>This will no doubt exasperate the Judy-haters, following Butler's in
>Bodies That Matter, it's interesting to watch how & when "biological"
>arguments are invoked - as a last ditch effort to limit the
>social/discursive analysis of social/discursive phenomena and ground
>them instead in some unalterable Real. That's just what Rob is doing
>here - resisting arguments based on gender (and class) relations and
>shifting attention to the realm of the gene. Last time I looked,
>genes couldn't talk, though lots of people profess to talk for them.
So is it a theory you reject, Doug (I acknowledge 'the selfish gene' is 'only' a theory - but what isn't)? And am I resisting arguments based on gender, or rather suggesting gender theory might not explain everything? This could conceivably matter, as it would be sad, I think, to see in every older man/younger woman sexual relationship a manifestation of structural tyranny. I realise I'm a bit theoretically old-fashioned (theorising a natural realm at play in our experience 'n' all), but all we're doing is discussing theories that can either contend or complement.
I don't see why the latter is out of the question unless we insist that, for instance, the only way a womb manifests in life is according to the idea of it and the concomitant positioning of its owner - as I took Catherine to be suggesting. Sure, to apprehend something is inevitably to allocate meaning, a meaning at once conditioned by, and itself conditioning of, material relations.
But wombs would still be there, and still affecting our world, if we did not apprehend them and they were not part of our structure of meanings. Same with genes. But, of course, how genes actually operate in conditioning our behaviour, and how powerful they are as against the determinations of a gendered society, I can't know. Only theorise.
I was being consciously political in my little intervention only so far as to question possibly tyrannical certainties (which can blight the constructivist left as much as the uncritically naturalist mainstream). Or, at least, that's what I thought I was doing.
Anyway, I subscribe to quite a few theories that don't sit well with how amenable to our desires I'd like the world to be. Just as genes might condition sexual preferences in a sexually reproducing species, so might members of such a species be consigned to inevitable death. Don't like that theory much, either, but as a theory it's a hard one to best.
Cheers, Rob.