HISTSEX ARCHIVES: July 2000
© Lesley Hall and list contributors
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 04:35:49 EDT
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
Tim, your endless insistence on the total oppression of the "she" is inclined
to produce facetious responses from me, but I'll try and address your point
in the spirit in which it was made.
While I agree that genitals do not a chicken make, by implication your fox
remains immutably male/masculine, as destructive hunter of the chicken, a
role seemingly for which females/"she" need not apply.
You note that "gender hierarchy is a reified construction". There are at
least two questions raised by this. Firstly, is gender hierarchy inevitable,
regardless of who is on top? And secondly, with the grim note you repeatedly
strike, what would need to change in order to produce the societal conditions
for chickens and foxes to metamorphose into turtle doves?
But my main response is that I do not recognise the world you are describing.
"And if willing objects (whose consent has been manufactured
in the social process of the reification of gender
hierarchy) aren't available, or if the would-be subject has
become anxiety-ridden from the sensation of cognitive
dissonance of asserting a subjectivity that's supposed to
feel "natural," and only ends up feeling empty, then the
game gets rough in one way or another."
While I would in no way deny the institutionalised oppression of women,
their/our economic disadvantages, and the historical weight of a thousand
formulations of women's innate inferiority, your formulation seems to me to
participate in, reproduce that inferiority by casting "she" as the inevitable
victim of her history and the legacy of social construction. And in doing
this you utterly remove any capacity for resisting agency on the part of
"she". As someone who teaches Gender and Women's Studies, as well as multiple
courses on women's writing, I am much more struck by the insight, wit,
stroppiness and "micro-resistances" of women in their understandings of
constructions of "she" than I am by their consciousness of being perpetual
and inevitable victim. Are we all deluded? Do you know better?
Written in genuine interest,
Chris White ("she"?)
___________________________________________________________________From: "hvalp" <hvalp@rhk.dk>
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 14:18:51 +0200
> No; it can work even if they switch, because gender
> hierarchy is a reified construction, and in order to
> maintain it, the subject has to possess an object in order
> to experience subjectivity--over and over and over again.
> And if willing objects (whose consent has been manufactured
> in the social process of the reification of gender
> hierarchy) aren't available, or if the would-be subject has
> become anxiety-ridden from the sensation of cognitive
> dissonance of asserting a subjectivity that's supposed to
> feel "natural," and only ends up feeling empty, then the
> game gets rough in one way or another. The fox really needs
> a chicken, and so just takes one--or more.
- So even if they for a moment "switch" social roles, it seems the true subject-object relation
is eventually determined by the hierarchy of teeth and feathers?
Lars Kolind
Teeth but no feathers, guess I´m pretty foxy then!
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 13:31:42 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
Chris White:
>While I agree that genitals do not a chicken make, by implication your fox
>remains immutably male/masculine, as destructive hunter of the chicken, a
>role seemingly for which females/"she" need not apply.
David Harley:
Perhaps we should consult a cockerel about its love of being attacked by a
vixen. There are always profound dangers of reproducing and naturalizing
our unexamined prejudices, whenever we move into species/gender analogies.
Aesop's Fables and Just So Stories tell us more about those who tell and
repeat the stories than they do about the similarities of inter-species
relationships to the way our society is, might be, or must be.
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 14:57:31 EDT
Subject: playing with chickens
Hi Tim
Loads of food for thought there.
I guess I'll kick off my responses by saying I'm a lot less convinced than
you are in the existence of a sex-class. If I'm a Foucauldian of any kind
it's a pretty weird one. I would label myself a marxist-feminist with
Gramsci-ist leanings and thus seek to elude definition as a liberal of any
species. (Liberalism I translate as mere self-interest politics.) I have a
hard time viewing women as the kind of homogenous class of being where
their/our sex transcends all other classifications. I don't regard sex/gender
as the fundamental organiser of societal interaction/identity/life-chances.
Race, disability and what we in the UK call class (in a marxist sense) seem
to me at least as fundamental as sex/gender, and in any case no category of
classification can be ripped free from the materialist conditions at any
given historical moment. No classification is transhistorical or
transcultural, although possibly the Golden Arches may give the lie to that
if they are not (hopefully) some aberrant fad of colonialism like tiffin. One
of the problems is that social construction is a mobile and flexible beast,
and many aspects of social being can be made to serve the interests of the
dominant powers.
Beyond this, I want to take issue with a couple of specific points in your
argument. You say "some women learn how to do more than just get
by; they learn how to eroticize the manipulation of the
cultural constituents of gender hierarchy into new
variations on the theme, to _gloss_ gender."
One can 'gloss' gender through many more means than eroticism, but eroticism
is also one way amongst others where one can produce an active lived critique
of gender constructions. How do you view men who through eroticism are
glossing masculinity differently?
You say "real force, which can be pretty
difficult to distinguish from the kinky kind, if you've ever
been as poor as I have been, and had the sadistic
supervisors I've had. They really got off."
While I'm really sorry your supervisors have been unpleasant and manipulative
people who got off on the abuse of power, I really must take issue with such
a sloppy use of the word 'sadist', deleting from it all its social and
cultural complexity. But more importantly, if something kinky is going on
which is not easily distinguishable from real force, then that isn't kinky,
it's abusive. Kinkiness is consensual, even when it may *look like* real
force, it's an elaborate game with power, identity and sexuality. It is not
real force.
And David, do the initials SOH and the word 'metaphor' mean anything to you?
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 11:57:38 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: N.B.:Problem of delayed posts
Chris: the post that appeared on the list overnight is out
of sequence--I wrote it a couple of days ago, so it's not a
response to your post of yesterday, which is forthcoming.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, Tim Hodgdon wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Hi Chris
>
> Perhaps I can clarify. No, I didn't mean
>
> << If you're standing in an "adult" video store, or a
> high-art gallery dedicated to the male-supremacist
> canon, it's a distinction without a difference. >>
>
> with any irony at all. So, where _does_ that leave "women
> who get pleasure from the products of both kinds of
> establishment"? It doesn't leave them with "false
> consciousness." Rather, it leaves them with _gendered_
> consciousness. We live in a gendered culture. Not
> surprisingly, some women learn how to do more than just get
> by; they learn how to eroticize the manipulation of the
> cultural constituents of gender hierarchy into new
> variations on the theme, to _gloss_ gender. So, when you
> ask, "why such shyness in allowing women any form of
> agency?" I'm more than happy to grant such women (and, in
> fact, any woman who learns how to get by in gender
> hierarchy) gobs of social agency. Gender is made, not born;
> here we find women industriously engaged in remaking,
> reforming gender. And yes, it does render some of them a
> pretty close approximation of liberalism's autonomous
> individual, both analytically and experientially. While
> orthodox liberals reject polymorphous sexual individualism,
> they do so only because it doesn't turn them on. They have
> no compelling analysis for why it isn't a valid form of
> liberalism.
>
> But in distinguishing agency from power, I meant power in
> the fullest sense: the collective self-determination of
> women as a sex-class. (Right: I'm not a Foucauldian, so
> we'll have to agree to disagree on the validity of
> constructions such as "sex-class.") I'm not convinced that
> any form of liberal individualism, including that of the
> sexually enterprising and self-actualizing woman whom you
> describe, leads women as a sex-class to the power of
> collective self-determination, just as I'm not convinced
> that liberal free enterprise is "freedom" for all. Liberal
> (sex-)class mobility promises freedom, yet always already
> presupposes the existence of (sex-)class, high and low,
> according to one's capacity to accumulate capital by
> extracting value: in capitalism, by appropriating the value
> of the work of the laborer; in sex-class through the
> objectification and possession of those whose sexual
> labor-their socially constructed sexuality-reifies the
> masculine. Sexual free enterprise can and does liberate
> some women, but only at the cost of the substantive freedom
> of others. There's so much shit-work to do when it comes to
> reifying class identities, and free enterprise of all sorts
> subordinates whole classes of individuals to make sure that
> it always gets done. This requires, at the bottom line, a
> willingness to use force--real force, which can be pretty
> difficult to distinguish from the kinky kind, if you've ever
> been as poor as I have been, and had the sadistic
> supervisors I've had. They really got off.
>
> Maybe that's why I find much more compelling the argument
> that sex-class--gender itself--has to be destroyed, not
> played with. Not a popular argument these days, but then
> again, it never was. It's a much more demanding political
> task, one that cannot be accomplished in our lifetimes. No
> wonder so many people place their bets on liberal
> alternatives: who wants to live their one and only life in
> the state of being oppressed, and conscious? It's not false
> consciousness to judge that to be a painful condition, and
> to want to avoid it. Still, the hard question remains: how
> does avoiding it, change it?
>
> Lastly, and briefly, you observed that "much of this debate
> seems to me to rest upon a version of female sexuality as
> cuddly and romance-bound." Well, I'd suggest that the point
> of view I find more persuasive remains unpopular partly
> because it is not in any way sentimental about men, or about
> the ugliness of sexual politics in the context of gender
> hierarchy. This ought not obscure the fact that such an
> unsentimental sexual politics actually springs from hope:
> that human beings can, somehow, come to an agreement that
> the best way to achieve sexual justice is to eliminate
> gender, and thus eliminate the forced sexual labor of
> reifying gender. That would amount to an agreement that the
> very real pleasure that humans can derive from actualizing
> the subject position of gendered sexuality--or, put another
> way, from consuming the product of forced sexual
> labor--isn't worth the price. But, having reached that
> agreement, it wouldn't be just "female sexuality" that would
> be "cuddly." If that sounds repulsively "vanilla" to anyone
> out there, then so be it. But it sounds like a genuinely
> better world to me, one that I regret I will never live in.
>
>
> Tim Hodgdon
> Ph.D. candidate
> Department of History
> Arizona State University
> Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 12:02:44 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: playing the chicken
> - So even if they for a moment "switch" social roles, it
> seems the true subject-object relation is eventually
> determined by the hierarchy of teeth and feathers?
More accurate to say that it inheres in the "roles"
themselves.
>
> Lars Kolind
> Teeth but no feathers, guess I´m pretty foxy then!
We've never met, so I'll take your word for it!
___________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 01 Jul 2000 14:41:24 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: playing with chickens
Chris White:
>And David, do the initials SOH and the word 'metaphor' mean anything to you?
David Harley:
I presume SOH is related to the e-mail acronym LOL, as cause and effect. I
don't know that any of my friends or readers would regard me as notably
strait-laced. I am somewhat notorious for making people laugh during
seemingly serious conference presentations. A careful reader will find no
shortage of jokes in my published articles.
As for metaphor, I would suggest that this trope, like all our other
rhetorical devices, shapes the way we think. It needs to be examined, like
our conceptual categories, rather than being regarded as merely ornamental.
That surely was the whole point of your query concerning the apparent
maleness of the fox and the femaleness of the chicken, with which I was
agreeing by suggesting that the metaphor had a tenuous connection with
barnyard realities.
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 15:59:43 EDT
Subject: Re: playing with chickens
David, I agree with you completely about the cultural basis of conceptual
categories. In my defence, I did not begin the chicken metaphor (said she
rapidly in self-defence), but if I have been brusque and humourless, I
apologise.
Tim, I look forward to your next in this interesting dialogue :)
CW
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Interesting book review
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 23:13:08 +0100
Review of Vernon A. Rosario. _The Erotic Imagination: French =
Histories of
Perversity_. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
x +
243 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00
(cloth), ISBN 0-19-510483-8,
by Christopher E Forth of the Australian National University, is at
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3D22433962403473
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Sbject: Christies sells condoms
Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2000 18:38:19 +0100
3 eighteenth century sheep gut condoms with silk ties, the longest 9 =
inches, recently realised a price of GBP881 at Christie's in London in =
a sale of 'Scientific and Engineering Works of Art'. A paper slip =
discovered with the lot was inscribed "CONDOMS (French Letters or =
Cap-Anglais) DISCOVERED BY LADY SALMONG AMONGST SOME 18th Century =
DOCUMENTS."
The Lot notes do not seem particularly well informed about the history =
of condoms, referring to the mythical Col Cundum and dating the =
invention of sheepgut condoms to 1700. The Dudley Hoard condoms, datable =
to over 50 years earlier than this, were recently exhibited as a =
National Science Week event.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 01:47:10 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Hi Chris
I appreciate your invitation to respond. Here in Arizona,
one of the more conservative areas of the U.S., the
opportunities to discuss these ideas are quite few, and it
is precisely this kind of discussion that I need in order to
further my training. I hope that it holds some equivalent
value for you.
As I see it, there are five interrelated themes in your two
previous posts: (1) that my perspective presents male
supremacy as a system of absolute male power and absolute
women's submission, against which there can be no meaningful
resistance; (2) that the concept of sex-class posits a
reductionist homogeneity among women (and among men), and
that my perspective subordinates all other inequalities to
the primary contradiction of gender; (3) that not only does
this perspective reduce the differences among women within
Euro-American industrial society in the present to
epiphenomena, it also ignores the historicity and, more
generally, of sexual cultures and the diversity of human
cultures; (4) that this perspective simply dismisses not
only women's critical appropriation of gender as false
consciousness, but also the role of mutual consent in
distinguishing the appearance of sadistic dominance in
ritualized sexuality from genuine sadism; and (5) leaves
unaddressed the question of how gay and queer men's sexual
transgressions, like those of women, might destabilize the
rigidities of gender hierarchy, transforming gender into a
democratic, politically neutral cognitive resource available
for all to use as they see fit in the pursuit of the
pleasures of sexual subjectivity.
A detailed response to any of these questions goes well
beyond the scope of an email message to a discussion list.
There are good reasons why such a response might be
worthwhile, especially if it could be reasonably expected to
change someone's mind. But I don't post to the list with
that unrealistic goal in mind. To put it mildly, people
take the politics of sexuality personally, such that
changing one's mind also involves rearranging one's personal
life on a rather extensive scale. It can, and does happen,
but probably wouldn't happen here, for a simple reason: the
themes of your posts replicate in microcosm a debate that's
already gone on out there in the published literature; like
me, readers have heard these assertions many times. My goal
is more modest than "conversion." For the sake of those who
might be "lurking" on the list, and for the sake of those
who might consult these threads at a later date as part of
their research, I simply want to make a case for the
legitimacy of a viewpoint on a radical sexual politics that
runs quite at odds to the perspective that predominates here
on the list. Somebody ought to do it, and I guess that I'm
that person for now.
So, in order perhaps to intrigue lurkers and future
researchers to check out what an alternative perspective has
to offer, please allow me to respond in a general way to
these five interrelated themes.
First, I contend that the practice of gender hierarchy in
the service of male supremacy is _pervasive._ That doesn't
mean that it's _absolute._ If it were absolute, I and the
feminists from whom I draw this perspective could not speak
about, or perhaps even think about, male dominance as a
social reality in the first place. No resistance would be
possible--and what would be the point, anyway, if nothing
could change? Of course that's not the case. Like you, I
admire "the insight, wit, stroppiness and
'micro-resistances'" of radical feminists (though if you use
the latter term, you probably do so to mean something
different). That's what inspired me to study their work in
depth. I still marvel at how some radical women managed to
put together so many small fragments of devalued personal
experience to reach the conclusion, in the early 1970s, and
again in Minneapolis in 1983, that _gendered sexuality
enforces gender hierarchy._ That perspective is called many
inaccurate names; "anti-sex" being one of them. But I see
it as one of the most hopeful and constructive insights that
human beings have yet articulated. From that insight we may
derive a liberatory politics: if gender is a reified
construction, then human beings have the option of dropping
it altogether. It's not essential to our existence; and
while people can derive intense pleasure from the experience
of reified subjectivity, the social costs are much too high.
(Below, I'll attempt to explain why I think "consent," the
model of sexual social relations that I call sexual freedom
of contract, is wholly inadequate as the basis for social
justice.) What's more, the insights we derive from attempts
to reach social consensus to drop it, may well offer new
approaches to address the reified, pseudo-biological
hierarchy of race. (Already have: see Mari J. Matsuda et
al., _Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive
Speech, and the First Amendment_ [Boulder, Colo., U.S.A.:
Westview Press, 1993]. Many other works profit from
rereading in light of this perspective: in addition to the
works by Lockridge that I cited in a previous post, see
Kathleen M. Brown, _Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious
Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia_
[Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1996].)
As these citations may suggest, I don't see the perspective
I'm advancing as dismissive of differences among women, or
as promoting the unsustainable viewpoint that gender
constitutes the sole oppression of women, or as suggesting
that gender hierarchy is the linchpin to all other forms of
oppression, to which other oppressions become subordinate.
I honestly do think that the world is more complicated than
that. Now, let's approach that same idea from the opposite
direction: the concept of sex-class does not require
homogeneity among women. Did Marx and Engels (or, for that
matter, their more sophisticated latter-day interpreters)
ever say that all proletarians were alike? No; they
stressed the _relational_ aspect of class, even as they held
that material conditions constructed consciousness. Both
sex-class and social class turn out to be contingent on the
particular situations in which human beings relate to one
another. The rules aren't always the same in every time and
place. "Contingency" refers to one property of human
culture: while participants in culture almost never
articulate their culture's first principles as such (it's an
awfully demanding task), they dispute the contingent
interpretation of those principles all the time. Most
day-to-day conflict takes this form; thus, multiple meanings
of cultural first principles constantly compete for
legitimacy.
This gets particularly convoluted, so an example is in
order: In their public stance vis a vis one another, Larry
Flynt (prominent U.S. pornographer) and Jerry Falwell
(prominent conservative U.S. evangelist) hate one another
intensely. (Never mind that men like Flynt sometimes turn
out to be Protestants; never mind that a good many prominent
evangelists practice exactly what they preach against.
That's another level of this same argument.) They hate one
another, yet they both militantly defend the first principle
of male supremacy: the one interpreting masculine privilege
as the freedom to fuck whenever, wherever, whomever, and
however; the other demanding that men observe the
constraints of the Christian double standard of compulsory
heterosexuality in order to preserve its privileges (when
men "fall," it is always a woman's fault).
Neither of these guys gives a hoot what women think, as long
as women are thinking and saying the word "yes." There are
more sides to this debate than two, but to save space I
won't try to describe others.
Thus, the level of conflict over interpretations of first
principles (should men be free to fuck at will, upholding a
single standard of "sexual freedom," or should men's first
obligation be to other men and defense of the legitimacy of
the double standard; or, what is a man, anyway?) that leads
postmodernists to question the stability of dominant
categories (and the veracity of analytical categories
derived about them and from them), leads me to conclude that
these same categories prove quite stable, because they're
flexible. Below, I'll distinguish what I'm calling
contingency from subjectivist relativism; for now, I'll just
say that I don't believe that contingency invalidates the
concept of sex-class. Like Somer Brodribb, I don't think
that social subordination boils down only to an "identity"
based on an "idea" that one may subvert by exposing its
foundational contradictions through a "performance" that
"plays with" the contradictory fragments (Somer Brodribb,
_Nothing Mat[t]ers: A Feminist Analysis of Postmodernism_
[North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex, 1992]). If I read
your response to my use of the word "Foucauldian" correctly,
then the latter is not entirely your perspective;
nevertheless, I include it here because it's one of the
common perspectives from which these themes emanate.
If the concept of sex-class proves sufficiently elastic to
admit to deep divisions in the sex-class, "women," then I
see no reason why it should not prove sufficiently elastic
to accommodate historicity and cultural relativism. We
probably will never know just how far back in human
(pre)history gender hierarchy extended; of all the
historical human cultures of which I have heard, it would
seem that they exhibit a wide range of conceptions of
gender, but I know of none in which gender is absent, or
that gender relations prove equal or complementary.
Anthropologists debate this as a question; I just don't find
the June Nash school of neo-Engelsian argument (gender
inequality emerged from the invention of private property,
sans Engels' outdated belief in the world-historical defeat
of "matriarchy" [Irene Silverblatt, _Moon, Sun, and Witches:
Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru_
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)]) persuasive.
We can, I think, agree to disagree over the applicability of
sex-class here, but I would still insist that it's not the
kind of reductionist concept it's often made out to be.
The fourth point has to do with the concept of "false
consciousness"--a concept that, as one who rejects the
mechanistic perspective of functionalism, I find repugnant.
In many ways, the notion of "false consciousness" derives
from the least imaginative conception of Marxist class: the
celebration of objectivity as the viewpoint from nowhere.
