Only one sex?

kelley oudies at flash.net
Fri Nov 26 21:39:16 PST 1999



>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?

right there is where you invoked identity. the question of a sexual identity of a woman was threatened by carrol's pointing out that women sometimes don't give birth, or that they can't give birth, or that they don't want to give birth was threatening to your notion of what and how we could possibly imagine a woman {her gender} to be. here you are policing identity are you not? are you not demanding that biolgical organs are part of women's identieies because you say they are. because you say that reproduction is important humans. [i beg to differ that it is all that importatn and that if we did a lot less of it we'd be better off. and it would help if we stopped assuming it was so all fired important]

somehow for you her identity is shaped in an important way by her ability to give birth, even though she may not always give birth or choose not to. again, there's no reason to think this. it has to be no more importanat than understanding that we need to breath air, as carrol pointed out. furthermore, are you really going to toss out feminist scholarship because most feminist say precisely the same thing as carrol did?

our identity has nothing to do with biology unless we make it mean that. we don't have to make it mean that. just like the shape of my legs has nothing to do with my gender or yours. we could have different genders based on breast size for example. men with larger breasts than women could be in a gender alongside women with the same size breasts and also share the fact of common contributions to the coupling sex act. they were be seen as different but equal and combined with their breast make a special gender.. we could do like other cultures and have gender based on what kind of work we do or our relations to the spirit world. there is an entire culture that has a gender that believes is is neither male nor female --despite the existence of the penises and vaginas. they are not doing mushrooms.

insisting that there are two different sexes and it is a binary system and can only be that by virtue of reference to their biological reproduction systems is a precisely the problem. for one thing, since there exist people who are neither biolgocially only male or female we are simply wrong to think that there is a binary character to biological sex characteristics. and fruther, it also depends on what you count as reprodcutive sex featues. if you count breasts,--which nurse babies and are needed for reproduction or at least were for millenia--then like i said you could have a entire biolgoical category of people defined by their shared possession of certain kinds of breasts [esp now that we learn that men can lactate!!!!!]l. there is gender in cultures that do not have even one biology--the zuni. they recognzie no biological sex differences. they see pensises and vaginaas but they don't attribute importance to them. they have gender though. children that have no sex, no biology that is recognized as important. then they have a system of "cooking" them to produce gendered identities that have nothing to do with their biological reproductive systems.

and no queerness does not depend on two historical reproductive systems because queerness has nothing to do with reproduction or even solely to do with where i decide to put my fingers tongue lips or toes on another person's body and where and how they do the same to me. we cannot in fact even define sex. take a whack at what sex is, if you think you know what sexual relations are.

i am treating you the same way you treat me. i did not do anything except criticize your arguments and your blindness to the world around you, your continued deployment of terminology you aren't using in the right way [if you can have that for marxism then we can have that for feminism and insist on at least *that* knowledge in the discussion]. you did all of theat with the certainty that what you were saying you were entitled to say as if you sprung from the skull of zeus. and i pointed out your obvious blindness to some very very obvious things about how "coupling" didn't matter. if you'd recognized that from the start and your argument didn't hinge on that you wouldn't have even bothered to say it in the first place. and frankly i think that impugning my character --i'm sucking after carrol's and yoshie's attention--is objectively an ad hominem attack that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything and didn't need to be raised. my pointing out your lack of knowledge about artificial insemination though sure as heck has everything to so with what is wrong with how you type and think about and criticize feminist arguments.

kelley



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list