a matter of direct sensory perception; sensory stimuli are the only influence. As Kleege (1999: 96) puts it, we apparently believe that the brain stays out of it (see also Jay, 1993: 62). The metaphor that best captures the dominant view that seeing is a no-brainer is the mirror. We believe that what we see is a mirror image of empirical reality, a direct point-by-point correspondence (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 7) without distortion or selection. This constellation of beliefs leads us to trust sight uniquely among the senses. Many of our sayings reflect this faith in vision: I saw it with my own eyes; sight unseen; seeing is believing; a picture is worth a thousand words. Seeing is believed to be unique among the senses in terms of its ability to provide the undisputable truth. Sayings that capture this association between vision, enlightenment and understanding are to have vision, to see the light, and to see things as they really are (Kleege, 1999: 22; see also Jay, 1993: 2, 587; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 48). Despite the many examples of different optical communities, then, we are typically unaware of socio-cultural influences on visual perception. This is the first reason to develop a sociology of perception. Our taken-for-granted folk theory of sight does not acknowledge socio-optical diversity or its epistemological implications. Another important reason to foreground a sociology of perception is that perception is a powerful but understudied dimension of the social construction of reality. For instance, in The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann (1967 [1966]: 140) make the claim that conversation is the most important vehicle of reality maintenance;

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perception, on the other hand, does not receive any explicit acknowledgement as playing a role in the social construction of reality. There is no entry in the index under perception, vision, visual, sensory, or senses. Yet many passages, such as the one below, seem to demand an analysis of the social construction of perception:
The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It does not require additional verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as self-evident and compelling facticity. I know that it is real. (Berger and Luckmann, 1967 [1966]: 23)

How do we gain this sense that reality is simply there without a need for additional verification? How do we come to experience it as real? It is through perception that information enters our minds in the first place. As such, subconscious cultural influences at the level of perception undergird this broadly shared analytic perspective, as well as a number of sociological sub-fields such as the sociology of knowledge. As Zerubavel has said in relation to cognitive sociology:
A good way to begin exploring the mind would be to examine the actual process by which the world enters it in the first place. The first step toward establishing a comprehensive sociology of the mind, therefore, would be to develop a sociology of perception. (Zerubavel, 1997: 23)

Visual perception is a mostly unacknowledged but uniquely powerful dimension of the social construction of taken-for-granted reality. It is this visual sub-structure of social construction that I aim to capture here.

Expectations, Selective Attention and Social Construction

Scholars have used a variety of concepts to describe the social construction of reality, including paradigms (Kuhn, 1996 [1962]), perspectives (Mannheim, 1936: 266; Shibutani, 1955: 564), styles (Fleck, 1981 [1935]: 39; Mannheim, 1936: 3), models (Mannheim, 1936: 275), schemas (Bartlett, 1932; Kessler and McKenna, 1978: 158), mental maps (Chayko, 2002: 3536), habitus (Bourdieu, 1984: 101), frames (Bateson, 1972 [1955]; Goffman, 1986 [1974]), and filters (Davis, 1983: 285 note 17; Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 250; Zerubavel, 1997: 24). Tannen (1993: 1416) has suggested that the notion of expectations unifies a number of these seemingly very different theories. Although she focuses her analysis on frames, scripts and schemata, each of the other concepts listed above also relies on some notion of expectation. My interest is in identifying how such structures of expectation (Tannen, 1993: 5, 15) work on our thoughts and perceptions. To answer this question, one might begin by turning to findings in social psychology about cognitive processing biases, such as expectation effects (Jones, 1990: 82, 84) and confirmatory hypothesis testing (Taylor et al., 2000: 5657), which lead us to unconsciously reject or ignore information that challenges our expectations. This point is powerfully illustrated in Kuhns description of an experiment in which participants did not perceive changes made to a deck of playing cards, seeing instead the numbers and suits they expected (Kuhn, 1996 [1962]: 112113). It is important to emphasize that the

