Here are two quotes from the text. You tell me what they mean:
"Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration."
Norms are social, their reiteration creates sex. Sex is socially constructed. It seems pretty clear.
"The moderate critic might concede that some part of "sex" is constructed, but some other is certainly not, and then, of course, find him or herself not only under some obligation to draw the line between what is and is not constructed"
And then she goes on to explain the supposed impossibility of defining or bounding a thing without effectively constructing it. Of course this is untrue. No human being constructed the rings of Saturn seen through a telescope or the pistil of a honesuckle flower seen through magnifying glass. We observe them and we do not effect them significantly because of the chaos of atoms that exist between us and them. From the imperfect impressions of the things made on our brains, we construct imperfect verbal definitions and then TEST them against subsequent observations.
To say that we construct definitions and arguments and norms that are subjective is a meaningless truism. The question is how do we test them.
boddi
On 11/18/05, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2005, boddi satva wrote:
>
> > Dear List,
> >
> > I'm surprised that Doug likes this. Yeah, I can read it, but it's a
> > lot of words meant to support a thin premise - that sex is constructed
> > socially. It's not in chimps and it's not in us.
>
> I'll try not to be patronizing, but it appears that you don't
> understand that you don't understand the argument. You completely
> missed the clue bus, as the kids say. You should make a good
> faith attempt to understand the argument before you attempt to
> refute it.
>
> Miles
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>