On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, Arash wrote:
> I think the
> tendency of leftist literature on gender to deny biological reality
> undermines how relevantly it describes gender relations between actual human
> beings, but I don't think this makes the study of gender itself meaningless.
No one in this gender thread has written anything that "denies biological reality". This is a gross misrepresentation of the point I'm trying to make. I'll try one more time: regardless of any catalog of biological distinctions a person could propose to finally and "scientifically" distinguish men from women, in practice, the identification of gender in self and others is a social process, not a biological one. Like Kel joked, we don't need to give somebody a DNA test to find out if they are men or women; we learn how to identify men and women via socialization. The practical, everyday cues to identify gender are social conventions (dress, walk, nonverbal behavior). Put simply, I don't need to look in somebody's pants to know if they are a man or a woman; I use social criteria that are products of social relations. Any biological differences that you could point out between the groups socially identified as men and women are irrelevant to this social process, unless the social standard becomes-- DNA testing!
Is this argument really that complicated?
Miles