>>> Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/16/00 07:28PM >>> This was one of the most illuminating of the contributions to lbo on the questions of sex and gender, "social construction" and biology. On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Seth Ackerman wrote: I smell a fallacy here, or perhaps a few. First off, it may be possible that social/discursive phenomena in fact are real. More fundamentally, it seems that much of the recent gender talk has been based on a category error. The question seems to be whether such-and-such gender phenomena is really social/discursive or really based on nature (genes, etc). Specifically, is gender difference in regard to sexual preferences based on nature, or is it socialized. Its not clear to me that this is an appropriate (exclusive) disjunction. It may be analogous to asking whether something is white or warm-blooded (versus e.g. white or black). The 'nature basedness' of a phenomenon does not necessarily preclude it being social, and a fortiori does not make a sociological analysis of the phenomena inappropriate.... -clip- _____ CB: Butler and following seem to tend to make the converse error. The fact that human sex is a social, historical and cultural fact does necessarily preclude it being a biological fact at the same time , does not make a biological analysis of the phenomenon inappropriate. That human sex is discursive does not mean that hormones have nothing to do with shaping it. CB