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expectations that I am concerned with here are specifically social expectations.5 Although expectations based on individual experience also produce expectation effects, it is the influence of social expectations on perception that is most relevant to the sociology of perception and the social construction of reality. Social expectations create a state of perceptual readiness (Bruner, 1958: 9293) to quickly recognize particular socially relevant cues to experience events in certain consistent and selective ways (1958: 85, emphasis added). In other words, one of the key effects of social expectations is to enact and organize selective attention. We seek out and register those details that are consistent with social expectations, while overlooking other details that are equally perceptible and real. The following examples address five of the major concepts scholars have developed to describe the social construction of reality (frame, schema, habitus, perspective and thought style). Although not necessarily central to his or her analysis, in each case the author makes some reference to selective attention. In drawing attention to this common conceptual thread, my point is to demonstrate that a shared socio-cognitive and perceptual process underlies each of these apparently very different theories of the social construction of reality. In Goffmans usage, to frame something is to determine which details are in frame and which can be disregarded as out of frame, which is in essence a process of selective attention. Consider in this light the following description of the importance of disattending irrelevant events: A significant feature of any strip of activity is the capacity of its participants to disattend competing events both in fact and in appearance here using disattend to refer to the withdrawal of all attention and awareness (Goffman, 1986 [1974]: 202). When Bartlett (1932) introduced the term schema it was to emphasize that memory is selective, as opposed to the storage and retrieval of all available information. More recently, Fiske and Taylor (1991: 15) defined schema as a cognitive structure that selectively represents relevant attributes, and Cerulo (2002: 8) explained that schemata allow the brain to exclude the specific details of a new experience and retain only the generalities that liken the event to other experiences in ones past Discrepant features are adjusted or omitted so that the information conforms to the schema in use. Bourdieu also relies on the concept of a schema (his exact wording is schemes of perception and appreciation) when describing perception as a function of habitus (1984: 2, 28, 44, 1996 [1992]: 318) and specifically mentions selective attention as one way habitus operates. In his words, habitus serves as a pertinence principle or principle of selection (1984: 50) that allows for an unconscious deciphering of the countless signs which at every moment say what is to be loved and what is not, what is or is not to be seen (1984: 86). Shibutani (1962: 131) likewise describes perspectives in terms of selective attention, explaining that people with dissimilar perspectives define identical situations differently, responding selectively to diverse aspects of their environment. And Fleck (1981 [1935]: 93) recounts that the expectations of their particular thought style led bacteriologists to disattend bacterial cultures that were either very fresh or very old as not even worth examining. As a result, he explains, all secondary changes in the cultures escaped attention.

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Note that in many of these examples, the author not only highlights the role of selective attention in the social construction of reality, but explicitly emphasizes the role of selective sensory specifically visual attention. Attention can refer to the mental act of selectively focusing our awareness, but it can also refer to selective sensory attention registering only selected details among the technically available stimuli while disattending the rest. I want to further illustrate the pivotal role of selective visual attention in the social construction of reality by introducing two more examples. Goffman (1986 [1974]) underscores the uniquely powerful role of visual perception (over other forms of sensory perception) in framing in the following passage: What is heard, felt or smelled attracts the eye, and it is the seeing of the source of these stimuli that allows for a quick identification and definition a quick framing of what has occurred (1986 [1974]: 146). Likewise, in Kuhns (1996 [1962]) theory of scientific revolutions, paradigm shifts are fundamentally about the reorganization of visual stimuli; where earlier scientists saw one thing, adherents of a new paradigm literally see something else. In his words, scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before (1996 [1962]: 111).

Filter Analysis and Disattention

Because of the mental image it evokes, the metaphor of a filter is uniquely well-suited to capture these pivotal processes of selective attention (DeGloma and Friedman, 2005). When using the term filter I specifically have in mind a mental strainer through which visual stimuli pass before they are perceived. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the function of a filter as holding back elements or modifying the appearance of something; and the American Heritage Dictionary offers that a filter is any porous substance through which a liquid or gas is passed in order to remove constituents.6 Filters in general function to allow selected elements to pass through a set of holes while blocking others. Although the size, shape and number of openings vary, all filters perform this function of straining or sifting. Thinking in terms of filters thus usefully directs our analytical focus to questions about which features or details pass through and are attended and, perhaps more importantly, those which are blocked by the filter and thus remain unnoticed. In his recent work on the sociology of denial, Zerubavel describes the social exclusion of details that are technically within our field of vision as follows:
Ignoring something is more than simply failing to notice it. Indeed, it is quite often the result of some pressure to actively disregard it. Such pressure is usually a product of social norms of attention designed to separate what we conventionally consider noteworthy from what we come to disregard as mere background noise. (Zerubavel, 2006: 23)

Filter analysis is explicitly conceived to reveal these social norms of attention and to make visible previously disattended information. The metaphorical blockages and holes of a filter bring our analytical focus directly to the dialectic of attention and disattention underlying perception, and specifically highlight the vast amount of potentially perceivable data that is normally blocked from our awareness. While not incompatible with filter

