okay, i have come up with a game prompted by several pots: charles's comments, rakesh re butler, sam re catherine, and raphael's superfine post that fleshed out my query to roger as to whether the relations of reproduction were like forces, social relations, mode of ideolgoy
this gets at what you are talking about charles and it does so by examining claims that we can do scientific research and that we can do so by reference to a neutral observation language. all those who believe that discursivity--social relations--have nothing or should have nothing to do with science please answer this question:
what is sex? not biological sex, but sex. if you were going to, say, do some research on how many times per week a couple has sex in order to compare how educational attainment affects how many times we have sex, then how would you operationalize sex? that is, in order to do research you'd have to define what sex is. sam says that you can't call a tail a leg and conclude that dogs have five tails. okay, let's do this exercise. it's important because, since many of us have a master's or more, we have learned that we have the least amount of sex in the population [on average, of course]. isn't that nutty. let's see how it is that they might have come to that conclusion without necessarily have discovered how many times people *really* have sex.
i can assure you, this is a fun and not painful way to see the value of lacquer's arguments, as well as someone raphael mentioned, emily martin--an anthropologist of science. it will likely also get objectors to see the value of a limited version of butler's arguments.
okay, so shoot. operationalize sex.
kelley
>In philosophy , the two camps of idealism and materialism reflect the
social construct, predominantly mental/predominantly physical workers and
analogously exploiting and exploited classes. This social construct may
impact this analysis of sex. But perhaps another relevant social construct
is male oppressors-exploitors/female oppressed-exploited.
>
>Thus, in testing the truth about sex, to know it (which is not to say have
carnal knowledge :)>), it is necessary to make it a thing-for-women, as
well as the standard materialist Theses on Feuerbach test of practice,
making it a thing-for-us.
>