Embodiment The following projects are part of a larger effort to apply dynamic systems theory to feminist theories of embodiment and in the process to recast biological accounts of how the enculturated body is produced, altered and also maintained throughout the life cycle. I am currently developing two case studies to explore these ideas. The first examines the intersections of culture and biology in bone development throughout the life cycle. The second, carried out in collaboration with developmental psychologist Cynthia Garcia-Coll, argues for a systems approach to the study of emerging sex differences in early childhood.
"The Bare Bones of Sex: Part I, Sex & Gender" 2005. Signs, 30(2): 1491-528.		In this paper I pursue an ongoing discussion among feminist theorists about the sex/gender distinction. I argue that this distinction is of limited use when thinking specifically about the body and biology and that we need to develop new theoretical approaches in order to analyze the interplay between biology and culture. To work in that direction I consider sex/gender differences in bone development. Bone is often considered to be a hard, permanent substance, a reflection of pure biological (sex) difference. Use, diet, and cultural habits, however, shape bones. The biology of bone is as much a result of culture as it is some inchoate pre-existing biology. I challenge feminists to use dynamic systems and life course theories to look at difference, even biological difference, as something that is never finished, but continually and dynamically produced from moment to moment.
"Refashioning Race: DNA and the Politics of Health Care." 2004. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 15(3): 1-37.		In this article I explore two major themes. First, as I explicate contemporary scientific discussions of genes, medicine, and race I show how social, political, and scientific institutions and interests become mutually constitutive of twenty-first-century views on race. Second, as I have begun to do in other venues, writing specifically about gender (see "Bare Bones," Sexing, "The Problem"), I here explore how the idea of a "gene-environment system" applies to the production of racialized bodies. Understanding such systems can clarify our analyses of the uses and abuses of genetic research applied to the study of race and disease. To accomplish these tasks I begin with a brief history of biological ideas of race; I then turn to the efforts of biologists to modernize biological categories of race and the entangling of that project with efforts to explain and address health disparities between various racially and ethnically separated communities. I argue, in the end, that the scientific projects of geneticists aimed at understanding aspects of human history ought to be disentangled from current public health questions. These latter problems can often be addressed immediately and effectively using means already at hand.
Early Childhood Development		This study will track the emergence (or not) of sex differences among young children, demonstrating the application of systems theory's central tenets to the study of sexual differentiation. Between ages 3 and 5, girls and boys consolidate the concepts that they are of a certain sex, that their sexes are not changeable and that some behaviors are associated with particular sexes. These are the "facts of the matter"; but how do they relate to one another? How does a system that includes everything from individual physiology to dyadic interactions to media representations of sex roles and behavior produce the emergence of sexually differentiated behavior? In developing a systems theoretical framework for studying gender differentiation one goal of this project is to break away from the centuries old nature/nurture debate in order to offer a more productive approach to understanding human development.

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