>At any rate, Kelley it just seemed to me that you were trying to prove
>that the assignment of sexual identity is political by showing that the
>definition of a sexual act is political--something that was not in debate,
>and had not been challenged. To keep up the political heat you just shifted
>the focus of debate to a new aspect of sex. this is legerdemain.
no, this isn't the case. there were several discussions here. one, which you and sam jumped into in response to critiques of science threads, was that science is shaped by politics. sam explicitly tried to say that description resisted the real with his example that you couldn't call a dog's tail a leg and then conclude that a dog had five legs. he wanted to suggest that research would prove it not so. i was pointing out that we can see how this is not so and i was pointing it out *directly* in response to charles' comments here. charles said that knowledge is about coming to know a thing as a thing-for-us. i wanted to show how even that can be difficult and it might be a good idea not to presume that the coming to know thing-for-us is that easy.
when it comes to sex, our understandings of what sex is, *are* shaped by reference to biological sex differences --generally conceived of as oppositions. the assumption that sex is about penetration is related to the focus on the penis and the valorization of penetration sex as *real* sex.
furthermore, lacquer's work shows the relationship between how we "make [biological] sex" matter and how that affects our assumptions about sexual relations and how women's and men's sexual functioning proceeds. in short, the assumption of opposition has lead to years and years of research that maintains that these differences are huge, maybe unbridgeable and best of all just natural, absolutely involably natural.
the political processes involved in the discovery that fertilization involved an egg! they didn't know that previously and they thought that men had everything to do with it --that there sperm naturally reproduced more males and deformed sperm were responsible for female babies.. and they further thought that orgasm had something to do with conception and that all women had orgasms. men had them so naturally women did too. now think about it rakesh, isn't that hilarious? isn't that really incredible given our assumptions today????
what happened when they found out that an egg was fertilized They had presumed men were superior, that women were lesser developed and this was the natural Arisotelian order of things. One scientists worries that this newly discovered knowledge would detract "from the deignity of the Male sex". the 17th c. saw the move from the one sex model in which females were lesser males to one in which there were two sexes conceived of as *ontological* categores --that is males and females were defined by the positing of an absolute ontological ground of difference. [now this one sex model is not so weird if you consider that we use the one human model to think about the difference between adults and children. children are little people right? not fully developed adults.]
anyway, laquer shows how an absolute difference was posited andthe emphasis was on the genitals as synecdochical signifiers. organs that had previously been considered deformed male organs, female testicles for example, came to have their very own words that signified their absolute difference from male organs. the nature of womanhood and her sexuality [there's the connection] was realigned as woman was further aligned with nature and specifically grounded gender [her woman-ness] in her reproductive capacities.
and part and parcel of all this was the problematization of orgasm. whereas women had orgasms before, now they didn't have them or didn't have them so easily at any rate.
>Also not in debate is the feminist claim that that child rearing
>arrangements and sexual division of labor are not written in our genes, and
>have historically been variable. Who exactly has questioned this that you
>feel under attack on this list?
errrm that surely is and has been part of these debates. people have said over and over again that it's surely important that women can give birth to children and that they menstruate. now why is that important? other than we are prone to certain diseases and bear the burden of pregnancy and may possibly die in childbirth? why is this the least bit important. furthermore, rakesh, they've said this in response to social constructionist arguments about biology. that is, one poster maintained that he could imagine that race wasn't based on biology and therefore race wasn't real, but he could not imagine that gender wasn't based on biology and that, therefore, gender was real. he argued that because he saw differences then he obviously had to assume that there were real differences and those differences *had* to be about the capacity to menstruate, conceive, be pregnant. if that's not an argument that my woman=ness is fundamentally about my capacity to gvie birth and your man-ness is fundamentally about your incapacity to give birth, then i don't know what is. what on earth would you do and how would you feel if someone here said that because dark skinned people don't get melanoma at the same rates and because s/he can see obvious differences then therefor there are differences that matter and we shouldn't ignore them????? and you wonder why i'm a wee bit astounded? you wonder why i reject roger's attempt to colonize feminist thought by demanding a economistic base/superstructure model in which sexual organs somehow contain the laws of motion of sexual reproduction. absurd as raphael nicely pointed out.
>
> But then I don't understand what you are getting at any more than Yoshie's
>argument that sexual identity is political but it is not political. That's
>why I suggested it was time for a break. Honest readers of this collective
>outpouring have every reason to be confused by what thesis you are pursuing
>here, how it differs from Yoshie's, how it differs from Butler's, etc.
it's not different than yoshie's. if you've read some the stuff typed last week, you'd see that. i can't expect that you've read it all. so i'll capsulize: i have said repeatedly that i grant that there are biological realities such that i have some organs that you don't and that makes a difference in real terms:
1. i can bear children and only from menses to menopause where as men can't
a. [but that shouldn't matter and that shouldn't be an argument for the obviousness of why 55 men date 25 women
b but that shouldn't matter as an important difference since not all women want or can have children or even menstruate
c and that shouldn't matter b/c not all women have sexual relations with men
[in other words, raising these as differences that must be attended is consigning women to their reproductive capacities in a way that some folks here haven't considered a problem]
2 i can get diseases associated with my sexual organs that men don't get
a. but why is that special when i don't get diseases associated with male sexual organs???
b. why isn't that part of the convo between blacks and whites [melanoma and sickle cell anemia]
>At any rate, I have been persuaded that her and Hubbard and Gould's
>cautions regarding sociobiology are worth heeding (see the post I just
>reposted). I don't read either however as denying that our sexual identity
>is given biologically,
errm, what do you mean by sexual identity? i believe yoshie would point out, as would i, that identity is a social relation
the biological categories, iow, don't mean anything until we make them mean something. and those meaning are ideological. choosing to focus on the biological sex organs then is focusing typically on the capacities for reproduction. for if we categorized according to hormones or what have you, you'd still see the same but--voila!--you wouldnt' shape the convo in terms of reproductive capacities.
>>and phallus btw doesn't equal your dicks
>
>Which means I guess that you can be one.
yes i'm a dick rakesh. arguing consistently and rationally and with evidence and thoeretical backing is being a dick. yes that's it. and yet, those who've jumped in here, and i'm not talking about you, demonstrate no familiarity with the terrain whatsoever and they're NOT dicks but my calling them dicks for that is being a dick.
okay, thanks for the lesson in how to be a good girl. :-) i'm sure you know that i never will be!
kelley