Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

btw, i'm not on board with biodeterminism at all in regard to humans, unless it is framed in terms so general as to become nearly meaningless. As WCC mentioned upthread, variation within sexes is much greater than variation between sexes (nb: I am using 'sexes' to denote the physically-expressed primary sexual characteristics) and I see no reason in my personal experience to disbelieve that assertion.

(cant get caught up here for a minute so XP)

even just basic chemistry tbh, w/r/t what the ~implications~ are of normal reaction-type stuff like concentration gradients, affinities, biochemical pathways, and le chatelier's whatever

in that: genotypically men and women are pumping out estrogens and androgens all the time, but at differing rates and compositions. this is largely (but not entirely) due to having different soft things making different hormonal stews; stews that, in XX/XY or XXY or XYY or w/e, are comprised of hormones shared and produced by literally (almost) everyone and that (surprise) can be chemically induced to act more like what we simplistically believe are their binaries.

which is to say: it might be very likely that if someone's hormonal ecosystem, with its v special concentration ratios, is experiencing a surfeit of testosterone, that that may predispose someone to aggression. or "aggression." and so sure XY "men" are more likely to roiling in that brew.

but that says nothing about the actual, root-causes of violence and violent behavior, what's doing the roiling. many ppl have a genetic predisposition to cancer (and these genes are often ~less~ subtle than the in-yr-face obviousness of X/Y phenotypic difference). and some of these people will, "inevitably," go on to develop cancer. but many of them dramatically increase their risk by engaging in behaviors and exposing themselves to risks (maybe unknowingly!) that also predispose to cancer. would we be right to demur on the topic of "bad behavior" or "social determinants" and make the genetic component the essential one, because it's more "science-y"? because that would be dumb.

so yeah ok i guess retrospectively males are pretty violent and sure if you take steroids (as a man or a woman) you're gonna be more hot-tempered than if you didn't. and criminals have excessive levels of testosterone or something (note the word "excessive"). big fucking deal! PCP, booze, and lust make all ppl violent and criminals also have "excessive levels" of drug addiction, mental illness, minority status, and connections to poverty.

tl;dr even pretending to get serious about the ~hormonal~ roots of gendered relations is roughly equivalent to phrenology, both scientifically and ethically

re hemingway, talk about yer later-life overcompensations.

don't know if i'm saying anything that hasn't already been said here, but i completely appreciate the desire to displace the question of biology from these discussions - no one is so crass as to pretend that there's no connection between the cultural and the biological, but yet the body is so overwritten by culture as to make any worthwhile study of it in these terms virtually impossible. but the problem there is that in displacing the problem of biology you can end up displacing the problem of what a genuine sexual difference could entail, perhaps risk engaging in a monolithic form of cultural critique that can't really do justice to the differences that hold between actual material bodies. how you work through the manner in which these things fold together, how you avoid falling into the particular pitfalls of this approach and avoid its own normative tendencies, well, that is difficult.

o sure, but it's still reasonable to draw connections (not necessarily or directly causal, but connections nevertheless) between testosterone production and male competition/aggression

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Monday, February 13, 2012 7:22 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was mostly posting to myself there obv but as to this: no, it really really isn't. unless its also reasonable to point out connections between butterflies flapping around in china and a bombing in a public place and then suggesting, humbly, by your leave, that bombings are actually a problem with butterflies and not with people blowing up bombs

i was being kind of a jerk there, soz

yeah, the connections are a bit clearer in the case i suggested than butterflies and bombs. as you said earlier, "males are pretty violent and sure if you take steroids (as a man or a woman) you're gonna be more hot-tempered than if you didn't. and criminals have excessive levels of testosterone or something (note the word "excessive")."

this matters, this is real. acknowledging it doesn't mean we've "answered the question", but ignoring or minimizing it because we are uniformly hostile to any biological interpretation of gender strikes me as foolish. we don't have to throw out biology entirely to recognize that culture is the primary architect of most of what we perceive as "gender", even the ostensibly biological stuff.

