>ps.What makes your son your son and not your daughter?
Your friend Judy B. writes:
>Certain formulations of the radical constructivist position appear
>almost compulsively to produce a moment of recurrent exasperation,
>for it seems that when the constructivist is construed as a
>linguistic idealist, the constructivist refutes the reality of
>bodies, the relevance of science, the alleged facts of birth, aging,
>illness, and death. The critic might also suspect the constructivist
>of a certain somatophobia and seek assurances that this abstracted
>theorist will admit that there are, minimally, sexually
>differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and
>chromosomal differences that can be conceded without reference to
>"construction." Although at this moment I want to offer an absolute
>reassurance to my interlocutor, some anxiety prevails. To "concede"
>the undeniability of "sex" or its "materiality" is always to concede
>some version of "sex," some formation of "materiality." Is the
>discourse in and through which that concession occurs-and, yes, that
>concession invariably does occur-not itself formative of the very
>phenomenon that it concedes? To claim that discourse is formative is
>not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively composes
>that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no
>reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further
>formation of that body. In this sense, the linguistic capacity to
>refer to sexed bodies is not denied, but the very meaning of
>"referentiality" is altered. In philosophical terms, the constative
>claim is always to some degree performative.
>
>In relation to sex, then, if one concedes the materiality of sex or
>of the body, does that very conceding operate - performatively - to
>materialize that sex? And further, how is it that the reiterated
>concession of that sex - one which need not take place in speech or
>writing but might be "signaled" in a much more inchoate way -
>constitutes the sedimentation and production of that material effect?
>
>The moderate critic might concede that some part of "sex" is
>constructed, but some other is certainly not, and then, of course,
>find him or herself not only under some obligation to draw the line
>between what is and is not constructed, but to explain how it is
>that "sex" comes in parts whose differentiation is not a matter of
>construction. But as that line of demarcation between such
>ostensible parts gets drawn, the "unconstructed" becomes bounded
>once again through a signifying practice, and the very boundary
>which is meant to protect some part of sex from the taint of
>constructivism is now defined by the anti-constructivist's own
>construction. Is construction something which happens to a
>ready-made object, a pregiven thing, and does it happen in degrees?
>Or are we perhaps referring on both sides of the debate to an
>inevitable practice of signification, of demarcating and delimiting
>that to which we then "refer," such that our "references" always
>presuppose-and often conceal-this prior delimitation? Indeed, to
>"refer" naively or directly to such an extra-discursive object will
>always require the prior delimitation of the extra-discursive. And
>insofar as the extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by the
>very discourse from which it seeks to free itself. This
>delimitation, which often is enacted as an untheorized
>presupposition in any act of description, marks a boundary that
>includes and excludes, that decides, as it were, what will and will
>not be the stuff of the object to which we then refer. This marking
>off will have some normative force and, indeed, some violence, for
>it can construct only through erasing; it can bound a thing only
>through enforcing a certain criterion, a principle of selectivity.