>Meaning that in our society gender is physical? But that the fact
>that gender is physical is a social fact?
it's no different than race, as miles pointed out. bruce hare used to line up the 300 students in his lecture hall by their skin color in order to demonstrate just how much race is about social practices of attributing meaning to the physical features we say constitute race.
>Seems to me that the difference between saying "gender is socially
>constructed" and "we have socially constructed a physical definition
>of gender" is analogous to the difference between "an ocean of water"
>and "a notion of water."
the point is that having a cock and pair of balls between your legs doesn't *make* you behave in this way or that any more than having brown hair does. and i would argue that, even if it *were* the case that biology determines some aspects of our behavior, the fact is we are *social* beings, by and large, having established a cultural edifice in and through which we become the people we are. as i recall you've read weber and durkheim and so ought to get the idea that the social prescribes and proscribes our behavior in powerful ways. i would go so far as to say that the social probably far more determines how we behave than anything biological. we need to eat and, as yoshie is fond of pointing out, we need to shit. but how we eat and how we shit is extraordinarily varied and there is little about the biological needs that determines how we set about eating and shitting, let alone wiping.
d. mccloskey actually undermines yoshie's claim that the social/discursive isn't real. if mccloskey feels more like a woman with the sex change op it is b/c she does not, despite her claims to feeling that she was born a woman in a man's body, feel completely like a woman without the features we've come to think of as signifying woman-ness. if woman-ness were natural, on the other hand, she wouldn't need things like larger breasts in order to feel like a woman and to experience others treating her as a woman. she'd feel like a woman regardless of her bodily features. but the further point *i* want to make here is that deidre mccloskey can feel that way because she can afford to.
how's that? there was a fascinating article in the new yorker in 92 i think. it was about female to male ops. the article was a nice piece of work, subtly revealing the contradiction between what the surgeons and sex change op specialist thought was necessary in order to be "truly" a man as opposed to what as opposed to what the people undergoig the operation wanted. the surgeons of course thought that size and approximating the "natural" penis mattered so much that they wanted to experiement and literally pushed to supersize deluxe Big D model penis on their patients . it's truly a hoot to read the article and then to imagine them making the case for model Big D like, say, double small d [dd.] has to peddle stox. for them, in their isolated world of research/surgery, technology was supposed to "approximate" that oh so special organ as naturally as possible in every respect [feel, shape, capacities] except size. they could not fathom why anyone would want an ordinary penis or would even be happy with the enlarged clitoris that results from hormone therapy. and yet, size didn't matter to women becoming men. this was for two reasons. first, it costs them a lot more money to have an artificial Big D deluxe model compared with hormone therapy and a smaller, but perfectly adequate, clitoris-turned-penis. and second, these women becoming men had already learned--quite nicely thank you very much doc-- all about the delights of sex without penetration. well, i guess i should qualify and say, "without penile penetration".
kelley