On Thu, 25 Nov 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:
> 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 gotta jump in here. Do really believe that giving birth or menstruating are necessary preconditions for being a woman in our society? C'mon, think about this for two minutes. In Kessler & McKenna's book Gender: An ethnomethodological approach, they point out that no one characteristic is an infallible indicator of whether you're male/female. The only way that we are able to identify people as male or female is through social interactions. In practice, the male/female distinction is a social one, just like race.
Miles cqmv at odin.cc.pdx.edu