This standpoint also had its adamant defenders in the early
days of U.S. radical feminism, in the debates between those
who advanced the "social conditioning" thesis. The response
of those advocating the "pro-woman line" was equally
adamant: at its logical extreme (and of course, most
"pro-woman line" feminists weren't out here on the tip of
this limb), this amounted to an answer of absolutist
subjectivity to the conditioning-thesis argument of
absolutist objectivity. One of the things I admire about
radical feminism is that, in a relatively short time, the
argument faded, as it became clear that each perspective
turned out to offer something of value and neither proved
sufficient of itself. But these days, we seem to be
reinventing the wheel. I see postmodernist subjectivity and
relativism--the basis for its claim to "subversive" power,
as similarly absolutist and insufficient: it is the reverse
side of the Enlightenment's epistemological coin, the view
from everywhere. I prefer MacKinnon's approach: to end
gender hierarchy, one must reject the subject-object
distinction itself, which is the basis for masculine
authority and masculine subjectivity through the knowing of
self--especially, but not solely, through gendered sexual
intercourse--as not-that-object-which-is other. She holds
that the method for this politics lies in
consciousness-raising. ("Method and Politics," chap. 6 in
_Toward a Feminist Theory of the State_ [Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1989].) Not surprisingly, this is not a
popular idea among those for whom women's endless
differences carry more weight than anything they might have
in common. Again, I'm sure I cannot convince you of this;
only you can do that. To your question about whether I
"know better," and whether I think you're "deluded," the
answers are "no," and "no." I'm simply making a choice
among feminist theories, something I have to do, since they
contradict one another. My choice carries no special
authority. What I seek, given that a politics is not an
empirical, falsifiable proposition, not reducible to "true"
and "false," and thus a matter of scholarly judgment, is
respect for the alternative point of view that I find most
convincing.
This perspective problematizes the notion of consent to a
considerable degree, given the pervasiveness of gender
hierarchy and the impossibility of harmonizing the interests
of sexual subject and object under conditions of gender
hierarchy. If "no" doesn't mean "no," what does "yes" mean?
The result, however, is not a stark resolution of social
life under gender hierarchy into absolutes of black and
white, but profound ambiguity, many shades of gray.
"Consent" isn't meaningless; rather, it is far more
problematical than the theory of sexual liberalism holds it
to be. To a degree that discomfits any thinking and feeling
person, this perspective requires that we contemplate the
degree to which sexual consent can be manufactured.
Radicals have no difficulty seeing this possibility in news
media (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, _The Manufacture of
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media_ [New York:
Pantheon, 1988]) or through the wages theory of value, in
which the worker formally "consents" to sell labor for a
fraction of its worth. Liberal theory calls these
phenomena, respectively, freedom of the press and freedom of
contract; radicals have convinced me that this formal
guarantee of equality led directly to substantive inequality
in practice. It's not accidental that the male-dominated
labor movement has always understood this relation in
gendered-sexual terms: their movement being the "manly
defense of the rights of the workingman"--from getting
screwed. When sexual liberals extend the doctrine of
freedom of contract to sexual relations--for example, as a
defense of prostitution as women's liberation--I still have
to wonder: workers "consent" to work for a host of reasons,
including avoidance of hunger and homelessness; wives
submit to sex that they do not want, and learn to want the
sex that men want to have, for an equally broad range of
reasons. Is "consent," then, sufficient of itself to
guarantee substantive equality? I'm skeptical of
liberalism's guarantee of the collective good through the
defense of individual self-interest, so I have to say no,
even as I hold that even liberal consent is not nothing: it
demarcates one of the many gray positions on a continuum of
sexual coercion that runs from near-white to truly black.
Same with sadism: my wording of the earlier post did not
indicate that I don't regard the sadism of my former
employers and the sadism of sadomasochistic ritual as
identical; rather, they are points on a continuum of sexual
politics. They are not identical, but they are related,
because they derive their meaning, and the pleasure of
sexual subjectivity, from an eroticization of hierarchy.
What about men? Just as male power and privilege are not
absolute by virtue of being pervasive, so to masculinity, as
a reified construct, does not represent the totalized human
nature of men. Human beings are social beings. Beyond the
material needs of the human biological organism, social and
emotional bonds sustain everyday life. Men's powerful
allegiance to gender identity does not preclude at all times
most men's capacity to respond humanely, to at least some
degree, to others, in ways not absolutely determined by
gender. This goes for sex, too; even the pervasiveness of
gendered identity does not make what one might call "sexual
communion" impossible. What I think it does mean, sadly, is
that it's a much more rare experience than it could be, and
much more rare than the culture of romance promises, because
the emotional distance and distinctiveness of a sexual
subjectivity constructed in opposition to that of a sexual
object is about the best way to kill the possibility of
"communion." To say, at this juncture, well, maybe
"communion" is not what some men and women want, that it's
too vanilla, it's not transgressive enough to be sexy--to
me, this begs the question that Michael A. Murphy raised
(though he didn't intend its use as I am here): in whose
sex-class interests is this? The fundamental question here
is whether freedom means the freedom to pursue the reified
sexual subjectivity so far reserved for the genitally male,
or whether freedom means freedom _from_ what I see as the
necessary consequences of that reified subjectivity: the
enforcement of gender hierarchy.
So, I don't regard "what about men's 'glossing' of gender?"
as really a distinct question. If we want a world in which
men can love men openly without fear of assault or
ostracism, we have to work toward the end of gender as a
fundamental principle of social organization, just the same
as if we want a world where women don't have to fear being
raped or beaten, or being taken and used. In my view,
trying to create a "sexual freedom" in which some women gain
sex-class mobility, in which some women get to be "men" and
some men get to be "women," doesn't address the reality that
this conception of freedom, like all liberal conceptions of
freedom, depends on the unfreedom of others in order to
function. (On the racial foundations of American liberal
democracy, see Edmund S. Morgan, _American Freedom, American
Slavery: The Agony of Virginia_ [New York: Norton, 1975].)
For every woman who might avail herself of the privileges of
manhood-however much switching from role to role there might
be--many more would have to remain behind in order for those
categories to maintain their erotic charge, their
distinctive meaning. It may not look like a liberal club,
since so many orthodox liberals, like our "pal" Jerry
Falwell, oppose it so vehemently. But it's a liberal club,
with the difference being the contingent sexual rules.
So I find more compelling the politics of women who, rather
than demanding access to the club, are trying to shut the
whole thing down. They don't resign themselves to the club
as the best of all possible worlds before we've had a chance
to see what a world without the club might be like.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 13:56:29 EDT
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Hi Tim
Glad this is contributing to your work :) You seem now to be opting for a
devil's advocate role, tho', rather than saying what you really think....
A couple of corrections to your reading of my response:
In referring to the stroppiness and wit of students, I wasn't talking about
'radical feminists', rather about women who would not/do not identify as
feminists, but who have incorporated into their identities ideas and
practices I would call feminist.
Gender as a 'democratic, politically neutral cognitive resource'? If that's
what I seemed to be saying, God help my articulation! Gender is as
politicized as any other arena of human interaction. What I'm arguing is that
it be less 'special', less of a totalizing explanation for the world's ills,
and in part -- *in part*-- a tool of political/social opposition and
resistance.
Beyond that, there are things you say that I would not dispute, so I'll stick
to the disputes <g>
You say "if gender is a reified
construction, then human beings have the option of dropping
it altogether. It's not essential to our existence; and
while people can derive intense pleasure from the experience
of reified subjectivity, the social costs are much too high."
The idea that gender is straightforwardly dispensible with is, I fear,
something I neither believe in nor like. At the risk of eating my own words,
not so long ago there was a vigorous debate here about biology and its role
in gender construction. While still clinging to my social constructionist
position, biology does play a role in the construction of gender. A woman who
chose (or did what was expected) to have children would be unlikely to have
the time and energy to do what I'm currently doing. The same does not apply
to a man 99% of the time. However constructed the meanings grafted onto sex
may be in the form of gender, there will always be meanings grafted on to
sex, call it what you like. It is the form which can vary, not its very
existence.
The second part of this I find almost alarming in its sucked-dry of fun and
games formula. Yes, reified gender construction comes with high prices for
men and women, and it is those parts, which precisely connect to construction
of class, race etc, that need doing away with. (By the by, does anyone
believe race and class are social constructions that could be dispensed with?
I have that wretched song 'Melting Pot' playing in my head....) Economic
conditions, wages, housing, legal questions, sexual violence, are not sources
of intense pleasure as far as I can see. But at this point in history, in the
privileged West, one way of opposing the oppressive effects of gender
construction is through 'play', taking pleasure in exaggerating, twisting,
inverting the status quo. Not the only reason, since it is a chicken and egg
thing (groan...) as sexual pleasure and its forms are determined by the given
social conditions in history.
I got very bogged down with your reading of ideological processes and how
change is produced. It would perhaps help to clarify your position if you
were to source your use of the word 'reification' -- which version are you
deploying? I keep wanting to read it as Lucaksian, but I may be wrong....
You imply that 'sexual communion' is antithetical to sadomasochistic
pleasure, and once again I have to insist on the difference between the
economically disempowered woman who must accomodate her man's domestic and
sexual demands or risk violence and/or poverty, and the temporary and
fictional adoption of a role of sexual and physical and domestic submission
within an agreed contract between two people (of any gender). They may look
similar on occasion, but they share nothing but a set of gestures, the latter
being performed on the basis of assumed identities in a theatrical space.
And, moreover, there is less likely to be any *real* abuse of power in such a
scenario. No may not mean No, but the safeword means No, Stop now, and it
will mean a very emphatic 'no'. I'm not claiming a hierarchy of sexual
'liberation' with vanilla at the bottom, but I'm less than convinced that sex
without an element of power is even conceivable. You blithely contradict the
'anti-sex' agenda of certain brands of feminism. I have to say, from
experience, that there was a very vigorous anti-sex campaigning brand of
lesbianism around in this country in the 80s (may still be for all I know)
and I have some lousy memories of just how violent that could get. And I mean
physically violent.
There's a lot more I could say, but I'll leave it there for now, and await
the next move :)
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 09:28:34 +1200
From: "Walter Cook" <Walter.Cook@natlib.govt.nz>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Tim, From one of your lurkers. I follow this debate to be forewarned of what ghastly "Genevas"
future "Calvins" have in store for the likes of me.
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 18:58:45 EDT
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (short)
The likes of.....? Walter, my interest is piqued. Well if you will delurk!
CW
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 17:19:48 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Calvin, Geneva, and the future of gender
On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Walter Cook wrote:
> Histsex:For historians of sexuality - http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
>
> Tim, From one of your lurkers. I follow this debate to be
> forewarned of what ghastly "Genevas" future "Calvins" have
> in store for the likes of me.
Walter: I do wonder what kind of "geneva" would be "a world
in which men can love men openly without fear of assault or
ostracism." Certainly not the literal kind, as I'm sure that
ol' Mr. Calvin is currently spinning counterclockwise after
having been associated, even though metaphorically, with
such a vision.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 18:35:34 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics (long)
Chris: No, I'm not opting for a devil's advocate position; I
am telling you what I think. The perspective that I'm
writing from is quite marginal, both on this list (where
it's labeled "anti-sex," a label the inaccuracy of which
will be apparent to anyone who follows my earlier citation
of Stoltenberg's _End of Manhood_ to the source) and in the
world at large, where its social constructionism generally
registers, among the "experts" whom mass media tend to
consult, not only as anti-sex, but anti-family, anti-church,
and/or anti-nature. That's why they generally prefer not to
allow it to register at all. "Free" speech is very, very
expensive, and so I see my contribution as, at minimum,
trying to preserve this perspective for the long term, so
that it won't simply disappear from the historical record.
To your point that "While still clinging to my social
constructionist position, biology does play a role in the
construction of gender. A woman who chose (or did what was
expected) to have children would be unlikely to have the
time and energy to do what I'm currently doing." Yes, and
so gender justice, not to mention the redistribution of
wealth, requires a radical restructuring of work and a
redistribution of value among the diverse forms of social
labor that constitute culture. To your point that "the same
does not apply to a man 99% of the time," I'd say, that's
exactly what has to change. To "however constructed the
meanings grafted onto sex may be in the form of gender,
there will always be meanings grafted on to sex, call it
what you like. It is the form which can vary, not its very
existence," I'd say that the meanings humans attach to
sexuality and reproduction don't have to be gendered: that
is, calling into existence distinctive social personae, with
corresponding subject/object positions. There are
biological differences or variations among human beings that
haven't served as the basis of such categorical
distinctions, so I don't see the existential necessity of
sexual dimorphism as being one such. That's why calling it
gender really matters: it names the distinction as a
politics of hierarchy.
To your aside, "By the by, does anyone believe race and
class are social constructions that could be dispensed with?
I have that wretched song 'Melting Pot' playing in my head,"
I advocate nothing like assimilation. Assimilation presumes
to end conflict by integrating opponents to the status quo
into the status quo--on the status quo's choice of terms.
The redistribution of wealth, and the redistribution of
social value, that I advocate can hardly be called
assimilationist. As for the reification of race, I refer
to the process by which "race" became a significant social
distinction despite the absence of any sort of scientific
basis for the category's existence. As some geneticists
have pointed out, there is more genetic diversity within
single African villages than in the whole of North America
or eastern Asia; human beings have simply lived there
longer. Still, the fact that colonialists treated "race" as
if it were real, and enforced it as a social difference,
means that it is now a real difference, even if it isn't
ontologically true. My view is that the only way to end
racial hierarchy is to work toward the elimination of the
reality of race as a social category; insisting on the
equivalence of "races" as the end-goal of politics neglects
the force and injustice that it takes to maintain the
distinction. Sound familiar? :)
Lastly, this is perhaps the opportune moment to say that I
can't provide you with a detailed citation for my
understanding of reification, because I don't know exactly
where I learned it. Probably the best place to look is at
Andrea Dworkin's essay, "The Root Cause," in _Our Blood:
Prophesies and Discourses on Sexual Politics_ (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976). I apologize for the convoluted
nature of my discussion; it was the best I could do within a
relatively short time. I sent it out knowing exactly what
it's like to read something of that sort, especially via
email, where it's difficult to flip pages back and forth. I
appreciate your willingness to wade through. Still, I hope
that I've been able to make at least some of my process more
familiar, and thus to at least some degree less threatening,
to those who are open to that possibility. For a very
different, poetic voice, I strongly recommend that members
of the list look at Pat Parker, "Bar Conversation," in
_Jonestown and Other Madness: Poetry by Pat Parker_ (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1985), 11-14.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 04:31:29 EDT
Subject: One chicken's marginality...
Hi Tim
I'm about to leave for a conference (to continue propogating my theories of
fetish porn) so this will be a sketchy response (as ever). I'm going to go
away and ponder further your notions on the abolition-potential of gender. A
slight pause for rethinking, even :)
So a couple of points to respond:
I would argue that the notion of 'reification' is so fundamental to your
ideas of gender, that some much better theoretical basing is required. It is
not the transparent term you seem to continually be invoking. What does your
term actually mean?
<< The perspective that I'm writing from is quite marginal, both on this list
(where it's labeled "anti-sex," a label the inaccuracy of which will be
apparent to anyone who follows my earlier citation of Stoltenberg's _End of
Manhood_ to the source) and in the
world at large, where its social constructionism generally registers, among
the "experts" whom mass media tend to consult, not only as anti-sex, but
anti-family, anti-church,
and/or anti-nature. That's why they generally prefer not to allow it to
register at all. "Free" speech is very, very expensive, and so I see my
contribution as, at minimum,
trying to preserve this perspective for the long terrm.>>
I accept that the ideas you're propounding are your own, but I'm intrigued at
your consciousness of being so marginal and so far outside of current
orthodoxies. As far as I can see, your version of sexuality, albeit with a
more developed social critique than one would often see attached to it, is
much more akin to the current societal and certain substantial feminist
orthodoxies about the healthy, mutual, power-free ideal of sex. Which sounds
like saying "I'm more marginal than you, so there!" but I suspect I may be. I
may find out on Friday :)
More anon
CW
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 12:11:22 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Chortling chickens, Batman!
Chris
Now it's my turn to retort that your endless contention that
"As far as I can see, your version of sexuality, albeit with
a more developed social critique than one would often see
attached to it, is much more akin to the current societal
and certain substantial feminist orthodoxies about the
healthy, mutual, power-free ideal of sex." Let's see: in
the U.S., those societal orthodoxies of "power-free" and
"mutual" would include the double standard; 96% of women in
one study reported unwanted sexual advances, ranging from
verbal harassment to rape, during the course of their
lifetimes; a marital rape exemption that has only recently
been overturned when feminists embarrassed male-dominated
legislatures enough to goad them into passing laws (with no
substantial effort to make them genuinely enforceable);
endemic date-rape; and -- well, let's turn now to ideas of
"healthy sexuality," in which merely glancing at the table
of contents for the famous Masters and Johnson _Human Sexual
Response_ gives one the veritable blueprint of sexuality
designed to reify masculinity, i.e., the weary ritual
trinity of erection, penetration, and ejaculation; booming
sales of Viagra to prop up genital function that does not
live up to male-supremacist ideals of manliness; dainty
television ads for products addressing the "problem" of
"occasional personal dryness" in women (maybe HIS insistence
on compulsive erection and penetration is the problem?); and
-- but let's turn now to best of all: the title of
Stoltenberg's book, _The End of Manhood._ Now, _there's_ a
social orthodoxy for ya! That one unites everyone from the
Promise Keepers, the Catholic priesthood, the political
parties and corporation presidents to sexologists (the
professionals whose motto might well read: Keep It Up!),
pornographers (whose product is popular only among the
marginal few who still support manhood in one way or
another), the Civil Liberties Union, and those among my
women undergraduate students who positively deplore the
"man-bashing" of those radical feminists.
Chortling chickens, Batman! I have not only the whole
society, but God Himself on my side. Who woulda thunk it?
As for "feminist orthodoxies," well, I would only point out
that it was radical feminism's refusal to ignore the
discovery that "sex" and "violence" were not the discrete
categories that male-supremacist propaganda made them out to
be that led them to quit trying to conform feminist theory
and practice to masculinist politics: liberalism (and its
marginal academic/bohemian variant, postmodernism) and
socialism. Hasn't made 'em popular, especially in academia.
Now, regarding the superficial similarity between the
liberal ideal of harmonious, apolitical gendered sexuality
and the radically ungendered ideal of nonhierarchical
sexuality, supported by a culture dedicated to gender
justice, I think that we can adapt socialist-feminist poet
Marge Piercy's words to elucidate the distinction between
my view and that of substantive liberal orthodoxy ("they"):
Watch who they beat and who they eat,
watch who they relieve themselves on,
watch who they own
The rest is decoration.
Cheers! :)
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: And on the subject of reviews...
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 19:23:13 +0100
My review of Chris Nottingham's The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis =
and the New Politics, is now available on-line, with Chris's response, =
on 'Reviews in History' on the Institute of Historical Research website, =
at
http://ihr.sas.ac.uk/ihr/reviews/lesley.html
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Review of book on the Russian Skoptsy
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 19:19:49 +0100
Reviewed by Irina Korovushkina Paert of
Laura Engelstein. _Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom. A
Russian Folktale_. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.
xviii + 283 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.
$29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-3676-1
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3D8038962120646
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Charles Moser" <docx2@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Chicken ethics, a different perspective
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 00:02:56 -0700
Dear Mr. Hodgdon:
I have a different perspective on this discussion. My professional
career has been devoted to the study of S/M and S/M practitioners. As such,
I have come to know these individuals and their problems. Unfortunately,
many S/M practitioners have lost jobs, their homes, custody of their
children, and other basic human rights. Often the rationale for this
discrimination is the "feminist" belief, that the private acts in which
these consenting adults engage hurts others and the society. The hurt that
S/M practitioners feel does not seem to enter into the discussion.
You said that you have no hope of changing anyone's mind, I have no hope
of changing your mind. It is futile to try to change someone's religious or
political beliefs. Nevertheless, these beliefs have been used throughout
history to justify oppression and even genocide. Hopefully, people who are
fighting for their freedom, would not believe it is necessary to oppress
others.
You said that you were sorry that you would never live in a gender-free
world. I am sorry that I will never live in a sexually free world. I
support your right to live your life anyway you choose. I hope you can
create a gender free community, to live as close to your ideal as possible.
I hope that you will give S/M practitioners and other sexual minorities the
same consideration.
Take care,
Charles Moser, Ph.D., M.D.
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 09:22:14 -0400
From: Sheila McManus <smcmanus@yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: historiographical/review article suggestions
Hi everyone,
As much as I hate to interrupt the heated 'chicken ethics' discussion, I
need some suggestions for British or European historiographical or review
articles on the history of sexuality. I'm teaching a 4th year seminar this
year and the first week is on the historiography of the history of
sexuality. I've got Maynard's article on Canada and Freedman's on the
United States, and I'd like to find something comparable for Britain or
Western Europe.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Sheila McManus
* * * * * * * * * *
Sheila McManus
Ph.D. Candidate and Sessional Instructor, Department of History, York
University
smcmanus@yorku.ca
___________________________________________________________________Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 07:34:14 -0700
From: Karen Duder <kduder@UVic.CA>
Subject: Re: historiographical/review article suggestions
Hi Sheila.
You might have a look at Valerie Traub's article "The Rewards of
Lesbian History," Feminist Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999), 363-394.
Traub discusses a number of recent works covering a wide period, from
the early Christian era to the eighteenth century.
