Deconstructing ROR and GDP

d-m-c at worldnet.att.net d-m-c at worldnet.att.net
Wed Jan 27 22:06:24 PST 1999



>Angela,
>
>I don't know if the stumble upon, revelation/recognition thing works with
>this stuff, onacona, it ain't natural. It's phantasimagoric.
>
>
>It ain't like Judith figureing out that some cockless girls find it
>necessary to act like cocky boys, or that some people let knives pierce
>their flesh based on other peoples ideas. Where basically, you just had to
>pay attention.
>
>p

but you see, Paula, you have an essentialist account of gender. women are women because they are peace loving and nurturing and relational/relationship preserving, whereas men are men because they are aggressive and argumentative and destructive. Judy's drawing on a tradition that suggests that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, natural about any of this and that these patterns of behavior are not only learned but are inscribed and reinscribed through all sorts of ordinary activities.

We, in other words, perform gender and there is not essential woman=-ness or man-ness underneath doing the performing. Iterative and reiterative and all that good lingo. There is no material, biological *cause* behind gendered behavior and so forth. So we have sex (biological sex characteristics) and we *do* gender and even then, some go on to argue, our biological material bodies are marked by --shaped by--performative discourses. Hence, my crack about about men and multiple orgasms which might also apply to women and their difficulty achieving orgasms. sure sure there is a biological component to these respective phenomenon, but we need to consider how much is shaped by language--representations of gender norms and the like


>



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