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analysis, most of the other available concepts (including schema, habitus, and paradigm) are not based on a concrete spatial image that provides a specific, useful guide for an analysis of both attention and disattention. While one of the virtues of the metaphor of a frame is that it is based on a similarly evocative spatial image, due to its structure, filter offers two important analytic advantages. First, although frame also offers a clear depiction of in and out, it is a binary representation in which the attended and disattended are fully separated and spatially contiguous, rather than interwoven in the same conceptual space. Compared with filter analysis, this is a coarse representation of attention and disattention that separates the attended from the disattended too starkly. Second, the filter metaphor offers a more balanced representation of attention and disattention than frame. While Goffman pioneered the sociology of disattention,7 conceptually speaking, the metaphor of a frame which focuses on the distinction between some relevant content (a painting, for instance) and what it is not (the surrounding wall, everything outside of the picture frame) primarily brings analytical focus to what is in frame; everything else is lumped together as out of frame. In other words, the frame metaphor primarily directs attention to those details that are marked as relevant, but does not invite a specific analysis of what is irrelevant and disattended because the space outside the frame is infinite and undefined. The concept of a schema similarly highlights cognitive processes other than disattention. Schema most often refers to the rapid and unconscious mental filling in of expected attributes based on the perception of a small number of highly marked cues. As such, conceptually schemata emphasize what is seen and what is mentally added based on what is seen, but not what is overlooked and ignored. This is significantly different from the metaphor of a filter, which equally highlights what is seen and what is not seen because it structurally represents the dialectical relationship between attention and disattention. This emphasis on identifying the disattended is particularly valuable for constructionist analysis, as what remain unnoticed are the evidence and details that would support other perceptions and categorizations and other social worlds. As I demonstrate with the case of sex and gender in the next section, in highlighting the disattended, filter analysis also facilitates a new and productive conceptualization of the relationship between social constructionist perspectives and the material world. The key insight of filter analysis is that empirical reality bodily or otherwise is always richer and more complex than what we perceive and thus experience. In other words, things in the world exceed any and all filtered perceptions of them. Merleau-Ponty put the point as follows: perception is communicating with a world which is richer than what we know of it (MerleauPonty, 1963: 186). Another potential benefit of using the metaphor of a filter is that it may provide a common language with cognitive scientists, who have used the same idea to talk about the brain of the perceiver. According to Mendola (2003: 40), some visual neurobiologists have used the term filter to refer to neurons since the 1960s because of the way they break down visual scenes by extracting particular features from small regions of space. Broadbent (1958) likewise proposed that the information flowing in from the senses is reduced through a selective filter prior to processing by the perceptual categorization system. More recently, Wang et al. (2007) studied the neural correlates of selective attention using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. If a process of filtration is taking

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place in the brain at the level of the neuron and in the social organization of the perceptual process (and also, arguably, in memory and cognition more broadly), this common form may provide a useful basis for exploring the similarities among these different levels of filters as well as an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the mirroring of biological and cultural processes. In this section I have made a number of claims about perception, social construction and the metaphor of a filter: that visual attention and disattention are among the primary mechanisms of the social construction of reality; that the metaphor of a filter is particularly well suited to capture these social dynamics of selective attention and thus to illustrate in concrete terms how social construction is functioning in any specific case; that the analytic emphasis of what is normatively disattended, which is facilitated by the metaphor of a filter, can buttress a constructionist standpoint. In the sections that follow I further illustrate these claims by using the metaphor of a social filter to analyze the visual perception of male and female bodies. While sex is certainly not the only example of socio-optical construction,8 this case study is a particularly powerful example because sex and the body more broadly have historically proven to be a stumbling block for constructionist theory. In taking on one of the hard cases of social construction, the unique insights facilitated by filter analysis are all the more apparent.

Sex Seen:The Socio-Optical Construction of Male and Female Bodies Social Construction and the Body
Although the theoretical development of understanding gender as socially constructed was crucial to the feminist movement, it has not been able to erase in many peoples minds what seem like natural differences between men and women. The notion of natural sex differences is even embedded in the distinction between sex and gender, which is arguably the dominant conceptual paradigm in gender scholarship. Underlying this distinction is the idea that sex is a fixed natural binary, a self-evident fact. For example, while gender scholars have written effectively and relatively extensively about social practices that gender the body, sex itself is often explicitly excluded from their accounts (Friedman, 2006). It is not uncommon to argue that the body is gendered, and that gender is omnirelevant (West and Zimmerman, 1987: 136), while at least implying that sex itself is asocial. Both Connell and Lorber make the point that we are born sexed but not gendered (Connell, 1987: 191; Lorber, 1994: 22); Connell (1987: 137) states that the categories male and female are not social or political categories; and Bordo (1999: 263) argues that the very fact of sexual difference is obvious. In these and other accounts, sex is portrayed as an exception to the social construction of gendered bodies and the omnirelevance of gender.9 As a result, gender scholars have left themselves vulnerable to continued attack on the grounds of biological difference: physical sex differences whether genital, hormonal, neuroanatomical, or other can serve as powerful evidence against the idea that binary gender is socially constructed. Ironically, most of these scholars also acknowledge that understanding sex as a fixed biological dichotomy hinders the acceptance of their conclusions about the social construction of gender.10 As