Karen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karen Duder PhD Candidate
Department of History Dept. Phone (250) 721-7382
University of Victoria Dept. Fax (250) 721-8772
P.O. Box 3045 Email kduder@uvic.ca
Victoria, B.C. V8W 3P4
CANADA
"Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer.
There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only
measurement relative. Relative to what is an important part of the
question." Jeanette Winterson, _Gut Symmetries_
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 17:54:48 EDT
Subject: Re: Chortling chickens, Batman!
Okay, Boy Wonder, nice to see you can match me for facetiousness, but that
last is more revelatory of you than current sexual politics. You remind me of
the character of Mr Mybug in Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm who saw
phallic symbols in everything everywhere. If I were a man of any intelligence
I would be mortally offended at being lumped into your unholy conspiracy of
cock-led automata who dedicate their lives to screwing women, in every sense
of the word. You deplore the status quo but throw up your hands in defeated
resignation at the uneducability of the male species. Yes, the world can be a
vile and dangerous place for women (but men too are on the receiving end of
violence engendered by masculine idiocy) but if one were to follow your
programme, all women and men should stay indoors and weep at the state of the
world instead of trying to change whatever they can change. And as a
long-term fan of Piercy, I suggest you go back and read some of her other
poems which celebrate sexual pleasure and sexual love, rather than co-opting
her to your genital-less agenda.
And Charles, beautifully put. Yours is a version much closer than Tim's will
ever be to a world in which *all* people are free to articulate a full range
of sexual and non-sexual relationships.
Chris White
aka Catwoman
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 16:18:40 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rummaging around among the sale books at the campus bookstore, I found a
copy of Rictor Norton's The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, nestling among
the piles of pious Catholic devotional works. Since I am currently looking
for suitable readings for a course on Sex, Bodies and Families, in Europe
and the US, 1600-2000, intended for non-historians, I snapped it up with
alacrity.
I also wanted to read his critique of social construction, voiced sometimes
on this list. It seems to me that Rictor's real objection is to the sort
of top-down, text-based social construction that is often found among the
works of cultural historians and historians of science, rather than social
construction per se, but perhaps Rictor would like to elucidate a little.
In any event, I can warmly recommend it as a good read to any list members
who have yet to come across it. All of us are likely to have favourite
stories, not all of which make it between his pages, but it seems to me a
good general coverage. [I would have liked to see something about the
lutenist Arabella Hunt, who married a woman in 1680. And I was sorry he
didn't talk about the use of bona polari by Kenneth Williams and Hugh
Paddick, on the BBC radio show, Round the Horne, but that was doubtless
before he arrived in the UK. Two BBC tapes available, Rictor!]
More generally, however, I wondered if anyone has any thoughts on
collections of primary texts and introductory general textbooks that would
be suitable for an undergraduate audience, especially one composed of
non-historians with very limited acquaintance with the issues concerned.
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________From: "Histsex:For historians of sexuality" <histsex-owner@listbot.com>
Subject: List downtime
Message received from Listbot administration:
'ListBot will be temporarily down for planned maintenance between 11:30PM
PST July 8 through 5:30AM PST July 9, 2000. During this time, users will
not be able to log in, nor will the system send or receive mail. If
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We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause and thank you for
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Lesley
histsex-owner@listbot.com
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 15:04:19 +0100
Re a general texts reader - I think I recently suggested Bob Nye's Oxford
Reader on Sexuality. Includes primary and secondary texts and excellent
editorial contextualising.
Recent historical studies (slight blow of own trumpet):
The two volumes Eder, Hall and Hekma, Sexual Cultures in Europe (National
Histories and Themes in Sexuality) Manchester UP
and perhaps a bit too nationally and chronologically specific for your
purposes, L Hall, Sex Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880,
written as a textbook.
Details of these volumes can be found on my website
http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah/nwsflsh.htm
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
______________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 10:49:52 +0100
From: Cristina Santos <cristina@sonata.fe.uc.pt>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
At 16:18 07/07/00 -0500, David Nicholas Harley wrote:
>More generally, however, I wondered if anyone has any thoughts on
>collections of primary texts and introductory general textbooks that would
>be suitable for an undergraduate audience, especially one composed of
>non-historians with very limited acquaintance with the issues concerned.
I would highly recommend you to read basically any book from Jeffrey
Weeks. His last one, published early this year, is called Making Sexual
History, and gives a wonderful and straight-to-the-point contextualisation
of how sexuality came to be such an important issue of public discussion,
and its implications in our daily lives.
You could also take a look at that book from Steve Seidman (1997),
Queering Sociology (I'm not sure if this is the exact title, but anyway it
should be pretty close), which reflects upon how and why sex became
gradually a matter of study in social sciences. I bet your students will
enjoy both readings!
All the best,
Cris
Ana Cristina Santos
Centre for Social Studies
Apartado 3087
3001-401 Coimbra - Portugal
Phone 00 351 239855583
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 08:31:45 +1200
From: "Walter Cook" <Walter.Cook@natlib.govt.nz>
Subject: Re: Chortling chickens, Batman!
Chris, Here here !!!!
Walter
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 17:40:49 -0700
From: Jennifer Evans <be82312@binghamton.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
David,
I am trying this text out for the first time this summer but think it
should be very accessible for an undergraduate class. It is the
english translation of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's autobiography I Am
My Own Woman: The Outlaw Life of Charlotte von Malsdorf, Berlin's
Most Distinguished Transvestite (Cleis, 1995). It is an excellent
primary source documenting her life experiences in both Nazi and GDR
Berlin and can easily be coupled with Rosa von Praunheim's film of, I
believe, the same name.
Hope this helps,
Jennifer
--
Jennifer Evans
Department of History
SUNY-Binghamton
be82312@binghamton.edu
___________________________________________________________________Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2000 06:09:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: technotoy <technotoy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
If you're interested in something on 18th-century
Germany, I can suggest my own book, "Warm Brothers:
Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe", which just
appeared with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Especially the first couple of chapter might be of
interest to your undergraduates. Later ones deal more
specifically with texts from German literature.
Robert Tobin
Conrad-Blenkle-Str. 58
10407 Berlin Germany
(030) 4280 3109
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 21:43:13 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Final thought from Boy Wonder: Chortling chickens, Batman! (short)
Chris
"Boy Wonder"--toucher! Well done. But I notice that all
you could do with the rest of my post is mischaracterize its
substance, since I don't regard male-supremacist sexual
culture as a conspiracy against which resistance is futile.
If I thought that, I'd join 'em rather than trying to
preserve some way to try to beat 'em over the long haul. But
I've learned a lot from this thread -- not the least, here
at its end. It was perhaps a tactical error on my part to
resort to satire -- not wise on my part to play to the
gallery, when the gallery is yours. An important lesson for
surviving in academia. But I take away than that. And I
hope that there may be those of you out there who will hear
this side of the debate in a slightly different way, the
next time you hear it. If you do, then I've accomplished
something. If you don't -- well, I tried.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 03:44:10 EDT
Subject: Final thought? Would be a shame....
Hi Tim
Ah, now you have me regretting the tone of my last. Written perhaps in
intemperate haste.... Having read back what we have written, I willingly
concede that I have mischaracterised your attitude to social opposition and
its worth, for which I apologise. My characterisation of you as 'Boy Wonder'
was not wholly satirical (tho' you gave my the riposte on a plate <g>) since
you are so d**n articulate and have forced me to exercise grey cells I'd
forgotten existed.
To address a more substantive point: perhaps at the root of this is a
fundamental disagreement not so much about gender, as about ideology. While
neither of us subscribes to a crude top-down model of dominant power, there
is a significant degree of difference of emphasis in our understanding of the
level of homogeneity of dominant power. If I am a Foucauldian of any kind, it
is in that the operation of power is flexible, variable, even localised, and
thus resistance to dominant ideology needs to be the same. Altho' this to my
mind derives from Gramsci more than any original thinking of Foucault. Thus
my repeated harping on the term reification as requiring a proper theoretical
and political grounding.
To what extent does your version of reification leave the individual with
agency, and if so, what kind of agency? If social construction is such a deep
and thorough process, where do we get the capacity to critique the status
quo? It seems to me that an understanding of this will go some way towards
extrapolating the extent to which we are merely reproducing dominant
structures and ideas, or what room we have for developing other, oppositional
structures.
I would regret it if I have succeeded in silencing you. The gallery may be
mine, but the floor is still open to you.
Chris
___________________________________________________________________Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 02:46:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: technotoy <technotoy@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Charlotte von Mahlsdorff
I love both the book and the Rosa von Praunheim film,
which by the way is the Praunheim film that has
appealed to my American students the most, but I do
suspect one might have to take a lot of the anecdotes
with a certain grain of salt.
Robert Tobin
Conrad-Blenkle-Str. 58
10407 Berlin Germany
(030) 4280 3109
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dr Gail Hawkes" <G.Hawkes@mmu.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 14:08:52 +0100
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
I wrote and have used my 'A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality' (Open
University Press:1996 ) with my undergraduates from a variety of
disciplines on my 'Sex Course' at MMU for past five years. They seem
to find it OK, she says tentatively..
Best wishes
Gail
Dr Gail Hawkes
Department of Sociology
Manchester Metropolitan University
Tel: +44 (0) 161 247 3464
Fax. +44 (0) 161 247 6321
___________________________________________________________________From: "Barb Marshall" <bmarshall@trentu.ca>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 11:23:53 -0400
I, too, have used Gail Hawkes' text with my 3rd year course in sexuality (in
a sociology department) and can say less tentatively that they find it more
than OK! I still think the most accessible introduction is the now-dated
(and I wish he'd do a new updated edition) 1986 Jeffrey Weeks' "Sexuality"
in the old Tavistock "key concepts" series.
***************************************
Barbara L. Marshall
Associate Professor
Sociology and Women's Studies
Trent University
Peterborough, ON
K9J 7B8
phone: (705) 748-1334
fax: (705) 748-1630
bmarshall@trentu.ca
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 13:22:50 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Thanks for help with textbook query, a further note
Many thanks for all the suggestions so far, which have been filed for
future reference. Any more will be gratefully received.
However, as is perhaps unsurprising on this list, all the suggested texts
principally concerned sexuality rather than the construction of bodies or
the shaping of the family over time. I wonder if anyone has come across a
text that combines at least two of these three themes, as I am inclined to
see them as having very close connections, at every level from the
psychohistorical to the social and political. I hope to be able to put
together a survey course that will address not only gender and sexuality
but also the social institutions that shape them, and it seems to me that
family structures and learned emotions should not be omitted.
If necessary, I will just have to put together a package, containing
extracts from books such as Vol.2 of A History of the Family, ed. Andre
Burguiere et al., but students seem to prefer having complete texts for
their secondary reading, on the whole.
Less creditably, since this is a Catholic university, a course with
"Family" in the title would sell better, enabling me to lure in large
numbers of unsuspecting students and therefore to be able to team-teach it
with a modernist! I'll do anything to avoid having to do too much thinking
about industrial society!
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Re: Thanks for help with textbook query, a further note
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 16:37:56 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
David-
I just read Joanne Finkelstein's The Fashioned Self (Temple, 1991) which
is out of print but offers an interesting thesis about the perseverance
of physiognomic knowledges about the body over time. Seems to offer many
of Butler's idea about the social construction of the body in a more
digestible language. The introduction would be particularly thought
provoking in any discussion of vision, gender and fashion.
Also the anthology Writing on the Body (Conboy, Medina, Stanbury) is
still in print and offers some great pieces, difficult to easy, but all
thought provoking.
I don't know if you're into the visual at all but Tamar Garb's latest
book Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France is
highly commendable, quite accessible in language, and covers a great
scope from juste milieu to avante-garde visual culture.I have certain
minor problems with her underlying theoretical apparatus about the body
(she doesn't have a stable one) but for undergrads I'd use it for it's
integration of body-knowledges and visual-knowledges (of course enver
mutually exclusive pace Merlaeu-Ponty, Lacan, et al.)
I still find the chapter on panopticism in Foucault's Discipline and
Punish very approachable and eye-opening (pun intended? see for
yourself!) Also volume one of The History of Sexuality might be a little
difficult but the family plays a prominent role in both books as a
disciplinary agent and an institutional site of power-knowledge.
Good Luck!
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
********************************
Any victim of queer-bashing will describe how the bashers came in a group
and were all armed with baseball bats or knives--straight men have
*enormous* respect for the homosexual male. --Mark Simpson
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:12:41 +0100
Yes, David, I agree that "Round the Horne" is delightful (though I never
heard the original), and I have a copy of the BBC tapes to keep me cheerful
on long road journeys. And I'm glad you're enjoying _The Myth of the Modern
Homosexual_, serendipitously discovered on the rubbish tip of history, as it
were!
On the subject of social constructionism, you're right that I object
particularly to the structural/post-structural linguistics branch of this
school of thought. For example, I do not believe for one minute that
sexuality (or sexual orientation, or even gender identity) is merely a
textual construct mediated by ideological discourse. Far too many objective
realities preclude the possibility of treating gender as a "text" (menarche,
ovulation, menstruation, child-birth and menopause to name but a few). Of
course I appreciate that sexuality is often constrained by surrounded
discourses (notably the law and religious morality), but I do not believe
that fucking in itself is a discursive practice. Most academics work in a
scholastic tradition and are besotted with words, which is why they have
fallen into the trap of thinking that a study of anti-homosexual texts (as
in the law) is equivalent to the study of homosexuality. They have
mistakenly conflated homophobia with homosexuality, which is perhaps the
basic error of all social constructionist thinking.
But my objections to the social constructionist position go much further
than disbelief at postmodern relativism. It seems to me that the social
constructionist position is reductionist; ahistorical; theory-led rather
than evidence-based; doctrinaire; scientifically ignorant; philosophically
lacking in rigour; often unfamiliar with any history before the
mid-nineteenth century; and too politically committed to be altogether
trustworthy as good history. Of course during the past 25 years social
constructionism has successfully entrenched itself as canonical orthodoxy --
the hegemonic discourse, no less -- and it is heresy to deconstruct it. But
as Michael Young observes in his rigorously scholarly book on _King James
and the History of Homosexuality_ (2000), speaking of the conventional
wisdom propagated by the social constructionist historians of homosexuality
Alan Bray, Jeffrey Weeks, and Alan Sinfield, no matter how often their
alleged truisms are repeated, they are not true. But the tide is turning.
I should perhaps hasten to add that I am fully aware that social constructs
do indeed exist and that they play a role in socialization. I recognize, for
example, that women are often encouraged to shoe-horn themselves into
culturally defined roles. Mary Wollstonecraft's analysis of the
infantilization of females in _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ is an
excellent example of the insights offered by this understanding. But
Wollstonecraft never questioned the existence of a natural category of
woman. I don't have a great argument with social constructionists who take
this soft approach to the issue, and who do not privilege these fairly
superficial *roles* as if they were radical *constructs* for which no *basic
category* or *nature* existed. My main argument is with hard-line social
constructionists who claim that sexuality in itself and sexual orientation
in itself and gender identity in itself are nothing more than social
constructs having no basic in objective reality, and who claim that the
repression/suppression model is unusable because there is no basic nature to
be repressed/suppressed. I find this position untenable.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
Some Fallacies of Social Constructionism:
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/extracts.htm
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:40:07 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
One of the problems I have with the general thesis of Rictor Norton's
last book lies in the following sentence.
>Far too many objective
>realities preclude the possibility of treating gender as a "text" (menarche,
>ovulation, menstruation, child-birth and menopause to name but a few).
In his appeal to an 'objective reality' of the body there is a rhetorical
slippage between material reality and cultural meaning.
I don't believe that any post-modernist/structuralist is arguing that
discourse *cretaes* the material reality of the body. I mean really,
that's silly. Even Judith Butler, a radical's radical, maintains the
matter of the body in her work. However, to my mind, the Posties are
concerned with how material reality is a product of social discourse in
that all our perceptions of 'objective reality' are *mediated* by
discourse. However would we recognize an objective reality that has not
already become cultural meaningful? Is not even the notion of, and the
search for, 'objective reality' a cultural discourse? Who decides and how
is it decided what constitutes the 'objective reality' of the body? What
instruments are used to perceive it? The eyes, hands, nose, ears,
fingers? The camera? We know that these have variously been situated as
objective instruments but are nevertheless thoroughly conditioned by
social knowledge.
Rictor wants to posit a transhistorical body. Fine. On its material
reality I'll concur. But he must concede that the very form and function
of that body has changed over time, alterations which can often be traced
through social discourse. But more important, knowledge about the body
has contributed to the shaping and forming of that body. While ovulation
has probably occurred for many women for eons, the term is a relatively
recent one. How does the naming of that process alter our understanding
of the ovulating body, and ultimately lead to its potential alteration? I
find it interesting that the only transhistorical bodily processes Rictor
names are those traditionally ascribed to females; I'm sure this was not
conscious, but his unconscious invocation of a transhistorical female
body concerns me. Mary Wollstonecraft did not question the 'natural
category of woman' (Rictor: did you really type that?) because there *is*
no natural category of 'woman.' Nevertheless, she was firmly situated
within discourses in which the category of 'woman' and her 'naturality'
were unquestionable. We're not.
According to his post, "fucking is not in itself a discursive practice"
as though fucking, like menses in his schema of the transhistorical body,
were an inevitable and unalterable function of the body! Or that there is
ever, or ever could be, 'fucking' as objective reality prior to
discourse. Only a man, for whom fucking is rarely if ever an involuntary
act, could have written this! On the contrary, fucking is nothing but
discourse. Perhaps he wants to render homosexuality as merely fucking.
I'd prefer not to. It is how, by whom, in what ways that (homosexual)
fucking becomes cultural meaningful (or certain kinds and situations of
fucking becomes homosexual) that are the interesting questions. We should
not confuse the temporal perseverance or superficial similarities of
certain relations of the body with the continuity of historical meaning
associated to those relations.
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
"In episode #228, who or what is 'Foucauldian'? We have enclosed a
self-addressed stamped envelope for your convenience."
-Letter to Alison Bechdel, cartoonist of Dykes To Watch Out For
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 15:59:42 +0100
Dear Michael,
I am inclined to agree with you here, but Rictor will recall my position on
such matters from a debate from the early days of the list (on homosexuality
and its constructedness, or not). I am not too convinced, as Rictor puts
it, that 'the tide is turning'. There is surely more work to be done in the
social-constructivist turn (at least as far as medical history goes, and I
am sure that David would agree here, on the basis of his recent foray into
the topic in Social History of Medicine). Perhaps the tide is still ebbing
after all?? It should make for good fishing.
Cheerio, Ivan
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 10:57:36 -0500
From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Dear Micheal Murphy;
I too had many problems with the previous post by Rictor Norton and was
wondering how to respond. Thank you for your response. While I could
quibble with a few of your comments (especially the conscious and
unconscious), overall I agree. Well said.
There is a wonderful little book by Denise Riley that might interest some on
this list.(1988). Am I that name?: Feminism and the cagetory of women in
history. Minneapolis: University of Wisconsin Press.
Riley explores the notion of 'womanness" over time (from a European
perspective).
She argues that that there is no one 'natural' catergory of women but an
identity that is produced as an effect of power (following Foucaults notion
of power).
Dar
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 14:49:03 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor Norton writes:
I do not believe for one minute that
>sexuality (or sexual orientation, or even gender identity) is merely a
>textual construct mediated by ideological discourse. Far too many objective
>realities preclude the possibility of treating gender as a "text" (menarche,
>ovulation, menstruation, child-birth and menopause to name but a few).
David Harley:
Having recently committed the offence of an essay with both "rhetoric" and
"social construction" in the title, I am perhaps liable to be suspected of
an unduly interested position here. However, it seems to me that one does
not need to suppose that there is no "real" world out there in order to
recognize the extent to which we are unable to apprehend it without the use
of categories supplied, either by our existing culture or by our own
inventiveness. There is always a danger of retreating into the "Death and
Furniture" position, which attempts to refute social construction by citing
the Holocaust or by striking the table. The point is not that people did
not die in the gas chambers or that wooden objects do not exist, but that
our ways of thinking about such phenomena are shaped and constrained by our
concepts. Thus, the changing meanings of menstruation or menopause are
what concern us, surely, rather than the brute fact of their existence.
Rictor Norton:
Most academics work in a
>scholastic tradition and are besotted with words, which is why they have
>fallen into the trap of thinking that a study of anti-homosexual texts (as
>in the law) is equivalent to the study of homosexuality. They have
>mistakenly conflated homophobia with homosexuality, which is perhaps the
>basic error of all social constructionist thinking.
David Harley:
Rictor appears to be taking Foucauldian cultural historians for the whole
world here. Most historians do not believe that words have anything to do
with the matter. They believe that the archives are supplying them with
virtually unmediated access to the real world. On the other hand, most
social constructionists have nothing to say on the subject of sexuality,
but deal with completely different topics. As Ian Hacking has pointed out,
in "The Social Construction of What?", the expression "social construction"
is now so widely used and in so many different ways that its more rigorous
uses have been quite eclipsed.
