>
>Oh, so you're redaing my mind now?
> My assumption is quite reasonable given the nature of the examples
you chose in your previous post:
Well, your assumption is wrong. I was not addressing Ameruican particularism. You brought that up. I did not contrast American views with anyone else's. Why don't you ask if you don't understand?
>Because gender indentification i solder than class, as you well know.
> Is gender identification in itself a cause of sexual anxieties?
What do you mean, itself? Apart from any context? There is no such thing. But it is explantorily relevant to such anxieties in many contexts.
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,
This is a verbatim quote from piece on Rawls and the family, so you know that I know this. But as a matter of fact I think the first question has almost always been, is it a boy.girl? People in premodern times knew that most of their kids weere not going to survive and therefore(as Boswell and others document) they didn't care so much for them. Be that as it may. Are you seriously suggesting that people didn't notice gender, that it wasn't important to them, for millenia until class society arrived? What possible evidence could you adduce for this ridiculous view. I really don't see what child abandonment (which Boswell does NOT particularly tie to infant health) had to do with anything.
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.
No, I'm not positing a theory at all. I'm pointing out that from what we know in gfeneral about the way people work and from a great deal of specific historical an anthropological work that psychosexual factors have a lot of explanatory power. You still haven't even offered the beginning of an argument to the contrary or the hint of a theory on which these factors are all epiphenomena.
>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_, ).
Well pardon me for being a bad Marxist. But you know I am not a Marxist. ANd when Marx negated a question he did more than try to push the burden of proof on the other guy. You have done nothing but. And you still haven't said what's wrong with offering true and informative explanations, or indicared why only reductive explanations are acceptable in the face of myt sepecific, concrete, and serious objections to the view.
jks
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