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Connell (1987: 91) has put it, ideas about natural sex differences are the lion in the path of social theories of gender.11 Not only gender, but the broader concept of social construction frequently founders on the body. The metaphor of construction can seem to have inappropriate connotations when applied to matter, to objects and bodies, because it implies that bodies are created ex nihilo (Mol, 2002: 32). If matter, some form of fleshy materiality, is irreducible to the social (Shilling, 2003: 60), this raises questions about the limits and legitimacy of the construction metaphor. One response to these concerns about the limits of social construction is the position Turner (1992: 118, 254255) promotes, which he refers to as foundationalist or weak social construction. While not determinist, this view retains givens of biology that impinge upon everyday life and our classificatory systems (Turner, 1992: 48, 256; see also Nicholson, 1994: 8283; Shilling, 2003: ix, 182). For many foundationalists, including Turner (1992: 256), sex is one of these biological givens. In contrast to foundationalism, anti-foundationalist or radical social construction holds that there are no things or conditions which are not the product of social processes. There are no essential foundations outside ongoing social processes: the most concrete things are social products (Turner, 1992: 105). While this position effectively precludes biological determinism, it has been rightly criticized for its postmodern tendency to textualize or idealize the body in ways that ignore the facticity of the body and result in disembodied accounts of social interactions and practices.12 Butler (1990), for example, famously argues that sex is always already gender (1990: 7) and is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results (1990: 25). However, her analysis of the performative constitution of sex does not discuss the body itself (Mol, 2002: 39; Prosser, 1998: 41; see also Butler, 2004: 198). As it stands, neither foundationalism nor anti-foundationalism provides an account of the body that successfully substantiates social construction. One of the aims of this article is to provide a new way to think about these debates about biology and culture. Using filter analysis to study visual sex attribution allows me to address both the concerns of foundationalists about the importance of acknowledging obdurate material reality, as well as the concerns raised by radical constructionists about the implications of assuming sex difference (or any other category of bodily difference) is self-evident and purely biological. In other words, it is not necessary to espouse a pure constructionist or blank slate position to develop a useful and interesting constructivist account of bodily sex difference. Filter analysis does not require denying real biological differences or eschewing all biological explanations. It does, however, focus on aspects of both perception and bodily difference not typically addressed in the biological and cognitive sciences. As Zerubavel has said in relation to thinking, a truly comprehensive science of the mind must also include a sociology of thinking that, by focusing specifically on the sociomental, would complement the efforts of psychology, linguistics, the neurosciences, and artificial intelligence to provide a complete picture of how we think (1997: 5). The same can be said of sex. While much can be learned from biological accounts, there are also other ways to think about physical sex differences. A number of scholars have made the point that human bodies are always excessive of the social categories through which we perceive and signify them. Hale argues that