Rictor Norton:
>But my objections to the social constructionist position go much further
>than disbelief at postmodern relativism. It seems to me that the social
>constructionist position is reductionist; ahistorical; theory-led rather
>than evidence-based; doctrinaire; scientifically ignorant; philosophically
>lacking in rigour; often unfamiliar with any history before the
>mid-nineteenth century; and too politically committed to be altogether
>trustworthy as good history.
David Harley:
I do not recognize this catolgue of offences as as a satisfactory
description of work in the social construction of scientific knowledge,
whatever problems I may have with some of the work in that field. Nor do I
see it as an adequate description of social constructionist psychology.
Rictor's argument appears to be with some writers who have adopted the
"social construction" rhetoric for the purpose of "unmasking" features of
the accustomed world for political purposes, as if showing social processes
at work somehow undermines the reality of the product of those processes.
If all our theories are social constructions, including social
constructionism itself, none of us have a sacred pinnacle from which to
throw stones.
Rictor Norton:
My main argument is with hard-line social
>constructionists who claim that sexuality in itself and sexual orientation
>in itself and gender identity in itself are nothing more than social
>constructs having no basic in objective reality, and who claim that the
>repression/suppression model is unusable because there is no basic nature to
>be repressed/suppressed. I find this position untenable.
David Harley:
This seems to be an extreme idealism based on some forms of French literary
theory rather than traditional social constructionism, which I would see as
basically neo-Kantian and therefore having rather less inclination to
dismiss out of hand the existence of something "out there" that resists our
categories. A Kantian idealism is rather more limited in its scope and
would not deny that some theories are better "fits" than others. Thus, a
social constructionist view of Copernicus would never deny the existence of
the earth we stand upon or the sun around which it rotates. A social
constructionist view of Freud would not deny that he did actually have some
patients. As far as "no objective reality" is concerned, I would suggest
that something that has been constructed socially (such as "race") is just
as real and can have just as powerful an effect in the world as anything else.
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 23:36:06 +0100
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael J. Murphy <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
To: Histsex:For historians of sexuality <histsex@listbot.com>
Date: 13 July 2000 15:46
>
>In [Norton's] appeal to an 'objective reality' of the body there is a
rhetorical
>slippage between material reality and cultural meaning.
>I don't believe that any post-modernist/structuralist is arguing that
>discourse *creates* the material reality of the body. I mean really,
>that's silly. Even Judith Butler, a radical's radical, maintains the
>matter of the body in her work. However, to my mind, the Posties are
>concerned with how material reality is a product of social discourse in
>that all our perceptions of 'objective reality' are *mediated* by
>discourse.
It is not true that all perceptions are mediated by discourse. If I want to
share my perceptions with you I will employ the facility of e-mail, as being
quite an effecient means of communication in the circumstances, but my
perceptions precede the use of e-mail and are not mediated by e-mail. I can
perceive a woman in the advanced stage of pregnancy without any discourse
mediating my perception. And more to the point, the woman will be aware of
this *objective reality* quite a lot sooner than me, and without any
mediation by discourse. In fact, a very large number of our perceptions
(unless we are academics) are sensual rather than discursive. Material
reality is not a product of social discourse. Social discourse can have an
effect on what value we may attach to that material reality, but it will not
alter the basic constituents of that material reality. A woman will continue
to menstruate regardless of whether or not her culture has a taboo regarding
the "uncleanness" of menstruating women.
> However would we recognize an objective reality that has not
>already become cultural meaningful?
By innumerable ways, experienced by us every day. I will begin to recognize
a cold (if not worse) by the first signs of a sore throat. Talking about the
weather may have cultural value, but I will recognize the coldness of an
east wind without the interposition of either culture or discourse, and I
will recognize it even without attaching any "meaning" to it because I can
recognize it as an objective reality that has no ideational content. In
fact, recognizing objective realities *before* they are determined to have
cultural meaning is one of the basic methods of empirical investigation.
> Is not even the notion of, and the
>search for, 'objective reality' a cultural discourse?
People do not normally "search for" objective reality. We simply experience
it. The experience of reality is not a cultural discourse.
>Who decides and how
>is it decided what constitutes the 'objective reality' of the body? What
>instruments are used to perceive it? The eyes, hands, nose, ears,
>fingers? The camera? We know that these have variously been situated as
>objective instruments but are nevertheless thoroughly conditioned by
>social knowledge.
>
No one "decides" what objective reality is: it just *is* whether or not we
have understood it or measured it. There are hundred of measuring
instruments and recording devices, that vary in the precision of their
measurements, and large masses of recorded empirical data can now be
analysed by computers so that we no longer have to depend upon the intuitive
fantasies of aprioristic theorizing.
>Rictor wants to posit a transhistorical body. Fine. On its material
>reality I'll concur. But he must concede that the very form and function
>of that body has changed over time, alterations which can often be traced
>through social discourse.
Bodies do evolve in the very long term, but the form and function of the
human body probably has not changed for 40,000 years, nor is it likely to
change much before we pollute the planet sufficiently to bring evolution to
an end and render the debate meaningless. Virtually all changes in the body
have occurred due to evolutionary principles (including chance mutation),
and are usually tied to increasing one's procreative chances of survival. No
alteration in the body has been caused by social discourse. (Of course one
can alter one's own body, e.g. through piercing or tattooing or whatever,
but these will not be carried over into one's offspring, and therefore
cannot be said to have altered *the* body.)
>But more important, knowledge about the body
>has contributed to the shaping and forming of that body. While ovulation
>has probably occurred for many women for eons, the term is a relatively
>recent one. How does the naming of that process alter our understanding
>of the ovulating body, and ultimately lead to its potential alteration?
The recent naming of ovulation is wholly irrelevant to either its existence
or process. The discussion of it within a scientific framework also has not
altered the lay-person's understanding of it, and is not likely to alter its
process. In earlier societies when not so many clothes were worn, ovulation
was easily recognized without a naming discourse: the pubes swell a bit and
get red, the whole body gets a bit fuller and more symmetrical (all bodies
are asymmetrical; during ovulation this assymetry is lessened, making women
look "more healthy", which is an advantage for procreation), the sex
pheromones are released and more readily smelled by males. The internal
process of ovulation temporarily (and cyclically) alters the female body to
send the clear signal to potential mates that now is the best time for a
successful impregnation. Today the whole thing is more easily observed when
cats or bitches go into heat. "Naming" has no relevance to the situation.
>I find it interesting that the only transhistorical bodily processes Rictor
>names are those traditionally ascribed to females; I'm sure this was not
>conscious, but his unconscious invocation of a transhistorical female
>body concerns me.
Actually, it was conscious, and quite deliberate.
>>"Mary Wollstonecraft did not question the 'natural
>>category of woman' (Rictor: did you really type that?) because there *is*
>no natural category of 'woman.' Nevertheless, she was firmly situated
>within discourses in which the category of 'woman' and her 'naturality'
>were unquestionable. We're not.
>
One reason for this example was to make the point that it is quite feasible
to adopt an "essentialist" view and nevertheless be fully supporting of
"women's" rights. Wollstonecraft held that in the case of women "art
smothered nature". The nature/nurture controversy was as common during her
day as during ours (and is of course still part of the
essentialist/constructionist debate). Historically, most advocates of
women's rights and women's suffrage were essentialist. Progressive arguments
for social change can be advocated by essentialists as well as by social
constructionists.
>According to his post, "fucking is not in itself a discursive practice"
>as though fucking, like menses in his schema of the transhistorical body,
>were an inevitable and unalterable function of the body! Or that there is
>ever, or ever could be, 'fucking' as objective reality prior to
>discourse. Only a man, for whom fucking is rarely if ever an involuntary
>act, could have written this! On the contrary, fucking is nothing but
>discourse.
You've lost me here.
> Perhaps he wants to render homosexuality as merely fucking.
>I'd prefer not to.
Quite true, it's not merely fucking, but it's a shame to leave fucking out
of consideration. It is also a mistake, I believe, to substitute "power" for
fucking in the analysis of sexuality. Because after the political or
cultural analysis is completed, you are still left with the factors that
make something distinctively *sexual* -- for which discourse cannot
adequately account.
> It is how, by whom, in what ways that (homosexual)
>fucking becomes cultural meaningful (or certain kinds and situations of
>fucking becomes homosexual) that are the interesting questions.
The world is full of interesting questions, and the biological constituent
of sexual orientation (including non-sexual and non-cultural factors such as
finger length ratio) is one of those interesting questions.
> We should
>not confuse the temporal perseverance or superficial similarities of
>certain relations of the body with the continuity of historical meaning
>associated to those relations.
>
>Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
>Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
>Washington University, St. Louis
>mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
>
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 18:11:40 -0700
From: chris dummitt <cdummitt@sfu.ca>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Christopher Dummitt writes:
I find Rictor's vision of an apolitical and non-theoretical empiricism very
troubling. I would like to say 'naive' but clearly much thought has gone
into the position so 'troubling' is the more appropriate term. Empiricism
IS a theory. The notion that one can experience the world 'as it really
is' is itself a theoretical notion that is impossible to prove except by
circular logic (ie by invoking a belief in our ability to perceive the
world unmediated by cultural discourse to prove our ability to perceive the
world
unmediated by cultural discourse).
This logic is displayed in the exchange below:
Michael J. Murphy wrote:
>
>> However would we recognize an objective reality that has not
>>already become cultural meaningful?
Rictor Norton wrote:
>By innumerable ways, experienced by us every day. I will begin to recognize
>a cold (if not worse) by the first signs of a sore throat. Talking about the
>weather may have cultural value, but I will recognize the coldness of an
>east wind without the interposition of either culture or discourse, and I
>will recognize it even without attaching any "meaning" to it because I can
>recognize it as an objective reality that has no ideational content. In
>fact, recognizing objective realities *before* they are determined to have
>cultural meaning is one of the basic methods of empirical investigation.
Christopher Dummitt writes:
It seems to me that these examples - sickness and weather - could equally
prove the social constructionist argument. I wouldn't (and I don't know of
any other social constructionist who would) deny that sickness and weather
actually exist. But I would say that our 'experience' of them is not prior
to our understanding of them. The two processes occur simultaneously. You
can't separate between the event and the meaning. Take the (admittedly
extreme) comparison of a cold virus that infects both a medieval English
peasant and myself. I'm perfectly willing to admit that the virus could
be the same. But my experience of the event will be radically different
than my unfortunate predecessor - our understanding of appropriate
treatment, causes of the illnes, etc right on down the line to the feelings
of hope, despair, pain, suffering. We both experience a cold but our
experience is in no way identical. (And here the difference between similar
and identical is key. It seems to me that a major difference between social
constructionists and their critics is that the critics are quite happy with
similarities while the social constructionist seeks more precision). Both
of our understanding of colds are culturally mediated. And that cultural
mediation simultaneously, along with the virus, creates our experience of
the cold. There is no 'before' and 'after'.
I'm also perfectly willing to admit that my argument is politically and
theoretically based. What I'm not willing to admit is that Rictor's
argument is not.
>
>
Christopher Dummitt
Department of History
Simon Fraser University
off: (604) 291-3150
fax: (604) 291-5837
cdummitt@sfu.ca
___________________________________________________________________From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 23:37:19 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
May I suggest that most of this debate is between academics with
categories and terminology so ossified they cannot possibly communicate, much
less debate profitably with each other.
May I also suggest a Darwinian model for language and categories (I hope
Darwin isn't too essentialist)? Various animals have ridiculous appendages
and displays for mating purposes, but the displays can only interfere with
survival so much before they begin to eliminate themselves. Likewise
adaptations to one environmental limitation can bend only so far before they
interfere with other necessary adaptations. Natural selection puts some
pragmatic limits on variability.
So it is with language and categories. Whatever categories we develop as
a culture, we still have a biologically and chemically determined reality
with which these categories must correspond to some degree. The categories
can depart from the realities only so far before they cause more problems
than the culture can bear.
So, when the categories are critiqued, the analysis should retain a
certain respect for them -- they survive and thrive in conditions too
rigorous for academic reconstructions. That doesn't make these categories
absolute; they can and should be critiqued. But maybe sometimes these common
categories retain some grasp of reality which academic reconstructions vainly
try to pretend away.
Maybe, huh?
Jim Miller
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 10:38:49 +0100
David Harley may well be correct in his suggestion that my summary of social
constructionism tars too many people with too broad a brush. It is probably
quite true that most practising social constructionists cluster at the soft
end of the scale rather than at the hard-line cutting edge. I think it is
also true that many people call themselves "social constructionists" without
really understanding the principles they are invoking by using that label.
This was true of anthropologists at the end of the 1980s, in the view of
Carole Vance:
"Although work in the cultural influence model contributed to the
development of social construction theory, there is a sharp break between
them in many respects. This different has not been recognized by many
anthropologists still working within the cultural influence tradition.
Indeed, many mistakenly seem to regard these new developments as
theoretically compatible, even continuous with earlier work. Some have
assimilated terms or phrases (like 'social construction' or 'cultural
construction') in their work, yet their analytic frames still contain many
unexamined essentialist elements. It is not the case that the cultural
influence model, because it recognizes cultural variation, is the same as
social construction theory." [basically, "construction" is a much more
radical concept than "influence") (Carole S. Vance, 'Anthropology
rediscovers sexuality: A Theoretical Comment', originally a paper presented
at the panel 'Anthropology Rediscovers Sex' at the 1988 annual meeting of
the American Anthropological Association.)
You [D.H.] claim that "most social constructionists have nothing to say on
the
subject of sexuality, but deal with completely different topics". That may
well be true. But within the field of sexuality studies, which is the
subject of this list, it seems to me that social constructionism looms
large. For instance, _Culture, Society and Sexuality_, edited by Richard
Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 1999),
designed as a textbook for the British market, reprints all of the classic
social constructionist texts published in the 1980s, with the explicit
aim of promoting this approach to the study of sexuality. Parker is a
hard-line constructionist, Aggleton somewhat less hard-line and less
doctrinaire. _Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a
Postmodern World_, edited again by Richard Parker and by J. H. Gagnon (New
York and London: Routledge, 1995) did pretty much the same thing a bit
earlier, for the American market. Gagnon's social constructionist theory of
sexual "scripting" (developed in the late 1970s) is, I understand, still
quite important to the thinking of contemporary theorists of sexuality. The
most recent book on sexuality in general (as opposed to homosexuality
specifically) that I have read is _English Sexualities, 1700-1800_ by Tim
Hitchcock in Macmillan's Social History in Perspective Series, published in
1997. Most of the writers reviewed by Hitchcock are hard-line
constructionists (e.g. Thomas Laqueur), and Hitchcock himself is a very
hard-line constructionist, who regards bourgeois ideology as the sole
driving force of sexuality. I thought this book took "problematization" to
the acme of absurdity, and was pretty well worthless.
I discussed this issue on another list, and can report that Vern Bullough,
author of _Sexual Variance in Society and History_ (which was published in
1976, but Bullough is still very active and productive in the field of
sexual studies), took the sanguine view that the history of sexuality is
alive and well and its practitioners are relatively unscathed by
Foucauldianism. However, it seems to me that a great many recent historians
of sexuality -- or, more accurately, theorists of the history of sexuality --
regard Foucault's work as a "threshhold" that has "utterly transformed" our
historical understanding of sexuality. Thus Tim Hitchock, in the work I
mentioned above, asserts that "Perhaps the greatest single influence [in the
history of sexual desire] can be found in Michel Foucault's incomplete
writings on the topic. . . . By reformulating the history of sexuality,
Foucault in effect allowed historians to see sexual desire itself as a
product of a particular moment and a particular culture. . . . Foucault's
influence has been profound and universal, and . . . has created a
relatively clear new trajectory for the history of sexuality." etc. etc.
Hitchcock systematically favours the theories of social constructionist
historical theorists such as Henry Abelove and Thomas Laqueur over more
conventional historians of sexuality such as Lawrence Stone and Edward
Shorter. Laqueur in works such as _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud_ (1990) had argued that elite medical discourse constructed
the two-body difference between men and women in an epistemic "shift"
between 1780 and 1820. But reactions to Laqueur easily demonstrated that the
two-body differentiation existed much earlier, in popular as well as elite
"discourse", so Hitchcock, who regards Laqueur as a second Foucault and
desperately holds onto Laqueur's "insights" even while he is forced to
acknowledge the flaws in his idol, has grudgingly modified this to a
"150-year shift" -- though how a 150-year period call be called a "shift"
beats me. It's absolutely fascinating to see how Hitchcock "modifies" the
hard-line social constructionist theories that have been demolished by
empiricist historical studies, without acknowledging that the theories were
no good to start with and should simply be jettisoned rather than
"modified."
In the field of gay and lesbian history (which is my main interest), it
seems to me that hard-line social constructionism still flows pretty
strongly (as Ivan Dalley Crozier suggested). One of the most recent books I
have (tried to) read in this field is _Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures,
and
Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance_, edited by J. Blackmore
and G. S. Hutcheson (paperback edition, Duke University Press, pub. late
1999). About 80 percent of the articles in this book are unadulterated
Foucauldianism. Only three of the fifteen essays take a more-or-less
traditional historical approach and suggest, somewhat hesitantly, that
sexuality is a process of being or experience *despite* rather than *in
response to* ideologies.
All the other essays suggest that sexuality is a "deconstructive space",
that is, a "site" for "contesting" "normative discourse". One essay
problematizes the discursive space occupied jointly by ethnicity and
sexuality. Another essay theorizes the "points of production of queer
sexuality that all respond in some manner to the presence of the cultural
other". Another essay "unpacks and reapproaches" the concept of masculinity
by using "the confluence of medieval studies, feminism, gender theory, and
cultural studies." Another essay examines the medieval Iberian discourse of
male friendship to reveal the "problematic negotiations and interstitial
constructions that appear inevitably along the edges of cultural frontiers."
Hutcheson's own essay is founded on Foucault's theory of sodomy as an
"utterly confused category" which "exposes those points where normativity
shows its cracks and queerness begins to break through." Another essay
examines the construction of sodomy as the "inevitable intersection with
discourses of power and social order during Spain's turbulent passage into
the modern age," circa 1460. Another essay theorizes "the semiotics of
phallic aggression and anal penetration as male agonistic ritual". Oh dear,
oh dear. Virtually every page in this book on medieval Iberian sexuality
contains the three words "discursive," "site" and "problematize" and is
almost unreadable.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 11:09:33 +0100
Dear Rictor,
Why can't I resist??
The problem, to my mind, with Laqueur's work (hereafter L)lies very much in
the way I would approach the question of social construction. Whilst L does
speak of the way that the body, or different historical understandings of
it, relies on different epistemes in order to be understood, something which
he thinks provides a better example than astronomy for Thomas Kuhn's ideas
of incommensurability between paradigms (an idea I find dubious, as it
ignores many years of post-Kuhnian sociology of knowledge which tries to
speak in terms of processes in micro-communities rather than large-scale,
catastrophic ruptures), he does not (a related point) actually address the
way that different knowledge claims are constructed within sui generis
knowledge-making communities. Hence there is a propensity to pick and
choose discourses from different periods, and different traditions of
practice, which ammounts to a pastiche of ideas which noone at the time was
ever able to think (yes, that was a nod to Quentin Skinner). In other
words, the two sex body comes from Columbo, Shakespeare, Freud, etc. Why
the assumption that it is the same body (of knowledge?), I am not sure. L's
history of ideas approach is not, to my mind, the ideal form of social
construction; it is this: analyse how different knowledge-making communities
(fields, traditions of practice, paradigms, whatever) play in a particular
field with a set grammar (which they have ben trained into, and which they
are more than capable of changing once they get into a position of
authority). Also analyse the way that these fields intersect each other,
the way that knowledge claims and discursive objects are reaticulated into
new fields, or barred from them, depending on the object/claim. It is in
this sense that knowledge of things, and hence the things themselves--as
they cannot be understood, or acted upon, socially or otherwise, unless they
are conceivable--is constructed. This says nothing about under-lying
realities, or the material world, or whatever. But these are not the things
of knowledge, not directly, anyway. Does this make me a hard or a soft
social constructividst, or just an excited one?
Please excuse the too numerous parenthetical statements, but it was Proust's
birthday on the tenth.
Cheerio, Ivan
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 11:11:15 +0100
ps, Rictor complained: "though how a 150-year period call be called a
"shift" beats me"
Me too, Rictor. A complete lack of historical sociology is the only way I
can think of it...
IJDC
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 09:12:03 -0400
From: Sheila McManus <smcmanus@yorku.ca>
Subject: citation help
Does anyone happen to have the full citation for Alice Dreger's "Doubtful
Sex: The fate of the hermaphrodite in Victorian medicine" at their
fingertips? I don't have time to get to a library to track it down, I'm
not having any luck on-line, and the bookstore needs it quickly to process
my reading kit - help!