i can't throw out biology entirely or else i'm out of a job

at a certain point, i'm not even being "fence-sitty" or "open minded" or w/e. i'm just trying to be as honest as possible about what i perceive as the realities of the situation.

i completely appreciate the desire to displace the question of biology from these discussions - no one is so crass as to pretend that there's no connection between the cultural and the biological, but yet the body is so overwritten by culture as to make any worthwhile study of it in these terms virtually impossible. but the problem there is that in displacing the problem of biology you can end up displacing the problem of what a genuine sexual difference could entail, perhaps risk engaging in a monolithic form of cultural critique that can't really do justice to the differences that hold between actual material bodies. how you work through the manner in which these things fold together, how you avoid falling into the particular pitfalls of this approach and avoid its own normative tendencies, well, that is difficult.

merdeyeux otm. this is very much where i'm coming from.

anyway, my point stands: it isn't that there isn't "biological stuff" that can be correlated to gender, it's that what exists isn't really germane to the conversation (if what you're trying to figure out is why women drive like this or why men are vicious rapers). it is insignificant, and very likely ("provable" even with facts and stuff) approaching totally non-contributory. yes, on an individual, case-by-case basis (which is yr style, con, <3 u tho i do), messed-up* levels of testosterone can make a person more likely to hit a guy. but to even introduce that as a maybe-maybe-not-but-look-see stakeholder in the hunt for why persons hit guys and what we ought to do about it is...irresponsible? or at least naive

dang another xp

ok see
this is very much where i'm coming from.

while i'm pretty sure i 'get' merdeyeux's post, imo talking about 'men' and 'women' necessarily elides and, sure, doesn't "do justice to the differences that hold between actual material bodies." but again that is a p myopic and case-by-case approach to an issue (to be vague) that isn't, can't, be read on a case-by-case basis.

a little confused by that, tbh, gbx. when it comes to this sort of stuff, i'm much less interested in the individual than the general/demographic. the individual is a field of endless variation in which everyone has the opportunity to be or do anything. it's only on the large scale, over time and across cultures, that we begin to see the deep patterns. and i don't think it's by any means absurd to attribute masculine aggression and violence as large-scale, human-species-level problems/phenomena at least in part to human biology.

i don't think that this is naive at all, and it should take nothing away from our understanding that culture is at least as big a driver of human behavior as gender. i mean, just because a human behavior has some basis in human biology doesn't make it in any way "right" or inevitable.

i.e., it wasn't the focus on the individual i was responding to in merdeyeux' post, it was this: displacing the problem of biology you can end up displacing the problem of what a genuine sexual difference could entail. it's elective selective blindness, and i don't see any reason for it.

god, and on reflection, i certainly wouldn't have chosen the word "genuine" there. sub "what a biological sexual difference could entail".

uh, also sub "culture is at least as big a driver of human behavior as biological gender" a couple posts up. moving too fast here, though that's a p telling slip (*ahem*)

yeah certainly, it's an approach that (whatever it ends up looking like) runs the risk of reasserting a male-female binary to the exclusion of trans, asexual, etc issues. and i don't know where the ideal place between that and a systematically ineffectual turn to specific individuals is.

(and fair enough on the genuine. although i'm inclined to think that sexual difference is probably better articulated ontologically rather than biologically. don't really know what i mean by that tho.)

well, the appeal to biology is necessarily an appeal to the ontologically "real", that much is unavoidable.

maybe part of the problem is that we want gender to be one thing when it isn't. there's biological gender (female, male, intersex, other, sliding scales, etc) and there's cultural gender and individual gender (both of which come in endless variations). there's perceived gender and identified gender. it's not singular, not as a concept and not in terms of how it applies to any person or group.

i don't think it's by any means absurd to attribute masculine aggression and violence as large-scale, human-species-level problems/phenomena at least in part to human biology.

my point about biology is and has been this (or at least i meant it to be): it's not a very big part (ho ho), at least vis a vis the process by which actual human violence is expressed. and that giving it a seat at the table "well let's not forget about biology, testosterone and such" can and does become a way to crowd out other, more germane explanations