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transgender people in particular do not fit into the available categories or only fit by denying ambiguous or contradictory (according to the available categories) aspects of themselves. In his words, [t]hose of us who live in the borderzones constituted by the overlapping margins of categories do so because our embodiments and our subjectivities are abjected from social ontology: we cannot fit ourselves into extant categories without denying, eliding, erasing, or otherwise abjecting personally significant aspects of ourselves (Hale, 1998: 115). To some extent this is true of everyone. We all fall somewhere in the overlapping margins of categories Hale describes. Shilling takes this broader position that the body in general is irreducible to social classifications (Shilling, 2003: 10). Bodies are classified into simplistic social categories (for example, male/female, black/ white, upper/middle/working class) he writes, which ignore overlaps in, and stress the differences between, human bodies (Shilling, 2003: 60). Filter analysis provides a conceptual system expressly designed to direct attention to those features of bodies that are, as Hale put it, denied, elided, erased or otherwise abjected by social categories. As we have seen, one of the most useful features of filter analysis is that it brings to light this world of excluded properties, as one of the defining questions of filter analysis is what is being filtered out? Answering this question requires one to identify at least some of the features that were previously excluded. By highlighting the ways that bodies always exceed social categories, filter analysis offers a different way to think about the social construction of bodily difference one that is based on biology, yet does not require denying the existence of particular bodily differences. Further, filter analysis helps us understand the cognitive transformations that allow the salience of gender to vary by social situation while never entirely disappearing. At times, specific contexts provide socio-mental filters that render certain aspects of identity relevant and, by necessity, others irrelevant (DeGloma and Friedman, 2005). For example, the color of a childs uniform shirt is more relevant and readily attended than his or her sex or race when one is a spectator at a youth soccer game. In addition, and perhaps more directly pertinent here because it deals with visual sex attribution, several female-to-male transsexuals I interviewed told me that they are unproblematically perceived as male in small towns, but in metropolitan areas, where the context provides the category butch, they can also be read as butch-females. The difference lies not with the individuals gender performance, but rather the shape, structure, and quantity of the holes in the contextual filter. In the first context, wearing mens clothing and having short hair are defined as sufficient signifiers of maleness, and other characteristics such as stature or hand size are irrelevant and not noticed, whereas in the latter context, these aspects of appearance are considered important cues (tells), whereas dress and hairstyle may be irrelevant for sex attribution (since there is an expectation that both males and females can wear mens clothing). As one transsexual informant put it, People in like suburban areas, they dont know anything about this, so theyre not going to see someone and go, Oh, transsexual. Its either girl or guy, thats it. Using the metaphor of a social filter to analyze visual sex attribution allows one to see much more clearly what is going on interpretively when we see sex. But first, a note on terminology. When discussing sex and gender I want to convey a number of ideas which these concepts typically fail to capture. In particular, I want to talk about the way that visual perception functions to gender the body as a whole, including

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what is normally conceptually cordoned off as sex. I want to explicitly challenge our perceptions of not only masculine and feminine bodies, then, but male and female bodies as well. But what term to use? If, following Kessler and McKenna (1978) and others, I use only the term gender (as in the socio-optical construction of gendered bodies) there is an immediate disassociation with sex itself. This way of talking about it effectively emphasizes the visual dimension of the social construction of gendered bodies, but does not convey that I am talking about male and female, as well as masculine and feminine, bodies. My inclination is to substitute the term sex instead thus emphasizing what is typically overlooked since the notion of purely biological sex differences remains a recalcitrant belief even in discussions of the gendering of the body. However, the term sex (at least in its strictest, most technical sense) signifies only certain specific aspects of the body, i.e. genitals, gonads, hormones, and perhaps secondary sex characteristics, such as breasts and facial hair, which may create confusion when I use it to refer to the body as a whole. It is my view that the dominant folk notion of a sexed body extends well beyond this technical definition, however; regardless of the technical meaning of sex, in everyday language male and female evoke images of the whole body, not just genitals and secondary sex characteristics. My intent is to intervene in precisely this takenfor-granted notion of sexed bodies by arguing that a cognitive structure (we could call it gender or sex difference) organizes our sensory perception of bodies to create the broad sense of physical dichotomy we think of as male and female.

Sex Difference as Socio-Optical Filter

Without using the term, a number of gender scholars have previously described visual sex attribution in terms that are evocative of a socio-mental filter in their pointed emphasis of attention and disattention. For instance, Kessler and McKenna explain that the attributor contributes to the accentuation of gender cues by selective perception (Kessler and McKenna, 1978: 157). In their words: certain differences take on importance, while others are seen as irrelevant [and] may be ignored (1978: 156). Judith Butler (2004: 42) similarly refers to a grid of legibility that defines the parameters of what will and what will not appear within the domain of the social.13 One of the key advantages of filter analysis is that it brings analytic attention to these details of bodies that are socially invisible. There is a wealth of visual information about the human body available to us when attributing sex, but we note only selected details. Bodies could be categorized based on many different visual characteristics: by height, by weight, by skin color, by hair length, by nose size and none of these criteria would group people perfectly by sex. When we perceive someones sex we disattend all of this uninformative information in favor of the sex differentiated details. We notice facial hair and breasts. What we do not notice are elbows and earlobes, or the other parts of the body that do not demonstrate sex difference. Furthermore, in drawing our analytic focus to what is disattended in sex attribution, the filter metaphor invites us to identify the proportion of the body that is ignored or filtered out. It is instructive to consider how much of the body organically and unfailingly indicates sex difference. Even amid the seemingly obvious differences, one can make the case that there is a significant amount of underlying sameness between male and female bodies. One logical starting point for such a discussion is embryonic bisexuality,