Sheila McManus
* * * * * * * * * *
Sheila McManus
Ph.D. Candidate and Sessional Instructor, Department of History, York
University
smcmanus@yorku.ca
___________________________________________________________________
Subject: Re: citation help
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 08:30:42 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
This appeared in Victorian Studies v38 n3 (Spring 1995): 335-70.
>Does anyone happen to have the full citation for Alice Dreger's "Doubtful
>Sex: The fate of the hermaphrodite in Victorian medicine" at their
>fingertips?
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
"I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." -Blanche Dubois
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 09:39:09 -0400
From: Sheila McManus <smcmanus@yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: citation help
Please ignore my last post - some one has already come to my rescue!
Sheila McManus
* * * * * * * * * *
Sheila McManus
Ph.D. Candidate and Sessional Instructor, Department of History, York
University
smcmanus@yorku.ca
__________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 15:45:53 +0100
>
>Christopher Dummitt writes:
>
>
>It seems to me that these examples - sickness and weather - could equally
>prove the social constructionist argument. I wouldn't (and I don't know of
>any other social constructionist who would) deny that sickness and weather
>actually exist. But I would say that our 'experience' of them is not prior
>to our understanding of them. The two processes occur simultaneously. You
>can't separate between the event and the meaning. Take the (admittedly
>extreme) comparison of a cold virus that infects both a medieval English
>peasant and myself. I'm perfectly willing to admit that the virus could
>be the same. But my experience of the event will be radically different
>than my unfortunate predecessor - our understanding of appropriate
>treatment, causes of the illnes, etc right on down the line to the feelings
>of hope, despair, pain, suffering. We both experience a cold but our
>experience is in no way identical. (And here the difference between similar
>and identical is key. It seems to me that a major difference between social
>constructionists and their critics is that the critics are quite happy with
>similarities while the social constructionist seeks more precision). Both
>of our understanding of colds are culturally mediated. And that cultural
>mediation simultaneously, along with the virus, creates our experience of
>the cold. There is no 'before' and 'after'.
>
No, Chris, you're quite wrong about this. You have misunderstood the
difference between speculation about a hidden cause, with experience of the
observable phenomena, and concluded, incorrectly, that the latter changes
whenever the former changes. The fact of the matter is that the symptoms
experienced by a common cold sufferer who is a Christian Scientist (or a
medieval person) will be identical to the symptoms experienced by a common
cold sufferer who is a practising 20th. cent. physician. Each of them will
experience, for example, an identical range of sniffles and an increase in b
ody temperature, and anyone can predict with a high degree of accuracy at
what stage of the cold these symptoms will appear and what progress they
will take. Neither the existence nor the identification of these symptoms,
nor their progress, is dependent upon discourse or theory or culturally
mediated "understanding". Their experience of the cold will be identical
whatever their interpretation. A runny nose is a runny nose no matter what
it is understood to signify, and, more to the point, an empiricist
methodology is more likely to result in a cure than an aprioristic theory.
There is a very famous study of King George III which established beyond
doubt that he suffered from porphyria rather than "madness". This conclusion
was made possible precisely because his physicians recorded all his symptoms
very carefully though they didn't understand what they "meant". Modern
physicians reexamined the record of these symptoms, such as red-coloured
urine, and precisely because symptoms do not change in response to our
"understanding" of them, coupled with blood analysis of King George's
descendants in the royal family (blood also is not culturally mediated),
they were able to recognize the objective reality of his disease. Do modern
physicians have a greater grasp on the objective causes of symptoms of
diseases, and can they diagnose diseases more accurately than their medieval
colleagues? Yes, and Yes.
The analogy is pertinent to our discussion, insofar as, if it is true that
the symptoms of sexual arousal are identical across cultures and across
time-spans (and across species), and I believe that that is demonstrably
true, then it seems feasible that underlying sexual desires are
transhistorical and transcultural.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
From: TallSkinny@aol.com
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 11:17:42 EDT
Subject: Thanks: what is pornography? and what is the objection?
Thank you all for letting me view this academic discussion ... and the latter
discussion which I think is merely another layer concerning the
"intentionality" associated with the original discussion. Regardless,
wonderful! ... it confirms the edge I felt was there and the idea
objectification.
-jb
http://members.aol.com/artproject
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 12:18:37 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor Norton wrote:
I can
>perceive a woman in the advanced stage of pregnancy without any discourse
>mediating my perception.
David Harley:
The Wolfboy of Aveyron or Rousseau's Emile would not have access to the
concepts "woman", "advanced stage" or "pregnancy". We need these concepts
in order to order the inchoate sense impressions that assail us whenever we
open our eyes. Each concept has a cluster of cultural associations which
gives our perception meaning. Samuel Johnson did not refute Bishop
Berkeley by kicking a stone, in part because he already knew what "a stone"
was.
Rictor Norton:
>I will begin to recognize
>a cold (if not worse) by the first signs of a sore throat. Talking about the
>weather may have cultural value, but I will recognize the coldness of an
>east wind without the interposition of either culture or discourse, and I
>will recognize it even without attaching any "meaning" to it because I can
>recognize it as an objective reality that has no ideational content.
David Harley:
"A cold" has to be defined and given meaning in order to be experienced.
Otherwise one simply has a collection of incomprehensible sensations. We
learn at an early age what "coldness" might signify, namely that we might
"catch a chill", a concept that derives from a medical system now defunct.
As for the "eastness" of the wind...
Rictor Norton:
In
>fact, recognizing objective realities *before* they are determined to have
>cultural meaning is one of the basic methods of empirical investigation.
David Harley:
Or rather, one of the foundational myths of empirical investigation, which
itself is heavily invested with cultural meaning.
Rictor Norton:
>No one "decides" what objective reality is: it just *is* whether or not we
>have understood it or measured it. There are hundred of measuring
>instruments and recording devices, that vary in the precision of their
>measurements, and large masses of recorded empirical data can now be
>analysed by computers so that we no longer have to depend upon the intuitive
>fantasies of aprioristic theorizing.
David Harley:
A great deal of rhetorical effort has to go into establishing what it is
that these devices are measuring before they can be used and understood.
Once this has happened, they are "black boxed" as though their functions
were as obvious as that of a hammer (which is also a complex cultural
artefact).
Rictor Norton:
>No alteration in the body has been caused by social discourse.
David Harley:
I think I must be suffering from a humoral imbalance, caused by my paying
insufficient attention to the six non-naturals. Such grinding realism
makes me rather melancholy.
Rictor Norton:
>The recent naming of ovulation is wholly irrelevant to either its existence
>or process.
David Harley:
But not to the practice of contraception, which makes having a female body
rather a different experience than it might otherwise be.
Rictor Norton:
The discussion of it within a scientific framework also has not
>altered the lay-person's understanding of it
David Harley:
Really? Does the idea that women produce half of the genetic material
involved in conception differ not at all from the widely popularized
Aristotelian notion that women are merely passive vessels for the male seed?
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 12:30:39 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Jim Miller wrote:
> May I also suggest a Darwinian model for language and categories?
...Whatever categories we develop as
>a culture, we still have a biologically and chemically determined reality
>with which these categories must correspond to some degree. The categories
>can depart from the realities only so far before they cause more problems
>than the culture can bear.
David Harley:
In his recent book, "Mad Travellers", Ian Hacking proposes the notion of an
"ecological niche" for psychiatric diagnoses. Although I would be
reluctant to abandon all talk of "interests" and "construction", this
proposal has some utility for all concepts. Ideas work well in the
appropriate environment. They founder when the context changes, and this
context may equally include shifts in religion and philosophy or
socio-economic structures. Even the accumulation of Rictor Norton's
beloved empirical observations has been known to bring down venerable
theories, which worked pretty well for centuries.
David Harley
Dept. of History
219 O'Shaughnessy
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame IN 46556
219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 13:02:31 -0500
From: Gail Bederman <Gail.Bederman.1@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
I've been enjoying this thoughtful debate between
"body-realists" and "cultural constructivists." I've engaged in
similar debates at other times, and have been ready to go to the mat
for the "cultural constructivist" approach, which I use in my own
research and teaching.
At some point, however, I'm wondering whether it doesn't pay
to step back and ask what's at stake in these questions, both
politically and intellectually. For most historians, isn't it
primarily a question of *what one wants to know*, and *why one wants
to know it*, rather than ultimate "truth claims?"
To take Rictor Norton's example of a cold: Were I to study
the way "colds" are treated historically, I would be interested, not
in the symptoms per-se, but in the changing ways the sniffling
sufferers were treated and understood. What does this tell us about
the ways people understood what bodies were, how they worked, how to
treat bodily weaknesses, etc. etc. My interest is in who people
think they are, and how they behave in consequence of who they think
they are. I'm not as interested in things that can't be changed as a
result of human effort or understanding, because these are things I
can't do anything about.
Similarly with sexuality. Looking at things like the
mechanics of vaginal lubrication or the rate of parturition simply
doesn't answer the questions that I have about the ways sexuality
varies over time. I'm interested in those historical variations
because they help me answer the questions I, myself, ask about
sexuality. I suppose I'm a bit of a humanist (dangerous thing for one
to admit these days!) I enjoy looking at variations in ideas,
behaviors, assumptions. It makes me question my own assumptions
about what is "natural," which helps me think outside the box. It
helps me understand what is changeable, politically, about gender and
sexual relations in the US, where I live. These are probably my
larger goals in doing history (other than good scholarship), and they
lead me to ask particular kinds of question.
But these are the questions of a cultural constructionist.
My sense is that historians who reject cultural construction
theory often ask different types questions of because they have
different political assumptions, as well as different intellectual
passions. In other words, for them, there is a distinct pay-off in
insisting on the biological nature of sex, because it helps them
figure out something which they find historically, politically, and
intellectually useful.
Unfortunately, I know fewer of these scholars, so can't can't
really speak for them. I'd like to hear them speak for themselves.
(Rictor?....)
But many students I've known dislike the idea that sexuality
is culturally constructed because of the way they have come to terms
with homosexuality (their own or others'). They rely, here, on an
assumption that bodily differences ought not be punished, whereas
moral transgressions should be punished. For them, homosexuality is
analogous to race and gender, which they likewise understand
biologically. Therefore, for them to say "Homosexuality is
biological and does not change over time" absolves gays and lesbians
of any moral failing. Conversely, for them to say that the meanings
of same-sex love are culturally constructed and change over time
resonates too strongly with right-wing Christian ideologues who say
that the prevalence of homosexuality shows that western civilization
is about to fall into decadence, like ancient Rome. What these
body-oriented students want to see, in contrast to social
construction historians, is that "there have always been homosexuals."
(I, cultural constructionist that I am, prefer to study how
peoples' understandings of same-sex relations has changed over time,
because for me this discredits the televangelists' claims that
"homosexuality" has any one meaning at all, good or bad, let alone as
a barometer of decadence.)
Which leads me back to my original question: isn't this
really just a matter of what historical questions we're asking, and
why? After all, most of us are not professional epistemologists.
My guess is most historians who ask these kinds of epistemological
questions (and I wish more did!) do so for instrumental reasons:
They help us answer the particular questions which motivate us to
study.
If I'm right, I'd like to hear from the
non-cultural-construction historians here. I think it might help us
talk to each other, rather than past each other on this issue. What
kinds of questions about sexuality and gender does rejecting cultural
construction theory help you to ask that adopting cultural
construction terms would prevent?
Gail Bederman
Associate Professor of History
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46656
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 13:43:37 -0500
From: David Nicholas Harley <David.N.Harley.4@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor Norton:
A runny nose is a runny nose no matter what
>it is understood to signify, and, more to the point, an empiricist
>methodology is more likely to result in a cure than an aprioristic theory.
David Harley:
We had better ignore the ontological theory of disease, then, and forget
about bacteria and viruses unless they can be not only shown under the
microscope in each individual case but also shown to be producing the
symptoms in question.
Rictor Norton:
>There is a very famous study of King George III which established beyond
>doubt that he suffered from porphyria rather than "madness". This conclusion
>was made possible precisely because his physicians recorded all his symptoms
>very carefully though they didn't understand what they "meant". Modern
>physicians reexamined the record of these symptoms, such as red-coloured
>urine, and precisely because symptoms do not change in response to our
>"understanding" of them, coupled with blood analysis of King George's
>descendants in the royal family (blood also is not culturally mediated),
>they were able to recognize the objective reality of his disease.
David Harley:
It is not generally noticed that the book in question was produced by two
authors, mother and son, who wished to undermine the belief in the reality
of "mental" disease. Hunter and Macfarlane did not believe that any
diseases existed which had no known physiological cause. He was in the
habit of sending away severely phobic patients because their affliction was
not real. In the book in question, they wished to show that King George
was not "mad" but suffering from a previously little known disease. They
were pretty cavalier with their use of evidence about him, and even more so
in their use of evidence about his ancestors among the Stuart dynasty.
This book rests entirely upon a theoretical assumption, that there is no
such thing as mental illness.
Rictor Norton:
>The analogy is pertinent to our discussion, insofar as, if it is true that
>the symptoms of sexual arousal are identical across cultures and across
>time-spans (and across species), and I believe that that is demonstrably
>true, then it seems feasible that underlying sexual desires are
>transhistorical and transcultural.
David Harley:
That depends on how selectively you choose your other cultures and species,
and how narrow a range of phenomena count as indicating sexual arousal. I
hope the praying mantis is not going to used for evolutionary psychology.
I like my Just So Stories to have happy endings.
By the way, I don't suppose that the notion that "underlying sexual desires
are transhistorical and transcultural" would have anything aprioristic
about it, would it? I can see why Rictor might want this to be the case
(and his previous example of the alleged finger length variation suggests
that he might go for genetic determinism), but it does rather seem to
preclude the possibility that there is significant variation across time
and space. Just how malleable would Rictor allow human nature to be?
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 20:51:07 +0100
David Harley writes, inter alia:
>
>The Wolfboy of Aveyron or Rousseau's Emile would not have access to the
>concepts "woman", "advanced stage" or "pregnancy". We need these concepts
>in order to order the inchoate sense impressions that assail us whenever we
>open our eyes. Each concept has a cluster of cultural associations which
>gives our perception meaning. Samuel Johnson did not refute Bishop
>Berkeley by kicking a stone, in part because he already knew what "a stone"
>was.
>
>"A cold" has to be defined and given meaning in order to be experienced.
>Otherwise one simply has a collection of incomprehensible sensations. We
>learn at an early age what "coldness" might signify, namely that we might
>"catch a chill", a concept that derives from a medical system now defunct.
>
>
No, David, you're quite wrong about all this. I do not thrust my hand into
an open flame for precisely the same reasons that my cat does not put her
paw into an open flame: because she and I have direct experience of the
objective world as it really is, unmediated by cultural associations. Dr
Johnson's cat Hodge and I are in entire agreement on this issue.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 18:40:43 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor said <>
So what sense do we make of the three year old child who will blithely (try
to) stick their hand into a flame and only learn not to by direct experience
(always culturally mediated) or repeated adult intervention? Perhaps the
obvious -- that cats are a more evolved species.
Chris W
___________________________________________________________________
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 19:48:26 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
Chris,
Of course this goes without saying! Which is not to say that our
perception of their superiority is not culturally mediated!
Mike Murphy
> what sense do we make of the three year old child who will blithely (try
>to) stick their hand into a flame and only learn not to by direct experience
>(always culturally mediated) or repeated adult intervention? Perhaps the
>obvious -- that cats are a more evolved species.
>
>Chris W
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 09:18:47 +0100
Ivan says:
>It is in
>this sense that " This says nothing about under-lying
>realities, or the material world, or whatever. But these are not the
things
>of knowledge, not directly, anyway. Does this make me a hard or a soft
>social constructividst, or just an excited one?
Even though you appreciate the limitations of Laqueur's approach, this
particular statement makes you a hard-line social constructionist (or
constructivist, a term that some prefer). The assertion that "knowledge of
things, *and hence the things themselves*, is constructed" is an error in
logic. Even if the first claim were true, it does not follow that the second
claim is therefore true. This is the standard irrationalist, anti-science
position of extremist relativism.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 08:56:33 +0100
Chris W. said:
>
>So what sense do we make of the three year old child who will blithely (try
>to) stick their hand into a flame and only learn not to by direct
experience
>(always culturally mediated) or repeated adult intervention? Perhaps the
>obvious -- that cats are a more evolved species.
>
The point of my example was precisely this: that I and my cat understand the
danger of fire because we will have learned this from the direct experience
of being burned. The direct experience of being burned and the knowledge
built upon that experience are not culturally mediated. A child will not
stop trying to put his or her hand into a flame because his or her mother
says its dangerous (culture), but because the child will learn by direct
experience that it really *is* dangerous (objective reality). It's because
of their experience of the real world that all children in all cultures
learn that flames are dangerous despite the widely differing values concepts
held by their cultures, and their experience of the pain of being burned
will be identical no matter how their societies define the concept of
"danger".
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 04:57:28 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor writes:
<< A child will not
stop trying to put his or her hand into a flame because his or her mother
says its dangerous (culture) >>
Hmm. The child will never come across a flame except in a cultural context.
It will be surrounded by role models of how to react/relate to flame. It is
not necessary for the child to have direct experience to prevent it from
trying the experience -- repeated reinforcement from parents/adults will
shape fear and/or fascination. The child who plays with fire will invariably
do it in private because it knows it is naughty and forbidden.
I'm also recalling how one of my cats languidly dipped her tail into a candle
flame and blithely set herself on fire, untroubled by the heat or the
smell....
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 10:36:18 +0100
David Harley's comment on Macalpine and Hunter's _George III and the
Mad-Business_ (1969), reproduced below, attempts to problematize the value
of their book by unfairly suggesting that they had a secret agenda in
writing it. But the fact is that they make it quite clear throughout the
book that they have an argument to pick with modern psychiatric theory, and
their position is very clearly expressed in the book, by no means hidden
beneath the surface, e.g.: "Kraepelin's ideas, like Bleuler's and Freud's
[i.e. early definers of the concept of mental illness], were time-bound, and
his system, like all nosological systems which are not based on knowledge of
disease process or cause, was doomed to be eroded by scientific evidence. .
. . Psychiatrists had to concentrate on mental symptoms and psychopathology
because on the organic side they could make no headway until medical
advances gave them the knowledge and the tools." In no sense does the book
"rest entirely upon a theoretical assumption, that there is no such thing as
mental illness", nor does the book even reach such a bald conclusion. What
it does is demonstrate the limitations and inaccuracy of constructs
developed on the basis of theoretical fantasy and intuition rather than
objective scientific knowledge. Roy Porter of the Wellcome Institute,
incidentally, felt that "Macalpine and Hunter were our finest psychiatric
historians". (Our finest historian of madness is of course Roy Porter
himself.) And whatever Macalpine and Hunter's assumptions may have been, and
whatever evaluations are given to them, they did nevertheless succeed in
demonstrating that George suffered from porphyria rather than "madness".
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
>David Harley:
>It is not generally noticed that the book in question was produced by two
>authors, mother and son, who wished to undermine the belief in the reality
>of "mental" disease. Hunter and Macfarlane did not believe that any
>diseases existed which had no known physiological cause. He was in the
>habit of sending away severely phobic patients because their affliction was
>not real. In the book in question, they wished to show that King George
>was not "mad" but suffering from a previously little known disease. They
>were pretty cavalier with their use of evidence about him, and even more so
>in their use of evidence about his ancestors among the Stuart dynasty.
>This book rests entirely upon a theoretical assumption, that there is no
>such thing as mental illness.
>
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 10:59:51 +0100
Chris W. writes:
>The child will never come across a flame except in a cultural context.
Oh, really? Never? Ever?
>It will be surrounded by role models of how to react/relate to flame.
So great herds of animals will flee a forest fire because role models have
taught them to follow that course of action?
Where did the role models -- whether animal or human -- get their ideas about
taking an evasive course of action in response to fire? From *their* role
models? And where did their role models get *their* ideas from? And why is
it that virtually all these role models (in different cultures, different
times, different species) agree upon the same concept-set [fire / danger /
avoid]? Could it just possibly be that there is some kind of direct link to
the real world as it really is?
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 06:36:50 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Hi Rictor
Don't you think it's slightly problematic to lump together herds of animals
and children/people? Unless one is talking about the first ever human
encounter with fire (and which of us was there?), or of those 'wild children'
who grew up wholly outside human society, then isn't it necessary to be more
precise in examining the relationship between 'instinct' and culture?
Information (yes, about the materially existing world) is passed from
individual to individual or within groups (animal or human and
*differently*/variably). We do not, to my mind, have an unmediated experience
of anything.
CW
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 15:06:19 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Final thought? Would be a shame....
Hi Chris
Thanks very much for your gracious response to my last post.
I'll be glad to continue our conversation, and I think that
the subject of agency is indeed a productive one for us to
pursue. I've vowed to finish a dissertation chapter draft
this weekend -- keep my committee chair happy before _she_
sets the deadline, you know -- so I just want to let you
know that I'm not ignoring you.
