>What nonsense.
did you even bother to read what carrol wrote. he wrote that for millenia people *thought* that there was only one sex and that women were simply a deformed version of the male. they looked at different genitalia and said that the uterus was an inside out penis and scrotum, that perhaps it just hadn't descended. i believe gray's anatomy says pretty much that there is only one sex. and gray's anatomy was what physicians were operating with as they booted midwives out of the territory arguing that they had greater professional knowledge than the quack midwives. ha ha ha. and the important point is, just like i can't see my typos despite their objective existence, their thoughts shaped how they behaved. and part of what happened was that their class structure helped to create this way of thinking and that their class relations were reinforced by this pattern of thinking about sexual difference. they saw the differnece. they knew that it required male and female and they had words for them reflecting that understanding. however, they didn't see them as two different sexes but as having two different genders. they just didn't think that it took two sexes --it required one whole sex which had been split up into different parts but nonetheless constituted a whole entity on their view. this is not unrelated to how they thought about other social relations and the cosmos in general. and i would say it is rooted in the mode of production in so far as production took place in the home and it seems pretty clear that there is a complementarity between men and women there and the way they organized the division of labor. this is even *more* evident when the division of labor is not so multiplicitous: that is, it is *really* clear just how much you depend on for your very survival the work and skills of the other.
and eminently material basis and dialectical explanation if you ask me. i don't even know for sure what lacquer's argument is entirely but i'm piecing together what i've reaad from C and Y and the book review and what i know from solid feminist historical and anthro research. though from that review, it looks like lacquer didn't do enough feminist reading on this topic.
furthermore, i would point out to you that a lot of marxists think that there are only two classes that are in competition despite the objective reality of what looks like at least three if not more classes in competition. compeitition between manual and professional, between service labor and manual labor, between owners and employees. and on and on.
his claim, as you know, is based entirely on theory because the 18th brumaire is an exploration of the real effects of class divisiveness along lines that don't separate out into bourg v. prole.
There is a simple way to show the existence of more than one sex.
>Reproduction of the species is possible only by the physical coupling of two
>different population cohorts (what some of us call the male sex and the
female
>sex), because each of these cohorts brings to that coupling different
substances
>that only they possess, and which are necessary to create offspring. You can
>claim that blue, yellow, and green are really all the same color, despite
the fact
>that green exists only as the union of blue and yellow, but you would be an
>idiot. Or at least someone uninterested in defining terms in such a way
as to
>communicate.
>
>Speaking of Carrol, he can only deny the foregoing biological fact by
claiming
>that species reproduction is trivial--a political decision, he says, which
humans
>can decide to do or not. But, do I even have to say this, nothing is more
>fundmenatal to the existence, or understanding, of a species than its
>reproduction. Think Marx, Carrol. You don't understand capital (as a social
>relation) until you understand its system of reproduction (self expansion).
>
>And Carrol, your attempts to trivialize the importance to the question of
sexual
>identity of a woman's ability to give birth, which a man does not possess,
>because women don't have it throughout their life, and some cannot
accomplish it,
>is more sophistry. Consider this. There are pockets of noncapitalist
production
>throughout the US. Does that mean that the US is not capitalist? It is not
>defined by capitalist social relations?
>
>Of course a woman's ability to nurture within her body and give birth to a
fetus
>may become less important to reproduction some day. What I am attacking
is the
>reasons you give for claiming it is trivial now.
>
>RO
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