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which refers to the fact that early in development male and female embryos have the same rudimentary genital ducts.14 This early developmental sameness also extends through infancy and childhood to a degree, as young children are often difficult to sex in the absence of gender specific clothing. There is also the exceptional but powerful example of intersexuality, which reveals just how fine the line between male and female really is. As Fausto-Sterling (2000: 8) has put it, since intersexuals quite literally embody both sexes, they weaken claims about sexual difference.15 Other forms of transgender identity, particularly transsexuality and transvestism/drag, also challenge the perfect dichotomization of male and female bodies. When they successfully pass or read as the other sex, their self-presentations draw on and highlight the similarities between male and female bodies.16 Even limiting the discussion to normal adult males and females, however, the evidence for sex sameness is strong. Consider in this light Mols (2002: 148) suggestion that inside the body sameness is everywhere. Angiograms, for example, do not reveal sex differences. With the exception of gonads, in fact, there is evidence that no organs are sex specific. According to Thomas Starzl, a preeminent transplant surgeon, not only do organ transplants take place across sexes, often the donor is of unknown sex (quoted in Fox, 2003: 237). In other words, male and female hearts, lungs, kidneys, livers, bone marrow, and blood do not exist; these organs and other bodily substances are interchangeable between males and females, and a match for transplants and transfusions has nothing to do with sex. Turning to the surface of the body, there too the similarities among human bodies are substantial. In fact, it is arguable that males and females are significantly more similar than different. Head hair is not naturally sex dimorphic. Neither are eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes, noses, lips or ears. Armpits will not tell us someones sex if they are not shaved. Elbows are practically indistinguishable. Males and females knees, ankles, feet and toes are also more similar than different. The list of non-sex dimorphic body parts might also include foreheads, collarbones, wrists, palms, fingernails, toenails, backs of knees, backs of necks, soles of feet, fingers, buttocks and more. The other list, the list of body parts that, at least in the aggregate, organically and consistently differentiate men and women, is considerably shorter: facial hair, body hair, Adams apples, overall stature, breasts, and genitals. This already shorter list is further limited by the fact that despite widely-held cultural ideas to the contrary many of these supposedly sex dimorphic body parts actually vary significantly within the sex categories. For example, body and facial hair vary by race and ethnicity. As one female-to-male transsexual I interviewed put it: I didnt get much facial hair because Im Asian. I call it hamster moustache. I dont get really any body hair either a few hairs on my chest, but thats nothing to be proud of and I pluck them. Although we commonly refer to body and facial hair as categorical sex differences, the reality is that these traits are distributed in some form of a continuum, with significant overlap between males and females. My point in highlighting these sex similarities is to draw attention to the perceptual residue that is disattended when we see bodies categorically as male or female and to emphasize that thinking of perception in terms of filtration helps to draw our analytic attention to these alternate perceptual possibilities. In short, seeing male and female bodies depends on a socio-optical filter through which we selectively attend to those parts of the body that are informative of sex category. Because of the proportionately
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larger number of sex similarities, this also requires disattending most of what is actually there to see. At the same time, this process of visual filtration is buttressed by the gendering of the body. Through polarizing display practices, which we might think of as filtration preparation, bodies are ritually prepared to be seen, prepared to pass through the sex difference filter. Zerubavel (1991: 4647) explains how polarization functions in the case of gender and appearance:
In order to maintain the mutual exclusivity of masculinity and femininity, the rigid mind also tries to polarize both behavior and appearance along gender lines so as to make males and females more obviously distinct from each other. Applying the law of the excluded middle, it promotes the exaggeration of natural differences between the sexes, prompting women to shave their legs and cultivate a somewhat squeaky voice and men to pump up their muscles and grow beards Eliminating any overlaps between masculinity and femininity certainly facilitates their perception as discrete entities separated from each other by a real divide.

By eliminating naturally ambiguous or asexual aspects of appearance, polarization makes visual filtration much easier for the perceiver. In other words, seeing sex involves both the reader whose visual perception is structured by the sex difference filter as well as the person perceived, whose presentation of self is polarized to allow them to be seen unproblematically through this filter. The sex difference filter thus works to enact sex difference from two directions simultaneously it organizes perception as well as organizing our norms of grooming, adornment and bodily demeanor. Bourdieu touches on this dialectical relationship between perception and display when he explains that [t]he habitus is a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices (1984: 170, emphasis added). It has been well established by gender theorists that the artificial creation and display of sex difference on and through the body is a pivotal aspect of the social construction of gender. For example, Kessler and McKenna (1978: 161, 164) refer to a dichotomization process, West and Zimmerman (1987: 137) argue that doing gender is essentially the creation of difference, and Connell (1987: 8081) introduces the concepts of negation and transcendence which describe the cultural creation of physical gender differences in places where none exist naturally.17 However, while gender scholars have comprehensively analyzed the display side of sex attribution, the role of the perceiver in sex attribution has yet to motivate an in-depth analysis that focuses on how by what cognitive and sensory processes perception contributes to the social construction of male and female bodies. Kessler and McKennas suggestion see someone as female only when you cannot see them as male (1978: 158) which is one of the few available explanations, leaves the specific organization of the mental and visual processes behind sex attribution unidentified. Filter analysis can help fill this gap by illustrating how social construction works cognitively and visually through selective attention.