And by the way -- I thought that "Boy Wonder" was a clever
rejoinder. :)
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 18:39:57 EDT
Subject: Re: Final thought? Would be a shame....
Hi Tim
Nice to hear from you again. Good luck with the chapter and I look forward to
again locking horns or some other phallic type metaphor :^)
Chris W
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 16:10:59 +0100
Chris says:
>
>Don't you think it's slightly problematic to lump together herds of animals
>and children/people? Unless one is talking about the first ever human
>encounter with fire (and which of us was there?), or of those 'wild
children'
>who grew up wholly outside human society, then isn't it necessary to be
more
>precise in examining the relationship between 'instinct' and culture?
>Information (yes, about the materially existing world) is passed from
>individual to individual or within groups (animal or human and
>*differently*/variably).
No, I don't think it's problematic to discuss, e.g., mammals (i.e. incl.
human mammals) with respect to many basic issues such as some we've covered
here.
If information is passed from individual to individual and never acquired
direct from experience of the world, then no knowledge of previously
unexperienced events are possible and the knowledge-base never gets larger.
I did not raise the subject of "instinct", and "instinct" did not feature in
my examples about animals. The view that all animal knowledge is totally
instinctual is as untenable as the view that all human knowledge is totally
cultural.
> We do not, to my mind, have an unmediated experience
>of anything.
>
And there we must end the discussion, as it can only proceed along the lines
of Yes it is. No it isn't. Etc.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 19:35:43 +0100
ps, Rictor said, quoting me: ""The assertion that "knowledge of things, *and
hence the things themselves*, is constructed" is an error in logic. Even if
the first claim were true, it does not follow that the second claim is
therefore true."
Here's a question: can you *tell* me about a thing, then, which is not
constructed? This is a point about the first claim (that knowledge is
constructed, relying on the fact that you need knowledge to tell me
anything, and that language/knowledge does not float around in the world,
but that we have to construct it so as to deal with stuff). About the
second point, we cannot really argue, as I am committed to the idea that the
reality of the thing is in the knowledge about it--hence the statement 'X
*is* real, not constructed' (for without the knowledge, how would we
recognise X as a part of reality: frameworks are needed to get around... and
they change). Perhaps this is why I don't believe in ghosts. I don't
preclude their existence a priori, but I have no knowledge of them and no
framework to fit them into (and do not accept the frameworks which have been
offered me), and so do not accept others knowledge of them. That is, ghosts
are not real, even if narratives are ocnstructed about them by others who
purport their reality. Thus I do not accept the reality of ghosts. I'll
tell you if I change my mind during the night...
IJDC
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 15:10:35 -0700
From: Jack Kolb <kolb@ucla.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
>> We do not, to my mind, have an unmediated experience
>>of anything.
>And there we must end the discussion, as it can only proceed along the lines
>of Yes it is. No it isn't. Etc.
>
>Rictor Norton, London
>mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
>http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
Or, rather, we have a tautology. When all experience is mediated, what
does mediated mean?
Jack Kolb
Dept. of English, UCLA
kolb@ucla.edu
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Auditory brains different in homosexuals and heterosexuals
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 23:11:13 +0100
Subscribers to this list may (or may not) be interested in the following
news release:
(This News Release is Embargoed until Friday,July 14)
Auditory brains different in homosexuals and heterosexuals
AUSTIN, Texas -- New research at The University of Texas at Austin reveals
that the brains of homosexual males and females respond differently to
auditory stimuli than do the brains of heterosexuals. When brief acoustic
stimuli are presented to the ear, a distinctive series of brain waves is
produced and the new research shows that certain waves differ in their size
or timing in homosexuals and heterosexuals.
For female subjects identifying themselves as lesbians or bisexuals, the
brain waves were intermediate to those of male and female heterosexuals.
"There was evidence that the auditory evoked potentials of homosexual and
bisexual women were shifted in the male direction," said Dennis McFadden,
professor of experimental psychology and co-author of the study. "The
implication is that some brain structures were masculinized at some time
during development," he said.
A paper reporting the study's results appears in the July issue of The
Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.
Other physical characteristics also are masculinized in homosexual females,
according to the research. For example, in heterosexual females the index
and fourth fingers are about the same in length, while in males the index
finger is shorter than the fourth finger. This sex difference is believed
to be produced by differential exposure to male hormones such as
testosterone. In homosexual females, the index finger is shorter than in
heterosexual females, also suggesting a masculinization effect.
"Physiological differences of this sort are highly unlikely to be caused by
differences in experience or upbringing," said McFadden. For male subjects
identifying themselves as homosexual, the brain waves were shifted away from
those of both the heterosexual males and heterosexual females. "A good way
to describe the data from the homosexual males is that they appeared to be
hyper-masculinized," said Craig Champlin, associate professor of
communication sciences and disorders at the University and co-author of the
study.
"This is especially interesting because other recent experiments have also
found hyper-masculinization effects in homosexual males. For example, penis
size is greater in homosexuals than in heterosexuals," said Champlin.
"Our research reveals that it is not just parts of the body that are
hyper-masculinized in homosexual males, but the brain as well," said
McFadden. Past research from McFadden's lab showed that the inner ears, or
cochleas, of female homosexuals and bisexuals also are masculinized, but
this is the first evidence of similar effects in the auditory brain. In
other studies, McFadden found no differences between the cochleas of male
homosexuals and heterosexuals, so the new findings of differences in their
auditory brain waves suggest that the mechanisms producing homosexuality may
act differently in males and females.
"A large number of physiological and behavioral measures reveal differences
between heterosexuals and homosexuals," said McFadden. "The problem for
science is to identify the mechanisms--presumably they are hormonal
mechanisms--that produce these differences. Our findings suggest that the
auditory system may be a valuable, if unlikely, tool for studying those
causal mechanisms. Apparently whatever developmental mechanisms are acting
to produce homosexuality are also affecting components of the auditory
system."
"Logic suggests that the degree of exposure to androgens--the male sex
hormones--is somehow involved in the production of homosexuality, and our
auditory results are generally in acccord with that idea," McFadden said.
Champlin emphasized that "the differences we have observed were group
differences, and it is not possible to determine anyone's sexual orientation
from knowledge of his or her auditory brain waves."
For both males and females, five separate measures of the auditory brain
waves were different in the homosexuals and heterosexuals. All of the waves
showing differences appeared within 0.05 seconds following the acoustic
stimulus. The auditory brain waves studied by McFadden and Champlin are
recorded using electrodes attached to the scalp. They are commonly measured
when it is necessary to obtain a physiological assessment of hearing instead
of a behavioral one, as with infants.
This article can be viewed online at:
http://link.springer-ny.com/link/service/journals/10162/contents/00/10008
http://rizzo.springer-ny.com:89/onlinefirst/10162/contents/00/10008
for the user id, type: online1st for the password, type: PoX1615
Champlin and McFadden can be reached through e-mail: mcfadden@psy.utexas.edu
champlin@mail.utexas.edu
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 17:28:04 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: Auditory brains different in homosexuals and heterosexuals
Maybe they didn't ask folks to turn off their gaydar before
they administered the tests? :)
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________
From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 22:36:17 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
In a message dated 07/15/2000 1:17:57 PM Central Daylight Time,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk writes:
<< You've used genetics as
an example in the past. How can one speak of the reality of genes without
relying upon the rather large body of knowledge, practices, etc, all of
which have been established within the specialism of genetics research
(specialisms: ecology, biochemistry, biotech, etc)? There is no access to
such highly abstract things unless one goes through the knowledge paths
which have been layed down, argued about, accepted, improved, etc, by the
genetics communities. >>
Actually, Mendel created the science of genetics without most of the
abstract and technical knowledge you seem to have in mind. The problem with
present concepts of genetics is that we have tied genetics and DNA together.
They were discovered separately however. Inheritance has been recognized for
centuries, even millennia (depending on how you define "inheritance"). The
gene theory of inheritance dates to Mendel who employed careful observation
and cross-pollenation of pea plants. His technology was that of basic
horticulture. His genius was in not allowing society to construct
inheritance. Instead he constructed an independent concept of inheritance
based on his observations and experiments. If he had help with this
construction, it was Renaissance and Enlightenment methods of epistemology
which continue to undergird the scientific method to this day. It is a
pragmatic construction which has had spectacular results.
It is relatively recently that we have been able to determine a biochemical
basis for the genes which Mendel discovered. But even in ancient times it
was recognized that children bear traits of both parents. Today we attribute
most physical traits to genetics, but we still are trying to puzzle out how
much of the behavioral inheritance is genetic and how much is transmitted
psycho-socially. Sometimes we add a third cause, environmental chemistry
(nutrition, contaminants, etc.).
Jim Miller
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 11:30:26 +0100
Dear Jim,
I appreciate the difference between Mendelian genetics and the contemporary
genetics which Rictor has used in the past (ie, comments on te gay gene) to
back an essentialist line of argument (and at some level, I don't have a
problem with this). Athough I think that the fact that there are two
different types of genetics says somehting about the different kinds of
'rules of construction' or 'grammars' of the different fields, is
intersting. Is modern genetics really a product of the kinds of work which
Gregor Mendel and his kind were woring on, or is it a different situation?
I think that latter, and I am fond of big-picture narratives in the history
of science.
My keenest problem is with what you wrote: "If he had help with this
construction, it was Renaissance and Enlightenment methods of epistemology
which continue to undergird the scientific method to this day." I want to
ascertain what you meant by 'help with this construction'...
Here are some questions, if you want to see a constructionist take issue
with relying on science in the way that you seem to do (ie, by granting it
epistemological privalege to science as a knowledge system): what is
scientific method? Which version of scientific method whould you suggest
gives better knowledge (ie, Cartesian, Hobbesian, Newtonian, Popperian,
Logical positivist, Lakatosian, Bayesian, etc: all complex arguments within
the philosophy of science; there are others...)? What role does this method
play in the discovery of scientific facts (read, construction of scientific
facts, if you like)? Does it direct the work of science? Is it used as a
retrodiction in order to justifiy the work? Is it used in arguments with
other scientists? With other segments
of society? Is it used to separate science from other types of knowledge?
Are these differences 'real' or are they socially derived/demarcated?
These are all very real questions. In many of the scientific articles I
have read, there is no spelling out of the epistemological side of the
argument. Rather, the sciences write for their own audiences (ie, other
scientists, or more other specialists within the sub-discipline which is
being read). Occasionally they come out and make the kind of methodological
pronunciamento which you are suggesting/contributing to. This is, I would
argue, rare, and often beyond most scientists (who are, after all,
scientists, not epistemologists). As a part-time sociologist of scientific
knowledge, I am wondering about the social effect of your depiction of the
scientific method (esp. as if it was a single thing, but it is not. There
are huge differences between the inductionisms, deductionisms and
hypothetico-deductionisms which I named above). This, if nothing else, must
surely cast doubt about the existence of 'the scientific method': there is
too much variety for that phrase to have meaning. It would be like a
botanist trying to have a professinal discussion with another botanist about
something highly specific, and only using the term 'tree'. Different fields
have specific languages and specific terms. Philosophy does just as much as
science.
Now this does not undermine the nature of science. It does not sugest that
science is not the best way of getting knowledge about the physical world
which we have available. I am still rather fond of biochemistry and
biochemists. But I do not accept that there is the kind of epistemic
distinction between science and other types of knowledge which you are
implicitly suggesting. Both are constructed, and both are so much the
better for it. This does not mean that one is not more technical than the
other, but why is technicality the sign of good-breeding in these kinds of
arguments. What about textuality, tradition? These count for something in
some fields... hence my slight obsession with maintaining that knowledge
systems are sui generis. Only science, however, has methodologicval
spin-doctors to push its image. And this, itself, is a product of the kinds
of historically situated stuggles for acceptance through which mechnanistic
natural philosopy had to go during the sixteenth and esp seventeenth
centuries: in order to carve out a strong hold for their own types of
knowledge over and against magic and (in a different way) religion, for
example.
Really, the methodological posturing which you are suggesting worked for
Mendel was really a form of political struggle in the construction,
acceptance and distribution of facts of one kind over facts of another.
Hmmm. No sex in this, and only a little history. Too bad, I suppose.
Cheerio, Ivan
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________From: "King, Michael" <m.king@rfc.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 13:22:03 +0100
Fascinating discussion , all the same!
Michael King
-----Original Message-----
From: Rictor Norton [mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk]
Sent: 15 July 2000 16:11
To: Histsex:For historians of sexuality
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Histsex:For historians of sexuality -
http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
Chris says:
>
>Don't you think it's slightly problematic to lump together herds of animals
>and children/people? Unless one is talking about the first ever human
>encounter with fire (and which of us was there?), or of those 'wild
children'
>who grew up wholly outside human society, then isn't it necessary to be
more
>precise in examining the relationship between 'instinct' and culture?
>Information (yes, about the materially existing world) is passed from
>individual to individual or within groups (animal or human and
>*differently*/variably).
No, I don't think it's problematic to discuss, e.g., mammals (i.e. incl.
human mammals) with respect to many basic issues such as some we've covered
here.
If information is passed from individual to individual and never acquired
direct from experience of the world, then no knowledge of previously
unexperienced events are possible and the knowledge-base never gets larger.
I did not raise the subject of "instinct", and "instinct" did not feature in
my examples about animals. The view that all animal knowledge is totally
instinctual is as untenable as the view that all human knowledge is totally
cultural.
> We do not, to my mind, have an unmediated experience
>of anything.
>
And there we must end the discussion, as it can only proceed along the lines
of Yes it is. No it isn't. Etc.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "King, Michael" <m.king@rfc.ucl.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Auditory brains different in homosexuals and heterosexuals
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 13:25:35 +0100
Dear Richard
Are you sure of the id name and password as it does not allow me on?
Michael King
This article can be viewed online at:
http://link.springer-ny.com/link/service/journals/10162/contents/00/10008
http://rizzo.springer-ny.com:89/onlinefirst/10162/contents/00/10008
for the user id, type: online1st for the password, type: PoX1615
Champlin and McFadden can be reached through e-mail: mcfadden@psy.utexas.edu
champlin@mail.utexas.edu
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 10:31:51 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
Does this not have parallels within another recent thread on this list,
re. pornography and women: if no means yes, what does yes mean?
>>> We do not, to my mind, have an unmediated experience
>>>of anything.
>
>>And there we must end the discussion, as it can only proceed along the lines
>>of Yes it is. No it isn't. Etc.
>>
>>Rictor Norton, London
>>mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
>>http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
>
>Or, rather, we have a tautology. When all experience is mediated, what
>does mediated mean?
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
"The artist was a 'special kind of guy.' *He* was a business-man."
--Waldo Frank on Sherwood Anderson's aversion to artists
___________________________________________________________________From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 20:17:19 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
In a message dated 07/17/2000 10:32:24 AM Central Daylight Time,
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu writes:
<< Does this not have parallels within another recent thread on this list,
re. pornography and women: if no means yes, what does yes mean? >>
Which brings to mind a joke which might answer this question somewhat.
A High School English teacher was telling the class about double
negatives. This being a school setting the teacher ignored popular usage and
informed the class that double negatives in English equal a positive. The
teacher went on to say that even in proper usage some languages used double
negatives as negatives,
such as French, Greek, Russian, etc. Finally the teacher pointed out that
in no language is a double positive understood as a negative. From the back
of the room a student remarked, "Yeah, right."
Jim Miller
___________________________________________________________________
From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 21:14:40 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
In a message dated 07/17/2000 5:32:42 AM Central Daylight Time,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk writes:
<< I appreciate the difference between Mendelian genetics and the
contemporary
genetics which Rictor has used in the past (ie, comments on te gay gene) to
back an essentialist line of argument (and at some level, I don't have a
problem with this). Athough I think that the fact that there are two
different types of genetics says somehting about the different kinds of
'rules of construction' or 'grammars' of the different fields, is
intersting. >>
Actually there is only one type of genetics, but there are distinct
stages of development. The search for the chemical basis for genetics was
fueled by the increasingly certain science of genetics. The problem cases of
inheritance that seemed non-Mendelean were, one by one, shown to be truely
Mendelean. Eventually it became certain that there were not a variety of
processes which determined genetic inheritance, but only one. The question
was what chemistry produced genetics. Once the core chemical was shown to be
DNA, a linear code could now be associated with phenotypes, etc. Most
biological science is like this -- observations are made, confirmed,
classified and understood as following certain rules. Finally the chemical
basis for the observed phenomena is discovered and explored to discover its
parameters and limits.
<< My keenest problem is with what you wrote: "If he had help with this
construction, it was Renaissance and Enlightenment methods of epistemology
which continue to undergird the scientific method to this day." I want to
ascertain what you meant by 'help with this construction'...>>
Mendel's greatest task was to decide that observable phenomena could be
broken down into simple units and analyzed a bit at a time until the
underlying abstraction was apparent. Once he did this genetic theory was a
piece of cake. Copernicus did the same. The Medieval model was based on
authority. Much of the Renaissance was also based on authority, though of a
different kind. But in the Renaissance the authority model of knowledge was
transcended more and more until in the Enlightenment authority structures for
knowledge were mostly overturned and observation/experimentation became the
primary basis for knowledge. Mendel, being a monk, was somewhat insulated
from the Enlightment, but not completely. In genetics he set aside Aristotle
and a host of other authorities and decided to find out if there were
discernable paterns in pea flower inheritance. The reasult was the theory
that all physical inheritance could be broken down into specific genes.
<<Here are some questions, if you want to see a constructionist take issue
with relying on science in the way that you seem to do (ie, by granting it
epistemological privalege to science as a knowledge system): what is
scientific method? Which version of scientific method whould you suggest
gives better knowledge (ie, Cartesian, Hobbesian, Newtonian, Popperian,
Logical positivist, Lakatosian, Bayesian, etc: all complex arguments within
the philosophy of science; there are others...)? What role does this method
play in the discovery of scientific facts (read, construction of scientific
facts, if you like)?>>
Here is the problem with your question. I , and most scientists I know
personally, associate these questions with their adolescence. As adults they
do not consider most of these issues. They assume the reality of the workd
they observe and assume that most other sane people (they use a common
convention of sanity, usually without examining it) observe things almost
identically. Those who do not observe things identically are given
opportunity to make their case and either the scientist learns something or
he considers the oddball to be silly or worse -- which is how most scientists
I know think of Foucault & co.
Now, I can critique the way in which these scientists view
constructionism, but always with a certain respect for the empirical edifice
they have constructed and from which I benefit greatly. Foucault has greatly
enlarged our understanding of how we construct society, but is almost useless
in biology, not to mention the other sciences.
Here is my take on constructionism and essentialism. Anyone who does not
respect either side is missing something BIG. Yes, homosexuality in our
culture is heavily constructed. But in most cases the core is essentialist
-- very essentialist. It swims upstream against a very homophobic current.
Duh and double-duh. The biggest group of constructionists in our culture are
not the followers of Foucault, but rather the psychoanalysts and conservative
Christians who think they can "cure" homosexuality by reconstructing the
environment and self-image of the "patient"/ disciple.
Jim Miller
___________________________________________________________________
From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 17:06:43 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Rictor:
<< And there we must end the discussion, as it can only proceed along the
lines
of Yes it is. No it isn't. Etc.
>>
Given that you chose to ignore any of the substantive implications of my last
(rather than the facetiousness), this seems a rather feeble way to end what
was, to my mind, a productive debate.
Michael's comment <Does this not have parallels within another recent thread
on this list,
re. pornography and women: if no means yes, what does yes mean?> would take
cultural relativism (and I know you don't mean this!) to an absurd level. Or
possibly not. If No means Yes (in certain circumscribed circumstances), then
Yes might also mean anything I choose it mean and probably does. But then
historically No has often been not Yes but utterly unheard. At which point I
fall off the wall.
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 11:43:10 +0100
Yes, it is social construction, HPS-style, again...
Jim wrote: "Actually there is only one type of genetics, but there are
distinct stages of development."
Isn't this kind of like saying that there is one kind of astronomy, and that
Copernican astronomy is the same in kind as radio astronomy? I am not sure
if I buy this line, although I suppose the objects of inquiry (inheritance,
stars) do bear similarities at a superficial level. Still, it seems to me
to vitiate scientific achievement. We do not think in terms of cirular
orbits, so the Copernican analogy would suggest that, no, knowledge has
changed, the objects which we are looking at are different, and the concepts
with which we organise this knowledge (making them real, I am inclined to
say) are diffferent too. What have all of those poor biochemists been doing
all of ths time, only to find out that they have not reinvented genetics.
They should have been out having fun instead...
