“Friedman’s clear and direct writing style makes this book highly accessible…. She proposes a shift in perspective that should spark generative discussions for sociologists of gender and the body.”

American Journal of Sociology

“Blind to Sameness is a remarkable and highly original book! For theorists and empiricists alike this is a masterful empirical work in the social construction of reality and a fine example that theorist and researcher need not be mentally separated.”

Wayne Brekhus, author of Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity

“Asia Friedman takes us into the mind’s eye—and ear, nose, and hand—tracking the path from perception to cognition as we humans discern male and female bodies. This book is a fascinating and original sociological exploration of how inattentive we are to sexual ambiguity. Blind to Sameness will literally change the way we see the world.”

Robin Wagner-Pacifici, author of The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End

“Asia Friedman has produced a work of significant value. Focusing on the sensory mechanisms that contribute to the creation and classification of male and female bodies, she convincingly shows that socially crafted distinctions depend not just on the amplification and polarization of recognizable differences but also on the diminishment of apparent similarities. The first sociological study to empirically examine how conventional ways of not seeing—or filtering out—are indispensable to both the social construction of sex in particular and the social construction of reality in general. Blind to Sameness cuts to the core of how people think and wonderfully illuminates how optical communities in diverse sets of circumstances envisage and categorize the world.”

Ralph LaRossa, author of The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History

“Blindness to Sameness is a fascinating, unique, and important contribution [to] the fields of sex and gender, sociology of the senses, sociology of the body, and cognitive sociology.”

Symbolic Interaction