Review: Roger N. Lancaster: The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: U.S. anthropologist and "unreconstructed socialist" Roger N. Lancaster has produced a wide-ranging and entertaining book which seeks "to critique the naturalization of heterosexuality in recent science and [seeks] an understanding of how bioreductivist ideas relate to ongoing changes in sexual culture" (308). Over some 350 pages of text, Lancaster shows how, in the wake of movements such as gay liberation and feminism, which have problematized "the quest for an authentic self" (7), US-American culture is "awash with highly-publicized (and publicity-sensitive) studies asserting a genetic source, a hormonal cause, and/or a hardwired, gendered brain as the basis for all manner of human traits and practices" (8).