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

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Nov 30 14:58:36 PST 1999


Katha:
>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>> This is where we might or might not differ. It doesn't take postmodernism
>> to argue that "sex" (a political interpretation of biological facts) is
>> historically constituted.
>
>Isn't GENDER the "political interpretation of biological facts"? Are
>sex and gender now just synonyms? It seems to me, Yoshie, that you are
>encoding your conclusion in your premise. You want to argue that there
>can be no apprehension of biological facts that is not infused with
>political interpretation--"sex" is always "gender". But instead you
>define your terms in such a way as to slip your argument in without
>actually making it.

There is a collapsing of the intransitive and the transitive dimensions in the above remarks of yours. By "intransitive," I mean an existence of reality independent of human knowledge (the realm of ontology); by "transitive," I mean our production of knowledge about reality (the realm of epistemology). Intrahuman biological differences are ontologically real and exist intransitively, that is, independently of language & interpretation (political or otherwise). Sex, however, is a _term_ that humans use to categorize and understand a few of intrahuman biological differences. There have been and will be a variety of models & theories (e.g., Pinker, Gould, Dawkins, Fausto-Sterling, Lewontin, Hubbard, etc. do not use the same models & theories) within human efforts to understand the biological, and sex as a term belongs here, in the transitive dimension of knowledge production. Biological facts do not speak for themselves (if they did, positivists would be correct, but they aren't). In a society where gender oppression exists, sex is always gendered, because we (including scientists) live our genders even in our efforts to understand reality as objectively as possible. Neither the intransitive existance of biological facts nor our being caught up in ideology, however, should make it impossible to compare competing models & theories and find a rational ground to choose, for instance, Lewontin's over Pinker's. Thus, we may maintain ontological realism, epistemological relativism, and judgmental rationalism simultaneously.

_If_ we abolish gender oppression & gender (understood as an ideological expression of oppression based upon a division of labor), *sex won't be gendered*. As of now, however, an oppressive gendered division of labor exists, *so sex (one way of understanding a few of intrahuman biological differences) is gendered* in our sexist society.

Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list