My assumption is quite reasonable given the nature of the examples you chose in your previous post: (A1) some Americans subscribe to the myth of black men's sexual rapacity, the ideal of manliness as the ability and willingness to kill when you are ordered by your commanders to do so, and/or social identities based upon gender-specific roles, (A2) while other Americans don't. Such differences in political behaviors are problems for left-wingers, requiring explanations with a view to removing the causes of (A1) backward or reactionary behaviors, promoting (A2). Thus, left-wingers would want a theory capable of explaining the causes of such politically significant synchronic cultural differences.
At 6:04 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>>What makes you think that sexual anxieties are temporally prior to
>>class?
>
>Because gender indentification i solder than class, as you well know.
Is gender identification in itself a cause of sexual anxieties?
At 6:04 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>You're not telling me that the you don't know that the fiest thing
>anyone has ever said about a new person is, I's a boy/girl!
The first thing to consider about a newborn in many premodern societies must have been, "Is it alive? Is it healthy? Will it survive?" Infanticide through exposure -- a method of family size limitation and/or elimination of the disabled -- was a common practice in the premodern world. Child abandonment in general was an accepted practice from antiquity till the Renaissance at least, according to John Boswell (Cf. _The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance_, <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13653.ctl>).
Here's a website that displays intriguing photos of children of both sexes dressed in what we in the 21st century think of as "girls' -- gender-specific -- clothes" -- a normal practice in the 19th century:
***** Interpreting Images of 19th Century Children
Sometimes information is available identifying the children depicted in drawings, paintings, and photographs. Such information is extremely helpful in establishing actual fashions and trends. More often, however, many available images lack accompanying information. This makes it very difficult for HBC to assess trends or even determine the gender of the children depicted in the images. Boys in the 19th Century, in some cases fairly old boys, wore dresses, skirts, and kilts. Thus it is often very difficult to determine the gender of children with any certainty. It hard to establish what younger boys wore simply because it is difficult to distinguish them from the girls.
<http://histclo.hispeed.com/photo/guide/pgg.html> *****
Today's parents -- even queer-friendly ones -- would probably think of such practice as liable to cause gender confusions and sexual anxieties, but apparently parents in the 19th century didn't think so. Obsession with gendering children as soon as possible -- in some cases even before they are born -- is a really novel phenomenon in human history.
At 6:04 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>I expressly acknowledged that the specific form of sexual anxieties
>was historically contingent.
Then, you are positing a theory that goes like this: there exists a generic source of Sexual Anxiety that exists throughout history, which takes various forms depending on levels of historical development and social circumstances. That's a theory whose relative explanatory powers in comparison to other theories need to be demonstrated, rather than assumed.
At 6:04 AM -0800 3/30/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Why is the Shrub Prez? Because Gore bollocksed the campaign. Because
>a GOP dominated S.Ct lawlessly awarded him the job for partisan
>reasons. Because Nader drew too many votes in Florida. What's so
>hard about that?
>
>You got a problem with true and informative explanations? You want
>to account for in terms of geberal relativistic quantum
>electrodynamics? Be my guest. Most people, when they ask a political
>question, are asking for the political explanatory factors.
"The question here arises whether this problem does not already pronounce its own nonsensicality, and whether the impossibility of the solution is not already contained in the premises of the question. Frequently the only possible answer is a critique of the question and the only solution is to negate the question" (_The Grundrisse_, <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch02.htm>). Political education and self-education begin when we begin to ask whether we haven't been asking the wrong questions. Marx first examined political economy of his day and then decided that he must ask the questions that it doesn't allow him to ask to solve the political problems that confronted him, beginning to seek explanations of economic phenomena (e.g., when and how "the economic" began to seem an independent sphere of human activity, disembedded from the rest of social relations), rather than economic explanations. The same goes for the "psycho-sexual," I think. -- Yoshie
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