Rene Almeling

Exemplary is Emily Martin’s groundbreaking study of eggs and sperm, in which she analyzed how cultural norms of femininity and masculinity led to beliefs about passive eggs and aggressive sperm.15 She demonstrated how these beliefs influenced not only the questions that biomedical scientists asked in the laboratory but also portrayals of their research in medical textbooks.

To underscore the irreducibility of sex and gender, of biology and society, Anne Fausto-Sterling suggested the metaphor of nesting dolls, which I adapted to illustrate reproduction as a biological and social process.

As a result, the nesting-dolls metaphor allows for a visualization of how biological and social processes may be analytically distinguishable but are actually indissoluble.