[Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Re: ignore this, it's about women and sexism ...]]]

[Katha Pollitt]

Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> Katha Pollitt wrote:
> 
> >But she never shows that physical sex
> >is discursive in the first place.
> 
> By the way, I think it's interesting that this thread got started in
> part because of Rob's invocation of the selfish gene to explain
> social behavior. I'm guessing that you (Katha) wouldn't support
> invocations of biological determinism to justify the oppression of
> women, or similar invocations used to justify competitive
> individualism (aka capitalism). In practice, then, you have a fairly
> discursive understanding of the biological, but when it gets
> generalized to the level of theory, you sound like Dr Johnson
> refuting Berkeley by kicking a rock.
> 
> Doug

  Well, I always thought that was a pretty good argument! 
But as I understand Ms Butler, what SHE says is radical, new etc about
her theory is that it goes beyond de Beauvoir's argument that gender is
socially constructed to argue that  sex is socially constructed also. In
our discussions on this list, it sometimes seems to me that people
assert the latter, but actually make arguments only for the former.