XXXXPOOSSSSSSSSSTSSS

it's not a very big part (ho ho), at least vis a vis the process by which actual human violence is expressed.

see, this is what i quibble with. you present your argument with great certainty, as though you were reporting a value-neutral, easily verifiable fact. but there's no way at this point to quantitatively analyze such a thing. "proportion and/or degree of violent male behavior caused by biological factors vs proportion of the same caused by other factors, in all cultures, through all time: a study"

anyone who claims with any certainty to know the real answer to questions like this is prioritizing assumptions and perhaps politics over scientifically verifiable information, imo. in trying to determine what makes sense and what doesn't, i try not to worry much about how any given conclusion might be employed, whose interests it might seem to serve. i simply look at the best information available and draw only those conclusions that truly seem warranted. only after doing that do i consider what my conclusions might mean in a sociopolitical context.

on that level, i agree that it's vitally important to keep the focus on gender as a cultural construct - but i'm not going to let that prejudice me when evaluating gender as biology. nor will i minimize, distort or ignore what seems to be true about biological gender out of political fealty to gender as a construct. i feel that there's room for both in any sensible consideration of the issue.

well, the appeal to biology is necessarily an appeal to the ontologically "real", that much is unavoidable.

i dont think this has to be the case, but i get that this has underwritten almost everything on this thread

there seems to be a dig in there somewhere, but i'm okay w that. would say the same about appeals to science in any context, chemistry, physics, whatever. agree that we can and probably should interrogate the construction and implications of such claims.

again, apologies to all. every other post iit is by me, and they're largely concerned with crap that most people itt (and, not to put too fine a point on it, most women itt) clearly don't wanna discuss.
i tell myself that i'm only responding because people keep questioning me, but that's horseshit cuz i know i'm working at sore nerves.

putting myself on restriction as of now. i'll confine myself just to reading along, at least for a while. thanks for having me over, sorry about all the busted furniture...

hey plax, i think i am generally a little more conservative or reactionary or something about identity, including gender identity, than you are, but i wanted to say, i really appreciate your point of view and how beautifully you've expressed it in this thread. i think my point of view has some pretty clear limitations, and the experiences of trans individuals wrt gender are a major one.

i don't know much about the trans experience or trans norms at all. i was raised by two cisgender lesbians & a hetero pair of parents, and i feel like i have some sense of what friends mean when they describe themselves as queer, but i haven't known or read of much of the trans experience. does anyone have suggestions on that?

dunno if yr looking for personal narratives or what but this blog has some good oversights on some of the issues generally facing the trans community today: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/

this is a particularly good post: http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=3865

uh. oversight? insight?

overview?

yes, brainfart

that post you highlighted in particular is really thoughtful & helpful, thanks.

<I>anyone who claims with any certainty to know the real answer to questions like this is prioritizing assumptions and perhaps politics over scientifically verifiable information, imo.</I>

This would be a more serious point if you weren't on the other hand saying "There has been male violence throughout history, and my masculine intuition allows me to infer biology plays a part"

(which one is plax?)

man I hope my photo never shows up on that tumblr

the one of you laughing while eating salad?

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c151/tiger_man01/weightlossfatmansalad.jpg

weightlossfatmansalad.jpg

so this thread has gone - some interesting points about male privilege - lots of nature vs nurture discussion(mainly about men) - focus on the role of testosterone in (male) aggression - fat man eating salad.

I thought this was going to be about women!

~that's what happens when you open the discussion up to men~

lol jk but no ACTUALLY

Andrew, how about trying to just type the bbcode from the start rather than relying on the 'convert simple html' button? that might help you remember. also, it is judith who is plax.

I recently had a brief conversation with my momz where she said she'd decided to start reading feminist theory again (having been in the women's liberation movement and kind of fallen out of the loop in the eighties) and she really wasn't sure about all this 'sociological, social construction of gender' stuff because they seemed to be totally throwing out the idea of gender being grounded in sexual difference, which she thought was important. and i thought: it is really weird that we have never had this conversation before.

Con, I don't mean to sound nit-picky but. You say that ppl (especially women) itt don't *want* to discuss certain issues - ie biodeterminism wrt "testosterone."

