Asking "why" when you should be asking "how" makes you less scientific than religious. Evolution is contingent, as Stephen Jay Gould never tires of saying. It's by chance that humans evolved into being and have survived to the present at all, and if we were to replay the evolutionary drama, we wouldn't see the same outcome again.
>On the face of it, politics has nothing to do with human's *general* sexual
>dimorphism.
>
>How is 'sexing' a political or discursive affair except in the assignment
>of sex to hermaphrodites? Well yes Hubbard does suggest (and only suggest)
>the biological transformations in body type, hormonal production, gait, etc
>that come from being 'sexed' from birth on. Yet who on this list has denied
>this? Indeed Roger has proposed some of the strongest arguments in defense
>of this idea. But we have little quantitative idea of its importance. And I
>would like for someone to explain to me if Butler is saying more than this.
The politics of gendering sex(es) is less quantitative than qualitative. In other words, it is ideological effects & social consequences of different ways of understanding biological facts that are at stake here. Speaking of numbers, the internment of Japanese-Americans (who must have been less than 4 % of the American population) during the WW2 could have hardly mattered, to the Left or the Right, in terms of their own political weight, no? But it did matter, ideologically. And why should it have mattered to the U.S. government whether Grenada was communist or not, in terms of number?
If we follow Anne Fausto-Sterling, pathologization & abnormalization of certain bodies & biological facts have a boundary-making effect, and without boundaries, ideology can't police the inside & the outside of the boundaries. As for Thomas Laqueur's view on the politics of sexing, see one of my posts from yesterday. The "opposite, incommensurable" sex model came into being together with modern sexism (and notice the parallel among modern sexism, racism, and meritocracy, in their respective appeals to nature in legitimation of hierarchy, oppression, & exploitation in the face of the ideology of equality). Ruth Hubbard asks why a tiny area of differences between men and women, in contrast to overwhelming similarities between them, has been made to color our understanding of sexes, creating "a false dichotomy," a metaphysics of "opposite sexes." Hence her comment:
***** Women's biology is a social construct and a political concept..., and I mean that in at least three ways. The first can be summed up in Simone de Beauvoir's (1953) dictum "One isn't born a woman, one becomes a woman."...[T]he concept, woman (or man), is a socially constructed one that little girls (or boys) try to fit as we grow up. Some of us are better at it than others, but we all try, and our efforts have biological as well as social consequences (a false dichotomy because our biological attributes are related dialectically)....[H]ow active we are, what clothes we wear, what games we play, what we eat and how much, what kinds of schools we go to, what work we do, all affect our biology as well as our social being in ways we cannot sort out. So, one isn't born a woman (or man), one becomes one.
The concept of women's biology is socially constructed, and political, in a second way because it is not simply women's description of our experience of our biology. We have seen that women's biology has been described by physicians and scientists who, for historical reasons, have been mostly economically privileged, university-educated men with strong personal and political interests in describing women in ways that make it appear "natural" for us to fulfill roles that are important for their well-being, personally and as a group. Self-serving descriptions of women's biology date back at least to Aristotle. But if we dismiss the early descriptions as ideological, so are the descriptions scientists have offered that characterize women as weak, over-emotional, and at the mercy of our raging hormones, and that *construct our entire being around the functions of our reproductive organs.* No one has suggested that men are just walking testicles, but again and again women have been looked on as though they were walking ovaries and wombs.
We have seen that in the nineteenth century, when women tried to get access to higher education, scientists initially claimed we could not be educated because our brains are too small. When that claim became untenable, they granted that we could be educated the same as men but questioned whether we should be, whether it was good for us. They based their concerns on the claim that girls need to devote much energy to establishing the proper functioning of their ovaries and womb and that if they divert this energy to their brains by studying, their reproductive organs will shrivel, they will become sterile, and the race will die out.
This logic was steeped in race and class prejudice. The notion that women's reproductive organs need careful nurturing was used to justify excluding upper-class girls and young women from higher education but not to spare working-class, poor, or black women who were laboring in the factories and homes of the upper class. If anything, these women were said to breed too much. In fact, their ability to have many children despite the fact that they worked so hard was taken as evidence that they were less highly evolved than upper-class women; for them, breeding was "natural," as for animals.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our concept of ourselves is socially constructed and political because our society's interpretation of what is and is not normal and natural affects what we do. It therefore affects our biological structure and functioning because, as I have said before, what we do and how our bodies and minds function are connected dialectically. Thus norms are self-fulfilling prophesies that do not merely describe how we are but prescribe how we should be. (emphasis mine, Ruth Hubbard, _The Politics of Women's Biology_, pp. 119-120) *****
Now, maybe the term biology has been misleading in this and related threads and needs clarification, in that it refers both to the intransitive dimension (bodies) and the transitive dimension (our knowledge of bodies), to use Bhaskar's terms. Why not apply transcendental realism to the ontology of bodies, epistemological relativism to the understanding of bodies, and judgmental rationalism to the evaluation of competing theories, as Bhaskar argues? Keep in mind that politics operate mainly through the latter two aspects (theory consturction & evaluation), but it affects the intransitive dimention -- ontological reality -- of bodies as well. For instance, sexism can be so severe that girl babies may be aborted or killed after birth. Once born, girls may be fed less well than boys, as Amartya Sen has argued. The double shift of wage labor and social reproduction often makes women more depressed than men. Women, through the ideology of gendered self-sacrifice, have learned to neglect their biological needs, seeking medical attention less often than they should. Doctors may trivialize women's pain. The list is endless. In other words, even our biological facts are the results of centuries of oppression, and we may say women's bodies are more stunted & deformed than men's, and not by nature. Human bodies do not exist independent of social relations and ideology. Women will have different bodies in a fully emancipated society (and so will men, for that matter).
Back to sexing, the same model of sexing needs not apply to different inquiries into bodies. One model of sexing may be better used in the understanding of how the present forms of human bodies came into being through evolution, another model in embryology, and yet another model in how bodies function in social relations and ideology. In our discussion, the main object has been the last: bodies in social relation, socialized bodies, as it were.
For instance, while the heuristic of "reproductive success" works reasonably well in understanding evolution, it doesn't work well to understand the politics of abortion, eating disorder (which can stop menstruation), body-building (steroid can make you impotent), does it? While biological facts still constrain the world of social relations (we can't fly on our own without using technology), social relations have changed nature as well. For instance, fertility rates are not determined by evolution, but by social realtions and ideology, most importantly by how well women fare (in terms of educational achievement, income & wealth, social recognition, etc.) in a given society.
Yoshie