In keeping with my self-appointed role as couples counselor for science and postmodernism, I’d like to say a few words about gender. Science geeks and other hard-nosed types don’t like the postmodern take on gender, according to which the behaviors that distinguish women from men are socially imposed, or constructed. Where’s the biology? Mo Costandi the science blogger wants to know. Steven Pinker, too, has argued at length that biological sex differences put the lie to the social construction of gender.
I think people like Costandi and Pinker have misunderstood the postmodern position, which also goes by the name queer theory, and which is easy to misunderstand. Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes Judith Butler, the seminal (and utterly unreadable) UC Berkeley queer theorist, on gender’s “performativity”:
Butler characterizes gender as the effect of reiterated acting, one that produces the effect of a static or normal gender while obscuring the contradiction and instability of any single person’s gender act. This effect produces what we can consider to be ‘true gender’, a narrative that is sustained by “the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of those productions – and the punishments that attend not agreeing to believe in them.”
Perfectly transparent, right? Well don’t check out just yet, because I think I’ve cracked Butler’s code. Read the rest of this entry »
A Fistful of Science 