now, saying this doesn't deny the physical properties that make a lump of muddy earth good for making clay that's for making jugs for transporting water. nor does it say that there isn't sex and that just anything can be considered sex or that we would want to consider everything sex [which is where catherine mackinnon goes, does she not?]
this inisght has been around at least since the 50s in the phil of the sciences, that things have meaning only because we give them such and there is no meaning inherent in anything, because meaning is fundamentally about social relations. and geez damn louise, hempel said quite the same in his concession speech for positivism. you can study physical properties, there's no doubt about that. but even then, kuhn's, feyerabend's, and bachelard's work have suggested that paradigms *do* shape the way scientists go about their work. the feminist/marxist./critical theorist's main point is this is simply not a benign process-- it's a process that reflects social inequalities, particularly when we're talking about research on people. part of our task is to point this out and keep science on its toes. keep ourselves on our toes for our blindnesses and hidden assumptions. as emily martin points out, the assumption of female passivity and male aggressiveness lead to years of science in which female eggs were passive receptors of aggressive sperm. women were seen as deteriorating, having all their 400 or so eggs given at birth it was a ll a process of decline. menstruation was a shedding of detritus. indeed, it was wasteful, unhealthy, dirty. otoh, the male body was construed as active, fertile, creative, alive with the constant endless production of sperm. and surprisingly enough no waste there! all those sperm being produced and yet none of it was presented as waste!
judith butler doesnt' ever once say that we create biological sex. in fact, if you read an interview posted at www.theory.org.uk, you'll see that she actually set about to negotiate a set of problems that emerged with responses to "gender trouble" she wanted, actually, to point out that performance simply wasn't voluntary as queer theory and activism sometimes wanted to have it. she wanted to look, then, at the way in which bodies might have material constraints that impose limits on how we perform anything. [not unlike angela's recent comments re the constraining force of money, that seem to have been ignored]. but she wanted to also point out the social lens through which we must necessarily see all phenomena. we are not capable of getting outside the social, as if there is some objective archimedean point upon which we can perch to grasp the truth. and it's a mistake for science or for us to invest in science this kind of ability and power, for it gives science an authority, a force, a power that it simply should not have. that does NOT mean that science isn't one of the tools that we can use, it just means that science doesn't have the absolute authority often overlaid on it and altogether too often wielded as the last word, as the end of the conversation because "science" says it's so. any good scientist--social or natural--seems to know the limitations of scienctific work and the conclusions it can draw. any reasonable introductory text i social and natural scientific methods focuses on that at some point, even if only in a discussion of the difficulties in "operationalizing" phenom. but you don't often see those cautions, those limitations focused on in debates like this or, especially, in public policy debates. especially not there.. [chicago school wankers excepted, of course; they're imperialists at root]
kelley +~+~+~+~+
Pulp Culture +~+~+~+~+ pulping theory-research-praxis http://www.flash.net/~oudies/pulp_culture.htm pulp-admin at infothecary.org