Abstract

Putting together data and models in fields of research as diverse as social and biological anthropology, gender and feminist studies, evolutionary biology, nutritional sciences, and obstetrics, this chapter proposes that a convincing hypothesis for the observed human sex differences in height is actually missing in scientific arenas because of the absence of an inclusive research. It argues that the most realistic hypothesis is that of gendered practices’ effects on the long term: unequal protein intake between men and women but also stature discrimination on small men and tall women. Nutritional inequalities are well documented in classical ethnology. But they seemed not being worth deserving interpretation within the framework of global gender inequality. From a gender theory standpoint, nutritional inequalities should be suspected to be present as an inevitable consequence of the gender order. Asking the still underestimated question of how unnatural selections are able to shape human biology points specifically on a renewal of “sex and gender” epistemologies that envision sex as a product of natural selection or as a pure scientific construction. Setting the problem another way has direct concern for contemporary public debates stuck to a particular social/biological articulation of gendered identities.