Conclusion
Although critically important in the feminist movement, the idea that gender is socially constructed has not been able to erase in most peoples minds what seem like natural
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differences between men and women, and attacks on the idea that gender is socially constructed continue. In part, this is the result of an artificial separation between sex (which is viewed as natural) and the rest of the body (which is gendered). However, it is possible to include sex in an analysis of social processes of gendering without denying the existence of bodily sex differences. I have approached this idea by using filter analysis to identify and analyze the interpretive process of visual sex attribution, illustrating how a substantial amount of physical similarity becomes visually transformed into polarized difference through attention and disattention. One of the most important results of rethinking sex difference in this way is that the body can become a valuable resource for social theories of gender (and social construction more broadly) instead of a threat. Drawing attention to the many non-dichotomous aspects of the body that are normally disattended can serve to anchor the idea that dichotomized gender roles are socially constructed rather than rooted in biological differences. To argue that gender differences do not reflect biological sex differences is not to say that no sex differences exist: certain virtually categorical physical differences among them, pregnancy, lactation, and genitals separate most males and females. It is my point that these sex differences are only some (even, arguably, a small proportion) of the potential similarities and differences among human bodies. When we consider sex differences in this larger context, the argument for a biological basis for gender differences seems unsubstantiated, based as it is on a selective view of human biology. As Knorr-Cetina (1981: 6) explains, selections can be called into question precisely because they are selections: that is, precisely because they involve the possibility of alternative selections. In other words, what is social is the process of selectively emphasizing and mentally weighing the existing bodily similarities and differences. The version of social constructionism I am advocating does not dispute the existence of biological differences, then, but highlights the cultural work that amplifies them. More broadly, in raising the question of what aspects of the body we are not selecting when we perceive sex, this formulation exemplifies the potential power of what Shilling (2003) calls the irreducibility of bodies to social classifications (see also Connell, 1995: 5660). Attending specifically to this misfit between bodies and the categories we use to describe them highlights the socially constructed character of the categories. In this way, bodies might become a resource for social constructionist analysis, rather than a stumbling block. Such a constructionist reclaiming of the body is facilitated by the two analytic moves I have highlighted throughout: foregrounding the visual dimension of social construction and employing the metaphor of a filter to analyze how by what cognitive and perceptual processes socio-optical construction happens. As we have seen in the case of sex and gender, filter analysis draws attention to important observations that can deepen and support a constructionist perspective. Among these, the following three insights are particularly important to emphasize. First, filtration and polarizing display practices both create perceptual bias in the same direction highlighting sex differences and thus function together to obscure other possible bodies and worlds. The trade-off for the clear sense of male and female we are able to achieve with the sex difference filter is that there are a multitude of other possible bodies we do not perceive. Second, at the same time as it draws attention to this double bias in favor of a reality dominated by sex differences, filter analysis also builds in conceptual tools to challenge this reality. One of the defining

