On Tue, 30 Nov 1999 10:14:07 -0500 Katha Pollitt <kpollitt at thenation.com>
writes:
>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.
As I understand it, mainstream feminist thought has tended to draw a rather sharp distinction between sex and gender. The former was taken as a given biological reality whereas the latter was taken to be socially constructed. Many feminists from de Beauvoir on argued that patriarchical ideology fell into the error of confusing the two. Now we are seeing people argue that sex as well as gender is socially constructed. No doubt much of our thinking concerning the nature of the sexes as a biological reality is itself distorted by patrirarchical ideology but it doesn't necessarily follow that sex is not a biological fact. And I think that Katha is correct in arguing that most of the arguments presented so far in defense of the thesis that sex is socially constructed only demonstrate that gender is. Furthermore, the connection between the defense of thesis that sex is socially constructed and the espousal of pomo seems self-evident to me. For many pomos science itself is basically just a social construct and hence another form of ideology. Katha is right in perceiving a link between the defense of realism and the rejection of the thesis that sex is just a social construct IMO.
Jim Farmelant
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