But (seriously) to bring this debate back to the issues which were at stake,
why social construction is not necessarily Foucaultian (BTW, I am sure that
the "Archaeology of Knowlegde" does have somehting to say about how to write
the history of biology, and to inform sociologists of biology of how to map
the discourses produced by the field, but it is a very misunderstood book),
and why scienitific method--still undefined, except in the previous posting
as naive induction, which is really not an acceptable description of how
science works--has roles which are social, and are necessary to the
construction of scientific knowledge, rather than directing the work of
scientists: as you said, the epistemological side of science is assumed by
scientists (not by epistemologists and sociologists of knowledge, however),
although I doubt that it is really dealt with in their neophyte days in any
real way (unless the come over to the HPS darkside for a good time!). This
is illustrated best by your comment:
Jim wrote: "They [ie, scientists] assume the reality of the world they
observe and assume that most other sane people (they use a common convention
of sanity, usually without examining it) observe things almost identically."
Is this not a classic case of using the accepted, doxic, conventional
aspects of a community's accepted perceptions of a situation or object to
judge anything outside of an acceptable claim. And this, according to
numerous sociologists, is the basis for all knowledge systems: to rely on
the accepted basis of knowledge when making and judging claims, thus making
knowledge conventional. Sanity has nothing to do with it (Aren't the only
famous scientists mad anyway? All of that wild grey hair...). This is why
I would argue that the acceptance of facts about the real world is only
conventional: because the facts are made and accepted so as they can fit
into accepted grids; these grids can change, but it takes a lot of hard
work. If you want to know more about this, see Bary Barnes, TS Kuhn and
Social Science, MacMillan 1980.
But it is in this sense, your suggestion that there are sides to the
construction/essentialism discussion, sparing the fact that academic
politics which fuel debates, is to my mind non-sensical. If you are
suggesting that there are facts, I am suggesting that these are conventional
to their core (ontological debates about the existence of the world aside).
But the debate operates at many levels. Perhaps the safest line to go with,
and one which I am happy to accept on the whole, is Ian Hacking's 'dynamic
nominalism': the real world is there, but it is managed by knowledge, which
is all we can do (we're only human, as Woody Allen says in "Manhattan"). It
is not the constructivism of the lunatic left, but hey, who wants that
anyway. But of course, accepting Hacking's position has to be separated
from his political take on the essentialism v constructed debacle. This
kind of constructivism has little precious little to do with Foucault,
although he can be slotted in, and when speaking of human sciences can be
used profitability. But it is a bit much to blame constructivism on him,
don't you think? What would his great predecessors like George Canguilhem
or Gaston Bachelard think?
Sorry once again for taking up the list's time with protracted history and
philosophy of science debate: I must missing my students (most of whom are
scientist, btw. I love the notion of corruption! The HPS version of a
tribute to modern babylon is continually being written anyway)...
Cheerio, Ivan
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 07:24:44 -0500
From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: RE: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Hello Ivan:
Can you please tell me the citation of the Ian Hacking quote that you used
in your post below.
Thanks in advance
Dar
___________________________________________________________________From: JNKATZ1@aol.com
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 10:01:28 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Thanks Gail Bederman for that thoughtful inquiry. I do think, however, that
those who begin with the assumption of a universal essence of homosexuality,
or heterosexuality, or bisexuality, etc., are in basic intellectual and
procedural conflict with those who start from a constructionist assumption.
I too would like to hear more about the advantages/insights for historians of
starting from the old idea of particular sexual essences.
I certainly hope that teachers who hear students refer to homosexuality,
race, and gender as biological point out the long horrible history of
biologism used against homosexuals, African Americans, and women. I also
hope that teachers let students know that many gays find it deeply offensive
when anyone assumes that homosexuals need to be absolved of some moral
failing. I also think it's important, politically and intellectually to
submit the dominant sexualities and categories to the same kind of cultural
construction critique that's been more widely applied to allegedly "minority"
sexualities and races, and the put-down sex, women. Of course, the right is
now using a version of constructionism to attack gays, so both
constructionism and essentialism can be used for very different political
ends. I think it's important to point out the politics and power plays
involved in any intellectual starting assumption.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
Jonathan Ned Katz
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Auditory brains different in homosexuals and heterosexuals
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 21:38:23 +0100
Michael King asks if the password for the article is correct. Sorry, I don't
know. It was just part of the press release which I copied verbatim. You
could actually contact the authors of the article, as their e-mails were in
the press release.
All the best,
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Gender identity determined in the womb
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 15:11:43 +0100
David Harley asks:
>Just how malleable would Rictor allow human nature to be?
Not very malleable, certainly not "infinitely malleable" (a claim made in
many social constructionist texts), particularly in the fields of sexuality,
sexual orientation and gender identity. In this respect, I attach a report
of a study which seriously undermines the theory that gender identity is
significantly malleable by cultural factors. The study was widely
reported and will be known to all Sex Researchers, but may not be known to
Historians of Sexuality, so it may be of some interest.
N.Y. Times (on line)
May 12, 2000
Study: Gender Determined in Womb
Filed at 5:01 p.m. EDT
By The Associated Press
BALTIMORE (AP) -- A study of male children who were born without penises
and raised as girls found that most of them considered themselves boys
when they got older -- suggesting that gender identity is determined in
the womb.
The results call into question the practice of surgically ``reassigning''
the sex of such infants, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Hospital said
Friday.
Researchers tracked the development of 27 children who had been born
without a penis, a rare defect known as a cloacal exstrophy. The infants
were otherwise male with normal testicles, male genes and hormones.
Twenty-five of the children were sex-reassigned -- doctors castrated them
at birth and their parents raised them as girls.
But over the years, all of the children, now ages 5 to 16, exhibited the
rough-and-tumble play of boys. Fourteen declared themselves to be boys, in
one case as early as age 5, said Dr. William G. Reiner, a child and
adolescent psychiatrist and urologist at the Hopkins Children's Center.
``These studies indicate that with time and age, children may well know
what their gender is, regardless of any and all information and
child-rearing to the contrary,'' he said. ``They seem to be quite capable
of telling us who they are.''
The two children who were not reassigned and were raised as boys fit in
well with their normal male peers and were better adjusted psychologically
than the reassigned children, Reiner said.
The findings were presented Friday at the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric
Endocrine Society Meeting in Boston.
``This has very profound implications for the development of gender
identity,'' said Michael Bailey, an associate professor of psychology at
Northwestern University, who studies gender identity and sexual
orientation. ``This suggests that hormones' effect on the brain has a
major impact on gender identity.''
Reiner also called for a thorough review of the practice of sex
reassignment of children.
Dr. Marianne J. Legato, a professor of clinical medicine who studies the
differences between men and women at Columbia University, said that sexual
differentiation occurs in the first trimester of pregnancy.
``When the brain has been masculinized by exposure to testosterone, it is
kind of useless to say to this individual, `You're a girl,''' she said.
``It is this impact of testosterone that gives males the feelings that
they are men.''
The results contradicted a Canadian study published in the journal
Pediatrics in 1998 that suggested gender identity develops after birth. In
that study, researchers found that a boy who was raised as a girl after
his penis was mutilated during circumcision continued to live as a woman.
---------------
There is also a longer report in The Scientist for 10 July 2000, though that
perhaps has too many intrusive view of the journalist that go a bit beyond
what is supported by this study and by several related studies. It is
available online at
http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2000/jul/lewis_p6_000710.html
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 16:02:14 +0100
Chris W. said:
>
>Don't you think it's slightly problematic to lump together herds of animals
>and children/people? Unless one is talking about the first ever human
>encounter with fire (and which of us was there?), or of those 'wild
children'
>who grew up wholly outside human society, then isn't it necessary to be
more
>precise in examining the relationship between 'instinct' and culture?
>Information (yes, about the materially existing world) is passed from
>individual to individual or within groups (animal or human and
>*differently*/variably). We do not, to my mind, have an unmediated
experience
>of anything.
>
OK, Chris, let's carry on with this (lest I be called "feeble").
Your last sentence seems to imply the absolutist position that all human
knowledge is mediated (presumably by culture), whereas my position is that
humans can have direct experience of nature as well as culturally mediated
knowledge. That is, my view seems to be broader than yours, and allows for a
greater variety of channels of knowledge. In the context of this list, my
view is that sexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity are much less
culturally constructed than many people nowadays claim. With respect to
these three areas, I think your views are sufficiently reductive to result
in the stalemate of "Yes they are - No they aren't". But let's see where we
can go from here.
It seems to me that it is much more problematic to exclude animals from the
discussion rather than to include them. I find it really difficult to
comprehend why humans and animals can occupy the same geographical space yet
have *totally* different ways of being aware of that space. If my cat and I
are in the same room and we hear a series of explosions outside, we will
both perk up (though I acknowledge that your cat will continue sleeping, one
of the many pleasures of solipsism). I don't understand the claim that my
awareness of that loud noise is determined through a series of culturally
learned signifiers, whereas my cat's awareness of that loud noise is
acquired pretty much directly, through biological auditory channels. I can
appreciate that she will hear a wider range of sounds than I do, because of
biological differences between us, and I can appreciate that I may come to
the conclusion "we're safe" more quickly than she, because I have culturally
acquired knowledge about fireworks and cultural conventions about time in
relation to Guy Fawkes Day (or July 4th if we happen to be in the US). But I
cannot comprehend the notion that my perception of the mere fact of the
existence of the loud bang has been mediated by anything other than the same
objective realities of the transmission of sound that have made my cat aware
of the loud bang. And while I can appreciate that there will be some
variation in the perception and interpretation of loud bangs by myself and
my cat, I cannot comprehend why such variations are sufficient reason to
believe that my cat and I have wholly different orders of knowledge. Nor can
I comprehend why my immediate reaction to this loud bang, and my cat's
immediate reaction as well, would be significantly determined by anything
"passed from individual to individual or within groups". My cat (actually I
have two cats, Jack and Gwendolyn (:-)), and it is of Gwendolyn whom I am
speaking now) was acquired by me (i.e. taken away from her mother) at too
early an age to have experienced the annual event of Guy Fawkes Day; neither
her mother nor I have passed to her any knowledge of serial explosions etc.
You ask which of us was present when humans or animals first encountered
fire? Well, all I can say is that *I was there* when Gwen first encountered
fireworks. It seems to me that our immediate reaction to this loud bang is
sufficiently accounted for by the biological fact that the eardrum will move
more agitatedly when struck by loud sounds than when struck by soft sounds,
and that sudden and large changes tend to produce greater degrees of pain
and fear by their very nature, rather than because of either culture or
"race memory". On the whole, even semioticians ought to be able to learn
something from the science of acoustics.
But social constructionist historians seem unwilling to learn much from the
scientific study of sex. By the mid-1970s it became a commonplace that "men"
and "women" did not exist except as social constructs, by the mid-1980s, in
the domain of the sociological study of sexuality, it became possible to say
that homosexuals did not exist except as social constructs, by the mid-1990s
it became possible to say that heterosexuals did not exist except as social
constructs (though no one in the normative category will ever give more than
lip-service to such a view), and by the late 1990s it became commonplace to
say that sexuality did not exist before about 1750, when it was constructed
by bourgeois ideology. Historians of sexuality really ought to be aware that
there is a huge amount of scientific research being conducted whose findings
reveal a world whose existence is denied by social constructionists. It
seems to me that the huge amount of scientific data about sexual dimorphism
in nature must at least problematize the claim that male/female or
hetero/homo is merely the ideological binary tool used to distribute power.
The cultural determinism of the social constructionist position puts even
more restraints upon the possibility of individual agency than the
biological determinist position. Although in theory the culturalist position
ought to allow for fluidity and a degree of freedom, in practice the
constructionists posit a single all-powerful culture (namely, in most cases,
"bourgeois ideology") from which there is no escape, and whose dicta we can
only accept as passive recipients.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: Kazetnik@aol.com
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 12:13:31 EDT
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Hi Rictor
First may I apologise for appearing to call you feeble. I didn't intend to be
so rude. While I would not say you have succeeded in changing my mind (some
hope!), I will say you have given me much food for thought to re-evaluate
long-unexamined assumptions, so look on it as a selfish desire to continue
learning and thinking.
First, cats. (Great names by the way. Nice and dignified.) Can we take these
as a working case study of 'nature/nurture'? Of our most recent 3 (one
demised a couple of months back sadly), one arrived with a total flight
response to fireworks, traffic, vaccuum cleaners etc, one arrived with a
total flight response to shoes and traffic, and one arrived with no flight
responses to anything but learnt one to dogs. These characteristics have
persisted into adult life even with our attempts at cultural construction.
Biology/zoology is way out of my field, so I am unsure about how to make
sense of these differences except through their life experiences before and
after they came to live with us. If these attributes were biologically
determined, would they not have the same basic responses?
Sexuality. The claim that there was no sexuality before 1750 flies in the
face of historical evidence and relies upon a semantic nicety that looks for
the right terminology and reads over what is actually happening. But I don't
see this as any rebuttal of the constructionist case. Sexuality (a system of
meanings attached to sex acts, and a narrative about the relationship between
the self and sex acts) changes, but I've yet to see the moment of its
invention.
<<The cultural determinism of the social constructionist position puts even
more restraints upon the possibility of individual agency than the
biological determinist position.>>
This I find the most puzzling assertion in your last. While debates about
agency rage within constructionist debates, the questions of fluidity and
change are problematic. But what room for resistance or fluidity is there in
the biological determinist model, as you seem to imply?
I am genuinely interested in these issues, even if ultimately they confirm me
as a hard-core constructionist :)
Chris White
___________________________________________________________________Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 11:53:35 -0500
From: Gail Bederman <Gail.Bederman.1@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Jonathan Ned Katz writes:
>
>I certainly hope that teachers who hear students refer to homosexuality,
>race, and gender as biological point out the long horrible history of
>biologism used against homosexuals, African Americans, and women.
and
> Of course, the right is
>now using a version of constructionism to attack gays, so both
>constructionism and essentialism can be used for very different political
ends.
To me, that's one of the interesting, if painful and frustrating,
aspects of this debate over "cultural construction" vs. biology.
While scholars like us grapple over this, the question hasn't
actually made much difference, historically. Whether homosexuality
has been seen as innate or as chosen hasn't really mattered--it still
gets attacked. So why do we get so hot and bothered over it, as
scholars?
(I ask that about gender, too. My MTV generation students are
sometimes bemused at my fascination with the fact that gender is
"constructed." As they see it, everything is constructed. Who cares
whether gender, as a category, is constructed, if discrimination
against women persists despite changes in its construction, they
wonder.)
I also second Chris White's request for clarification: Would those
who think cultural constructivism shuts down possibilities for
individual agency explain how the biological or essentialist
position opens up more room for resistance or social transformation?
I genuinely puzzled about this, and would like to understand.
Gail
Gail Bederman
Associate Professor of History
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46656
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 18:15:43 +0100
Gail Bederman's comments are a fair summary of certain differences in
attitudes/motivations between social constructionists and what she chooses
to call "body-realists" (i.e. those who, like myself, believe in biological
determinism or "essentialism").
Unfortunately, any non-social-constructionist who responds to her invitation
to discuss the issue of motivation will automatically lose ground by
appearing to accede to the social constructionist position that regularly
reduces substantive arguments to ad hominem arguments. The moment we discuss
the issue in her terms, we will appear to be agreeing with the social
constructionist position that all knowledge issues are political issues or
power issues. I reject that premiss. I do not believe that there is a
one-to-one relationship between motivation and the rise of knowledge claims,
nor do I believe that the validity or accuracy about any claim about
homosexuals can be judged by an understanding of "what is at stake", or, to
put it another way, what is politically expedient or personally useful.
Nevertheless, in the spirit of good will, and with the above proviso kept
constantly in mind, I'll make a tentative response.
A lot of the people who study gay and lesbian history -- whether they just
read books about homosexuals or write books about homosexuals in the past --
are themselves gay or lesbian. Though this is by no means true, I think it
is broadly true, just as most people who write about the history of women
have themselves been women. The reason for this high number of "participant
historians" or "participant observers" is because we are searching for a
modus vivendi. That is, we are trying to find out how people of our own kind
managed to live reasonably fulfilling lives in the midst of a society that
rejects us with varying degrees of contempt. We're searching for something
positive in the midst of what appears to be a wasteland of hatred and
ignorance.
A member of an outcast or marganilized or oppressed group usually
finds strength by establishing a network of solidarity with a community of
similar individuals. For many people, that "community" will appear to have
greater validity if the network is seen to stretch across time as well as
across geography: that is, a sense of having a heritage and having "roots"
in similar communities in the past. It seems to me that people require some
sort of "inner strength" if they are to successfully engage in the strenuous
work of changing oppressive social practices and values. To put it rather
bluntly, we will find it easier to argue that society is wrong if we first
of all feel convinced that we are right in ourselves. I am not really very
interested in the history of homophobia, which is a branch of heterosexual
history that heterosexuals really ought to be studying. The history of the
laws against homosexuality really does not help me understand my self and my
desires. The history of censorship does not quite help me understand the
nature of what has been censored. All of Michel Foucault's theorizing about
"the temporary aberration of the practice of sodomy" is of less value to me
than the police report of 1748 in the Paris archives concerning two men who
had lived and slept together intimately for two years: "It was even almost
always necessary for Duquesnel to have his arm extended along the headboard,
under Dumaine's head. Without that Dumaine could not rest."
So, then: for better or for worse, I am interested in the kind of gay and
lesbian history which seeks to recover a gay and lesbian heritage. Now to
your specific question: "What kinds of questions about sexuality and gender
does rejecting cultural construction theory help you to ask that adopting
cultural construction terms would prevent?"
It seems to me that hard-line social constructionism has made it extremely
difficult to engage in the more traditional kind of gay and lesbian history
that I've mentioned, and that it has discouraged primary research in favour
of theory. Non-social-constructionist history has been pretty thoroughly
dished as being naive and under-theorized. For example, I would be
interested in asking the question "Was Handel gay?" But a social
constructionist position prevents that question from being taken seriously,
because they would assert that (a) one cannot project "a modern construct
such as 'gay' " back in time, and (b) a list of "the great queens of
history" is a self-serving construct having no historical validity, and (c)
the whole approach is naive and foolish. So it may be, but there you are.
The indulgence in gay and lesbian history is no longer a congenial
occupation for the non-social-constructionist, because our would-be
colleagues are largely derisory in their attitudes to us. The language of
derision and exclusion employed on such internet discussion groups as the
Queer Studies List is really quite intolerable and lamentable; few people
dare stick their heads above the parapet, for fear of being shot down. But
on to more important issues.
The social constructionist habit of problematizing all sources as being
"mediated" makes traditional historical research very difficult to pursue.
In particular, the social constructionist theory of "mediation" is regularly
used to debunk traditional methods of historical research. If I try to make
a claim about what homosexuals were "really" like or "really" did based upon
evidence drawn from newspaper accounts or trial records, my views are
debunked on the premiss that newspapers are mediated by politics and trial
records are mediated by ruling establishment interests to such a degree that
none of the evidence revealed through them can be trusted to reveal anything
more than the construction of sodomy that serves hegemonic interests. This
is explicitly the view of, among others, Cameron McFarlane, Alan Sinfield,
and Tim Hitchcock with regard to the 18th-cent. trial records I have made
use of. I judge their view to be dogmatic and aprioristic, because I can't
find any evidence that they have read many trial records.
Cynthia Herrup in _A House in Gross Disorder_ gives the typical social
constructionist take on trials: "adversarial law is as much about style as
about fact, about obfuscating as much as clarifying, about self-interest as
much as objectivity. ... Trials are confrontations, rhetorical swordplay
within set rules. Like the swordplay of the theater, trials are constructed
to persuade their audiences. The purpose of a prosecution is to convict its
defendant, and the purpose of a defense is to avoid conviction. Regardless
of fact and even law, the best performance is the most convincing one. And
the most convincing performance is usually the one most strategically
attuned to the fears and ideals of the judge and jury." This gross
caricature of English law is itself a rhetorical passage and persuasively
written: the only trouble is that it is a wholly inaccurate picture of
English trials. The view that judges ask formulaic questions designed to
elicit answers they want to hear, simply could not be maintained after
reading all the trial records for even a single year of the Sessions Papers.
The cost of prosecution was an inhibiting factor, but once that hurdle was
crossed, everyone within the courtroom was concerned to "get at the facts as
they really were" and judges made a special effort to ensure that defendants
were given a full hearing and were not intimidated by any requirements of
"legal discourse". Nevertheless, the social constructionist dogma about the
"discursive practice" of trials has become so entrenched as conventional
wisdom, that I can no longer ask my sort of questions of trial records
without first writing 50 pages challenging the social constuctionist view
that any answers I might find are not valid. That is very wearying and
tiresome.