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questions of filter analysis is what is being filtered out? In the case of seeing sex, this perceptual residue is sex similarities, the androgynous and otherwise non-sex specific aspects of bodies. The third insight, to which I have only alluded, is that the idea of selective attention to sex differences can provide an analytical framework to intervene in debates about gender at a number of levels, including the flurry of recent arguments about sex differences in brain structure and chemistry.18 When studies emphasize statistical differences between males and females in the size of a particular region of the brain, for example, or the proportion of different hormones, filter analysis draws our analytic attention to what is filtered out of these descriptions of the brain: namely, that these are usually proportionately small differences amid much greater similarity (in size, appearance, structure, and function). As a critical analysis of Brizendines The Female Brain that appeared in the magazine Nature put it: Human sex differences are elevated almost to the point of creating different species, yet virtually all differences in brain structure, and most differences in behaviour, are characterized by small average differences and a great deal of male-female overlap at the individual level (Young and Balaban, 2006: 634). In short, filter analysis can help scholars to illustrate how social construction works cognitively and visually and how, especially (but not only) in the case of gender, particular filtered perceptions of the body have grounded social differences and eroded faith in constructionist perspectives. Since part of the resistance to social constructionism both in the case of gender and more broadly comes from presumptions about the transparency and accuracy of visual perception, using filter analysis to identify the specific dynamics of socio-optical construction, adding a concrete analysis of visual perception to the general idea of social construction, can help scholars to more effectively account for some of the hard problems of constructionist theory, such as the body. Broadly speaking, even though obdurate material reality exists, it does not have to pose a problem for constructionists particularly if we focus on interpretation and analyze the body using the metaphor of a filter, which draws attention to those material realities that are normatively disattended. Perception is a foundational aspect of the social construction of reality, yet the sociocognitive processes underlying perception remain largely unidentified. Here I have highlighted norms of visual attention and disattention that are pervasive and powerful mechanisms of socio-optical construction. I expect that these norms of selective attention are only one among many social processes informing perception, however, and I hope that this article can serve as a starting point for a new stream of research in the sociology of culture that examines the perceptual dimension of the social construction of reality. Acknowledgements
I thank Eviatar Zerubavel, not only for his extensive and enthusiastic comments on countless drafts of this article, but for his continually extraordinary mentorship. Also, while very different in focus, the section on filter analysis is strongly influenced by collaborative work in progress with Tom DeGloma, and would not have been possible without his insights.

Notes
1 When discussing the case of sex and gender, I refer several times to interviews I conducted between 2005 and 2007 with 41 transsexuals. I have previously discussed this interview material in a number of conference presentations (see Friedman, 2007, 2009).

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2 For additional examples of studies of the social history of visual perception, see Fleck (1981 [1935]); Zerubavel (2003); and Simpson (2006). 3 For an excellent discussion of the socio-cultural dimension of perception see Zerubavel (1997: 2334). 4 Notable previous attempts to develop a sociology of perception include an article by Child, The Sociology of Perception (1950), Douglass edited volume, Essays in the Sociology of Perception (1982), and Social Optics, the second chapter of Zerubavels Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (1997). 5 See Garfinkels (1967 [1964]: 37) concept of background expectancies, or expectancies that lend commonplace scenes their familiar, life-as-usual character, which for Garfinkel emerge from and reproduce the stable social structures of everyday activities. 6 Filter: see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/filter and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, New College Edition, 1978 [1969]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 492. 7 See, for instance, Goffman (1986 [1974]: 202); Goffman (1961: 1926) on rules of irrelevance; and Goffman (1963) on civil inattention. 8 Sex is not the only example of the socio-optical construction of the body, which also applies to race, for instance, as well as any other categorical perception of the body. 9 For other examples of this position, see Gatens (1996: 810); Moi (1999: 112114); West and Zimmerman (1987: 127); Young (2005: 3236). 10 See Bordo (1999: 37); Connell (1987: 66); Lorber (1994: 1718). 11 Examples of recent accounts that highlight biological sex differences and make some form of causal claim about gender based on them include Eugenidess novel Middlesex (2002); Colapintos (2000) biography of David Reimer entitled As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl; Rhoadss Taking Sex Differences Seriously (2004); as well as several articles appearing in some of the most prestigious journals in sociology. (See, for example, Lueptow et al., 2001; Udry, 2000.) See also Baron-Cohen (2003) and Brizendine (2006), both of which have received significant media attention. I would also include the well-known speech by former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers in which he suggested that there are biological roots to gender differences in math (Summers, 2005). 12 For examples of this criticism, see any of the following: Bordo (1993: 38, 1999: 263); Connell (1987: 74); Moi (1999: 4654); Young (2005: 12). 13 See also Bem (1993) and Nicholson (1994). 14 For one account, see De Beauvoir (1975 [1952]: 10, 1416); see also Fausto-Sterling (2000: 4950) and Money and Ehrhardt (1972). 15 See also Chase (1998: 207, 211212); Kessler (1998); Preves (2003). 16 Butler (1990: 136139) makes the argument that drag reveals sex/gender as performatively constituted. For illustrations of the idea that transgender bodies highlight sex sameness, see Howey (2002: 208209, 222223); Lorber (1994: 19); Rupp and Taylor (2003: 25, 4344). 17 For other accounts, see Bartky (1988); Bordo (1999: 26, 39); Lorber (1994: 1819, 2224). 18 For instance, Baron-Cohen (2003) and Brizendine (2006).

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