That is a fib. It's also a dangerous fib, because it's often used (not nec by you but by ppl with an agenda) to paint this picture of "oh noes feminists be keeping down the TRUTH."

When what I have explicitly stated is that I'm *tired* of these conversations. I find them not useful, unhelpful, overly reductive and not really backed up by the science in all the ways gbx has pointed out.

I think that gbx's metaphor was a helpful one - sure, there is a genetic component to some cancers. But if you are living on a nuclear waste dump, smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day, eating nothing but processed food sprinkled with saccharine and taking HRT your ~genetic risk~ is probably not the most important thing to be addressing

C# do you mean that it's weird you haven't had that conversation w yr mum or weird that it hasn't played out in media, on ILX all over the world, etc?

Because the former, sure, the latter - it's been constantly played out everywhere since Larry Summers (sp?) made his famous gaffe about women and maths and was famously shown his ass by some very smart women. Or maybe I just follow weird media sources?

weird that i have never had that conversation before with my mother, whose feminism has always been an important part of my upbringing.

also weird to me because my mother fucking loves Shulamith Firestone.

cisgender lesbians

yo hoos what does this mean?

just a quick thing cuz am on deadline (or...past the deadline, gah) but w/r/t nature/nuture...i'm not sure why, even if you think there are certain components of gender that are naturally or genetically imprinted, it has to follow that we're beholden to them and can't change them, or that we "can't help it" that we act in certain ways (as "men" or "women"). isn't the history of civilisation about overcoming genetic instincts? i don't think we have to simply accept that "men are more aggressive" if that aggression is antithetical to civilised society.

Thanks for clarifying C# that's what I thought

I didn't mean to go into the Cher Lloyd "nnnggghhhh!" of frustration quite so hard ha ha

Yeah this is also a thing, Lex!

Like, human beings manage to control and modify all sorts of other "biological" instinctual things - we change our diets in all sorts of weird ways, control our food intake, some ppl even practice breathing control, we manage not to slaughter each other at the grocery shop - but somehow when it comes to gender "oh no, we're biologically programmed, we can't ~help~ ourselves!" #NotBuyingIt

we manage not to slaughter each other at the grocery shop

only fkn just, most of the time :(

Those examples are so confused, I should not try to address srs topics before I've had my tea.

i want to read that shulamith firestone book again c# maybe your mom can be in my book club

so this thread has gone - some interesting points about male privilege - lots of nature vs nurture discussion(mainly about men) - focus on the role of testosterone in (male) aggression - fat man eating salad.

I thought this was going to be about women!

― thomasintrouble, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 4:46 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao. its the contenderizer and aimless show!

it is about women, that's all there is to say about us

Can I just say, I didn't bring up testosterone & aggression bc I was interested in men qua men, I'm interested in knowing if there is in fact *any* underlying justification for painting men and women differently wrt violence, or even confidence and approach to power relationships, or is any biological component in fact weak enough to discount in favour of biological factors as WCC indicates. I think it is weak but I wld like to acknowledge differences if they exist, and I have a personal pref for evidence-based argument. Also it's been 15 years since I looked seriously at the research on neurological sex difference and I wanna know what's changed.

It seems there is more or less a consensus here that we shld look at the social construction of gender first and foremost, and that's cool, I'm well up for that & will happily take my brain chemistry 101 stuff off-thread.

MASSIVE POST ALERT. Sorry, and also several x-posts bcuz it took me forever to write it.

I'm gonna try and get off this "violence" thing and try to explain / share personal examples of how this determinist approach to gender gets me down in my daily life. So these things may seen trivial, but they're purposefully trivial rather than the life-changey stuff.

So much of this X = "masculine" and masculinity = BIOLOGICAL is about Identity construction. Carving out space as "masculine" (and excluding women from it) is a kind of ersatz identity politics for men. (I could be snide about that, and say "bcuz of male privilege, men don't have ~real~ identity politics so they resort to this shit" but I don't think that's true. The enforcement of "masculinity" is deeply poisonous. It's just that some men play these "get girls out of the treehouse" games instead of questioning "masculinity.")

