You write:
>furthermore you completely MISS my point. it's not about who posts or how
>often, it's about how people respond to race and gender analyses. it's
>difficult to have discussions of gender because it is so easily attributed
>to autonomous personal preferences, biology and genes such that structural
>analyses are often challenged on those bases. it is unacceptable *in
>leftist circles* to attribute race disparities to naturalized phenomena;
>structural analyses are already common currency and are assumed to be the
>right way to discuss those issues.
Er, does a leftie have to pretend there is no physical difference between men and women - pretend that part of what makes the gender experience might not have to do directly with the bodies into which we're born? I mean, I don't pretend this is the be-all and end-all of the issue of sex/gender (after all, people in our age group have seen meanings go a long way in these things, changing real experience in fundamental ways, no doubt). But we'd need better arguments than we have (to my knowledge, anyway) to throw appeals to nature out the door altogether.
'Sex' and 'race' might not be of the same order of label. I may have trouble unbundling gender categories from sex categories ('where history begins and ends' is a poser), but I daringly propose that there are some objective differences between you and me, which are independent of meaning systems, and should be factored into thinking about how we'd like the world to be ('sex', never mind wherever and whatever it is, constitutes the limits of Butlerism, for mine - I can't choose to perform birth-giving or menstruation, for instance - not convincingly, anyway). I still haven't seen 'race' defined such that I can understand it, and tend to think that line of distinguishing humans doesn't just lead to racism, but is itself entirely a construct, the very deployment of which is effectively racist in the first instance.
So I wasn't challenging structural analyses, just proposing a little common-sensical complementary/supplementary approach to the task of explanation. We're not gonna convince anyone out there that their womb is *wholly* a discursive phenomenon, eh?
Er, I feel a bit silly writing this, but your post made the compunction to explain myself irresistible.
Cheers, Rob.