1) I got this book out of the library, about walking the London tube lines. Like, this is such WCC-bait I can't even tell you. Maps! Trains! London! Psychogeography! Lost rivers! Guest appearances by Bill Drummond! You could not make a book seem more appealing to me unless you threw in a story about Aphex Twin living in the actual Elephant & Castle roundabout - wait, that was in there, too. Yay!

But right from the start, because the author's wife thought the project was, well, a bit silly (Might that have something to do with the fact that they had a child under 2, and her partner kept disappearing to do massive 2-day walks instead of child-minding?) he decided that MAPS were "masculine" and in fact walking itself was masculine, and producing statistics about how men just travel more (again, this is ~biological~ and nothing to do with circumstance?) which is sounding more and more spurious to a woman who lived on 3 continents by the time she was 10, but, whatever.

It got to the point where I could no longer read the book bcuz I was sick of his identity politicking. Bill Drummond turned up, with this amazing art project about "cake lines" (based on ley lines, but involving Bill Drummond turning up at yr house and making you a cake) and all this author could do was prattle on about how Cartography was so ~male~ - despite the fact that Bill Drummond pointed out that HIS SISTER was actually an IRL cartographer, not him (he's a cake-baking conceptual artist, talk about "feminine" coded activities) and never mind that the A to Z, the apex of London cartography which he is using to plot his "masculine" map-walks, was designed by ~a woman~ - author dude is so invested in his identity politics of "maps = male" that he cannot abandon it.

This did not hurt *me* beyond the irritation of having to abandon a book I thought I would like. But it certainly hurt him, in terms of, it cost him a sale. It cost me going on twitter and ILX and recommending "hey this is an awesome book" and instead me giving him negative publicity of THIS IS A BADLY WRITTEN AND INACCURATE BOOK.

Example 2 is a bit more worrying to me personally, but still fairly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

2) Because I am a massive Aphex Twin phan, I joined a forum dedicated to that artist and similar electronic music. I encountered there a whole group of angry young men engaged in their own Identity construction. Aphex Twin fandom and Electronic Music was a huge part of their self identity. But they had also constructed this in such a way that AFX and EDM was coded as "Masculine" and that fandom as reinforcing their masculinity.

It took me a while to figure out why I was getting *such* bad treatment on that board - above and beyond the usual newbie hazing and aggro-banter. It wasn't even the kind of angry men going into feminist spaces and intimidating them to get women to shut up. (Though it often took the same forms - harassment, intimidation, rape threats)

What it was was this: the idea of AFX TWIN FANDOM IS MASCULINE was so important to their constructed identity both as music fans and as "masculine" that the idea of a *female* Aphex Twin fan threatened their entire identity. They would keep repeating "no women like this music" not as a statement of fact, but as a statement of identity. And would police its borders rigorously, driving off any women who dared to like their masculine-coded music, in order to preserve, even by force, their construction of masculinity. *Creating* it as a statement of biological fact (no women lasted very long on that forum, because rape threats are kind of an icky thing to have to deal with every time you post) to service their ideas of "masculinity." And then presenting it as fact.

So you take those two stories, and you scale them up (to big things, like my career) and repeat them over and again, twice weekly for an entire life, and you start to understand maybe, why I'm so suspicious of the essentialist constructions of gender.

(I think it's particularly weird to me, as a not very gender conforming woman, that gender is so high up on many people's lists of identity signifiers. Not even addressing "femininity" (which is totally unimportant to me) but "being a woman" is not even top 3 of my identity signifiers (in fact, it's so subliminal it's like "being human" it's not even an issue to me until someone else points it out - which, unfortunately, they do, at least once a day.) I'd put things like "artist" and "music fan" and "feminist" way higher than "being a woman" (Yes, I know that last one sounds weird, but I don't believe that "feminist" means "being a woman" so much as it means "pro gender equality") on the big list of Things That Construct WCC's Identity.)

Sorry these examples are so personal and anecdotey - I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but the personal *is* political, as evidenced by how rigorously these men defend their identity politics.