By regularly reducing all "texts" to "mediated texts", social
constructionists have lost the ability to discriminate between relative
degrees of accuracy/trustworthiness between different sorts of texts: trial
records are mediated tout court. Diaries are mediated tout court. Sermons
are mediated tout court. Poetry and satires are mediated tout court. By
subsuming all discursive texts into the single "text", they have in effect
subsumed fact within fiction. Unlike traditional historians, who try to
discriminate between varying degrees of accuracy entailed in different kinds
of evidence-containers, the social constructionists lump everything together
as constructs, that is: artificial fictions. Since no constructs can be
judged to have any greater link to "reality" than any other construct, we
can rest content with an analysis of anti-homosexual satires and do not need
to attempt to look beyond our homophobic sources (for that is what they are)
in search of a homophilic source that has a greater claim to validity. Every
actor is reduced to being a performer upon the stage of a monolithic society
or culture, who has no extra-discursive reality off-stage, and who cannot
recite any other lines than the "script" (a la Gagnon) prescribed for him or
her by the conventions of the stage. The implications of this approach,
which allows the possibility of denying the existence of such things as the
Holocaust, is what has led to a fairly widespread revulsion at social
constructionist histories of "the Jew".
Further, not satisfied with denying me my sources, social constructionists
have denied me the very words I would use to discuss my sort of history.
Specifically, "gay" and "homosexual" are absolutely forbidden for use in
discussing the past for the mere reason that these words did not exist in
the past. Social constructionists take a much more literalist and scholastic
attitude to the use of words than traditional historians, and in the field
of gay and lesbian history they effectively prevent certain questions from
being asked by constantly challenging the use of words such as "gay and
lesbian" or "homosexual". The hard-line school of social constructionism has
made a very good effort to abolish gay history before 1860 by regularly
asserting that where no words exist, no concepts exist, and that in cultures
which have no word for "the homosexual" there cannot be any option for being
"a homosexual". This, in my view, is a very naive view of both knowledge and
history, but the conviction that all knowledge is linguistically mediated is
a very tedious nut to crack. By no means impossible, just tedious.
I think that social constructionism has brought down a barrier between
ourselves and the past, which I think betrays the people and the heritage of
the past. In _Homosexuality in Renaissance England_ Alan Bray wrote that "It
can hardly be stressed too strongly or too often, that the society of
Renaissance England is at an immense distance, in time and culture, from our
own." This view, which encourages the view that the past is another country
that we really cannot hope to understand, is parroted as a fundamental dogma
in social constructionist "histories" and has done a good deal to make the
past less "usable" to us in the present. Bray's assertion, in particular,
that there is an uncrossable gulf between the Renaissance
discourse/construct of the sodomite and the modern discourse/construct of
the homosexual, and that we have to guard against any sympathetic
identification or claims of continuity between one and the other, pretty
much strikes at the heart of the kind of history in which I am interested
and the uses of history in which I am interested.
Which is why I am very pleased that Michael Young in _King James and the
History of Homosexuality_ has patiently gone through all the evidence
concerning King James's homosexuality and his contemporaries' thoughts about
the subject, and has demonstrated that most of James's detractors had pretty
much the same sort of homophobia found in modern society and did *not* make
use of the discourse of sodomy (i.e. the discourse that treats men who have
sex with men as monsters, papists, witches, heretics, demons, and morally
depraved, which forms the main part of Bray's thesis about there being a
gulf forever fixed between "homosexuality" and "sodomy") and did *not* even
use the word "sodomy" in their condemnations of him, but, on the contrary,
spoke about the subject using very much the same sort of terms that modern
people use when speaking about homosexuality. For example, the most that
many of them can say about James is that "he naturally hated women", "was
not very uxorious" but "loved his favourites"; that he was alienated from
his Queen because of his "masculine conversation and intimacy"; that "his
fancy ran with a violent stream upon a young Gentleman"; Osborne, who
salaciously described James's "wanton gestures [that] exceeded any part of
Woman-kind", did not call up any monstrous spectre from the demonizing
discourse of sodomy, but simply ended up calling it "love, or what else
posterity will please to call it." As Young comments: "The word 'homosexual'
was not yet in Osborne's vocabulary, but it would seem to be the word he was
searching for." Young's well-supported conclusion is that people during the
early Stuart period shared a body of assumptions about homosexuality quite
similar to modern assumptions about homosexuality, that the recognizable
form of homosexuality was already in existence, and that those who have
subscribed to the model of modernization have underestimated the persistence
of ideas and common experiences cross time.
So perhaps traditional history, and traditional gay and lesbian history, is
set to make a comeback after all.
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "LJ Hall, Historical Studies" <Lisa.J.Hall@bristol.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 10:50:27 +0100
Subject: Re: Gender identity determined in the womb
"But over the years, all of the children, now ages 5 to 16, exhibited
the
rough-and-tumble play of boys. Fourteen declared themselves to be boys, in
one case as early as age 5"
If the rest of the group are talking about their cats may i
introduce my daughter, in a totally un-scholarly way & suggest that
most if not all children seem to have a rather fluid relationship
with their ... uh 'gender identity' and are very likely to declare
themselves a boy for the morning or even the fortnight.
As for "the rough and tumble play of boys" surely this is a prime
example of how "gender" is socially constructed, and it's rather
amusing to find it used as a biological signifier.
lisa.
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Gender identity determined in the womb
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 10:54:25 +0100
Dear Lisa,
You wrote: "As for "the rough and tumble play of boys" surely this is a
prime example of how "gender" is socially constructed, and it's rather
amusing to find it used as a biological signifier."
Yes, I was thinking something like this myself... I also supposed that these
penisless boys musn't have played with dolls.
IJDC
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________From: JNKATZ1@aol.com
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 12:11:37 EDT
Subject: Recent Publications?
Will everyone on the list tell us when they publish new stuff? Ivan
Dalley-Crozier tells us he's about to publish an article that sounds
interesting, and I'd like to see it.
I'm especially interested in recent publications relevant to the history of
sex and intimacy between men in the U.S. or in England in the 19th century.
Thanks Jonathan Ned Katz
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 16:32:52 gmt
Subject: Re: Recent Publications?
>
>Will everyone on the list tell us when they publish new stuff? Ivan
>Dalley-Crozier tells us he's about to publish an article that sounds
>interesting, and I'd like to see it.
>
>I'm especially interested in recent publications relevant to the history of
>sex and intimacy between men in the U.S. or in England in the 19th century.
>Thanks Jonathan Ned Katz
>
I think I may have mentioned this on this list already, but my new book _Sex,
Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880_, had just been published by
Macmillan. While it's the 'European Culture and Society' textbook series, and
thus aims to synthesis a mass of existing literature, because of the gaps in
the historiography it also draws on archival research. Further details, and
also of recent articles of mine, can be found at http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah/nwsflsh.htm
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
homepage: http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
Subject: Re: Gender identity determined in the womb
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 10:15:18 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
>"But over the years, all of the children, now ages 5 to 16, exhibited
>the
>rough-and-tumble play of boys. Fourteen declared themselves to be boys, in
>one case as early as age 5"
Yes, I love the tautology of this. Boys play rough, therefore any child
which plays rough is a boy. No room in this schema for little lesbian
amazons now is there? After reading Anne Fausto-Sterling's work on gender
and the womb I can never read one of these reports without seeing the
construction in the supposed empiricism! Interesting how these 'doctors'
overlooked the fact that the parents of the penisless little boys were of
course aware of the child's condition and might have 'over-raised' them
as girls? Also fascinating how the child is constructed as _either_ boy
or girl, and that this is defined by the attrributes of the genitals but
never just left alone to be a human being whose genitals consist of
testicles, left to retain the sexual pleasure associated with this part
of the anatomy. The child has a vagina 'constructed' (read mutilated) as
thow this intervention were somehow _less_ horrifying than the absent
phallus! Now that's phallocentric for ya! Where were the parents when the
doctors were butchering their children, and how did we come to a position
where the white-coated ones have such power? Whose 'truth' is represented
here? If anything Rictor's example shows that the truth of the body is
always a product of social intervention, sometimes in the form of a
scalpel.
Michael J. Murphy, M.A.
Doctoral Student, Dept. of Art History and Archaeology
Washington University, St. Louis
mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu
********************************
"And remember darling I don't work before 10:30 and never after 4:30 in
the afternoon."
-Norma Desmond to Cecil B. DeMille in _Sunset
Boulevard_
___________________________________________________________________From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Gender identity determined in the womb
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 17:36:57 +0100
Lisa Hall writes:
>
>As for "the rough and tumble play of boys" surely this is a prime
>example of how "gender" is socially constructed, and it's rather
>amusing to find it used as a biological signifier.
>
Quite the contrary. The category of behaviour described as "rough and tumble
play" is considered by behavioural scientists to be a prime example of
non-sexual sex-dimorphic behaviour observable among all primates, and many
animals. Though I won't say for certain that that is a sure way of
identifying baby dykes in a human population. :-)
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 12:51:30 -0500
From: Gail Bederman <Gail.Bederman.1@nd.edu>
Subject: Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
Many, many thanks to Rictor Norton for his eloquent, comprehensive,
and persuasive reply to my question! Although I remain a social
constructionist, I can now see why he finds our insistent,
intransigent social-constructionism dogmatic and damaging. This
gives me something useful to think about.
I also agree with Ivan Dalley Crozier that social historians and
historians of past knowledges are likely to speak past one another in
this debate. Perhaps we historians of past knowledges should stop
beating up the essentialists on their epistemology, and realize
they're simply engaged in another project (though I can understand
why essentialists may not be able to reciprocate!)
One minor, cavilling note of protest (and I speak as one who reads
court records to figure out what people did, as well as what they
thought): Inadequate archival research and relying on skimpy evidence
can drive social constructionists crazy, too! You don't need to be
an essentialist to recognize that you need to understand something
about social history in order to understand what's going on
culturally.
Gail
Gail Bederman
History Department
University of Notre Dame
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 14:05:45 -0500
From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: Hacking our way through social construction?
>Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 09:33:04
>To: histsex-return-1692-6829931@listbot.com
>From: Dar Weyenberg <dweyenbe@students.wisc.edu>
>Subject: Re: Hacking our way through social construction?
>
>
>>Hello
>Nice subject topic.
>>Thank you very much for taking the time to respond.
>>I am familiar with some of this work, although not the lastest book. It
has been a while since I read his work and had forgotten this important
aspect. For me, this phrase 'resolves' the binary distinction between the
real/unreal, text/content etc.
>>(although other writers such as Foucault and Nicholas Rose, and Mitchell
Dean has much to add and contribute to this also).
>>Best
>>Dar
>>
>>"....Perhaps the safest line to go with,
>>>and one which I am happy to accept on the whole, is Ian Hacking's 'dynamic
>>>nominalism': the real world is there, but it is managed by knowledge, which
>>>is all we can do... "
>>
>>At 01:33 PM 7/18/00 +0100, you wrote:
>>>Dear Dar,
>>>
>>>There were two: his book, "The social constructoin of what?", Harvard, 1999,
>>>which I do not like because of its political stance, although it has good
>>>summaries of a lot of his other work, and a paper "Making up people", in
>>>_reconstructing Individualism_ ed T Heller, M Sosna, and D \Wellberry,
>>>Stnford, 1986 (plus elsewhere, like the science studies reader, ed. Mario
>>>Biagioli, 1999. His position, incidently, is similar to Arnold Davidson,
>>>numerous ppapers in Critical Inquiry in te later 1980s.
>>>
>>>Hope this helps. Another text you might want to see is "Rewriting the soul"
>>>by Hacking.
>>>
>>>
>>>Cheerio, Ivan
>>
>>
>>
>
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: Confessions; or The man without qualities?
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 11:16:59 +0100
I would like to thank Rictor for his response to Gail Bederman's questions
about positions in the history of sexuality. I found his response
intelligent, and enlightening (although I already thought this about his
work, and I would put in a serious plug for his web page: an excellent
resource! Check it out).
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
My position, as some of you might imagine, is somewhat different, although
not necessarily critical of Rictor's interest in the history of
homosexuality.
I am an historian of the human sciences and medicine, who happens to look at
the way that nineteenth- and early-twentieth -century doctors wrote about
homosexuality and the sexual instinct/impulse. That is, I am interested
about specific scientific knowledge about homosexuality, not about the
relationships between people of the same sex in history. I do not have a
political axe to grind; I am not especially interested in finding out what
really happened to the people who appeared in the case studies of
Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis or Freud (although I have written a bit about
this, but it is more an 'anti-history-from-below piece, coming out in
_History of Psychiatry_ any time now). I certainly have no interest
whatsoever in saying whether these guys got it right. Rather, I am
interested in seeing how doctors constructed knowledge about homosexuality,
how this knowledge was deployed, accepted, rejected, argued about,
challenged, reforged, etc. by members of the scientific and medical
communities. Past homosexuals--or indeed anyone else who had sex in the
past--really does not come into my work, except as the occasional patient.
I do not care what the wolf man was really like; I am interested in the
medical respose to Freud; how he came to change the way that many people
thought about sex. This position in itself whould put gulf between my and
Rictor's historical aims, and this is not a value judgement or a snide
remark.
I use social constructionist ideas only so far as they help me construct
better maps about the medical knowledge about homosexuality; how this
knowledge changed over time, and how it developed in some ways and not
others. I am particularly interested in mapping these changes in a
contextualist way: many historians of science take a narrow, internalist
focus; I consider my work to be much more contextual, looking outside the
field of medicine to the other kinds of issues which were at stake in the
period I consider. This is the basis of my real argument, if indeed I have
one. I want to challenge the way historians of science work. My teachers
in this were John Schuster (Scientific Revolution and Descartes expert) and
Evelleen Richards (Darwin scholar).
I am interested in how sexuality in general was theorised by experts, not
about what people do between the sheets. Actually, I am emphatically not
interested in reconstructing past people's sex lives: just past medical
documents. The only sex which I am particularly interested in is that which
I have (although I don't mind the occasional saucy email from a friend...
but let's not get carried away). I am also not especially interested in
sexual politics (or any politics, for that matter); don't consider myself a
card carrying member of any particualr sect (although if pushed, believe
Freud--who needs to be modified, it's true, but hey, he was writing about a
hundred years ago: let's not expect miracles--and support feminism, am not
homophobic or racist). And, for reasons which will not sit too well with
this email--but I just got into work--am not into public confesions of the
'real' me. I would use an analyst for that...
Essentially, then, I am in the academic business because I like teaching,
epsecially like interested students who are eager to learn (and who do their
reading), and like writing about esoteric topics. I also like arguing and
interacting with intelligent people, which is why I am on this list. If I
did not need the money, I may well sit around the whole day, drinking
Bordeaux, smoking cigars, and reading Proust. In Australia (where I am
from), this would include watching the cricket, but apart from Alec
Stewart's recent ton, there is not too much going on in London in this
field...
This is why I really do not think that Rictor and I have anything to argue
about at the end of the day; this could be extended to essentialism v
constructivism. He does very fine work which I would consider to be social
history of homosexuality (as well as literary studies). I do stodgy,
theoretical history of science and medicine. This work involves a keen
interest in the sociology of scientific knowledge and in French historical
epistemology (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault, and Bourdieu--although the
latter is not an historical epistemologist). I used to use exactly the same
kinds of ideas to look at anatomy. In the future I intend to look at
ethnology (although still relating to sexuality); for the next three years I
am not looking at medical writing about homosexuality on its own, but at the
way that the medical world in England managed writing about sex betwen
1850-1930: the book reviews in journals, the papers in journals, the lack of
attention to sex, etc.
In other words, I am interested in past knowledge, and Rictor is nterested
in past events. No wonder that we keep speaking past one another (and in
the spirit of good, academic discourse, not spite, I should add.)
OK, enough solipsism. Should I Cc this to the Tavistock?
IJDC
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 00:52:04 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Chris White's question about historical agency (was: Chicken ethics,
etc.)
Hi Chris
The chapter is done -- until my advisor gets through with
it. So, now's a good time to think about a somewhat
different topic.
For the sake of those peering over our shoulders, perhaps I
should restate your questions:
1. <<perhaps at the root of this is a fundamental
disagreement not so much about gender, as about ideology.
While neither of us subscribes to a crude top-down model of
dominant power, there is a significant degree of difference
of emphasis in our understanding of the level of homogeneity
of dominant power. If I am a Foucauldian of any kind, it is
in that the operation of power is flexible, variable, even
localised, and thus resistance to dominant ideology needs to
be the same.>>
2. <<To what extent does your version of reification leave
the individual with agency, and if so, what kind of agency?
If social construction is such a deep and thorough process,
where do we get the capacity to critique the status quo?>>
We _might_ disagree on the homogeneity of the domininant
power, but I doubt it. I would agree that power is
flexible, variable, and localized -- within limits beyond
which it would no longer make sense to speak of hegemony at
all. Now, that might strike you, or others, as either too
obvious, or too abstract, and if so, I sympathize. I'm
saying it to clear the air, because I suspect that we may
instead disagree on the assumptions one can make about the
cultural context within which conflicts over power take
place.
I learned a lot about how to apply what I learned of
cultural anthropology (during my undergraduate days) to my
current studies in social history from a book by Steve J.
Stern, _The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power
in Late Colonial Mexico_ (Chapel Hill: Univ. of N. Carolina
Press, 1995). The text is as pompous as the title in some
respects, but still, I think that Stern articulated from a
historian's perspective that some cultural anthropologists
learned long ago: that while conflict is endemic in social
systems, it is rare that conflict arises over the legitimacy
of cultural first principles _as such._ Rather, most
conflict arises over the legitimate _interpretation_ of
first principles. (This goes quite against the grain of
those historians of popular culture who, finding conflict
everywhere, see _resistance_ everywhere to one or another of
the pervasive hierarchies of gender, race, or class. For
an example of this tendency, see George Lipsitz's _Time
Passages._)
This insight into the nature of most cultural conflict
helps, I think, to clarify current political struggles
around the legitimacy of certain forms of gendered sexual
identity and practice. If one takes gender as a given, as
the field within which all human cultures construct sexual
relations, then those who style themselves "sex radicals"
are accurate in their self-description. And, judging by the
depth and intensity of reaction by those who subscribe to
the dominant ideology of sex (as Charles Moser attested to),
it would seem that the sex-gender status quo agrees in that
description, seeing any change as threatening.
If, however, one regards as radicalism the questioning of
gender _itself_ as a legitimate organizing principle (I'll
refer to this as "anti-gender," though I prefer to call it
"radical feminism"), then sex "radicals" appear to be
engaged in one of two principled but less-than-radical
political strategies.
The first is reformism: an ambitious attempt to replace the
Enlightenment two-sex model (as Laqueur calls it) with a
polymorphous model of gender. We might call this the
"multi-sex model." Reformers hope to do this through a
strategy of transvaluation and reclamation of sexological
constructs of deviancy -- shorthand for which is "queer"
and/or "playing with gender" -- as if destabilizing current
gender categories perforce eliminated gender hierarchy, as
Judith Butler believes (_Gender Trouble,_ x-xi).
The second is a more conventional politics of sexual
pluralism, a humanist call for liberal tolerance of sexual
difference, shorthand for which is "gay rights."
>From both of these perspectives, anti-gender appears to be
"anti-sex," when in fact it is _anti-sexological._ The work
of Sheila Jeffreys is particularly emphatic on this last
point: for a good condensation of her work see her article,
"How Orgasm Politics has Hijacked the Women's Movement,"
_On the Issues_ 2 (Spring 1996): 18 et seq.
(By the way: "anti-gender," "reform," and "pluralism" are
_analytical_ distinctions, not descriptions of individuals'
consistent behavior; individuals can and routinely do shift
from perspective to perspective depending on context.)
In Stern's terms, both reformism and pluralism contest the
dominant ideology (in U.S. social history, one refers to the
20th-c. ideal of "companionate marriage"; I don't know if
that term holds meaning for those of you in other parts of
the overdeveloped world), but they don't contest gender
itself.
The social agency of the individual is important to each of
these perspectives. One of the things that I've noticed over
the course of my training is that many social historians,
including many historians of women, tend to conflate the
concepts _agency_ and _freedom._ My favorite example
(Michael A. Murphy will pardon me for repeating myself, I
hope) comes from Christine Stansell's _City of Women,_ in
which she strongly implies that the sexual transgressions of
young and unmarried working class women constituted a
proto-feminist liberation through sexuality. Applying
Stern's more nuanced understanding of culture-as-conflict, I
would reinterpret Stansell's evidence as showing that
multiple notions of gendered sexuality competed for
legitimacy during the period -- none of which threatened to
invalidate gender as such. Timothy Gilfoyle's history of
prostitution in New York City (_City of Eros_) could also
benefit from such reinterpretation. He doesn't share
Stansell's faith in "transgression." Instead, he casts
about for some way of making sense of mid-century struggles
between sexual "libertines" and moral reformers in which all
parties seem equally implicated in maintaining gender
hierarchy -- much to the author's bewilderment.
These two examples, and the many others like them that one
could produce, do not mean, however, that all forms of
historical agency simply debate variations on gender. There
are examples of historical agents who question the
legitimacy of gender itself. Here, I have to rely on my
greater familiarity with social movements of the recent
past. (Reading between the lines of a number of works
treating earlier centuries of U.S. history, such as Ann
Braude's _Radical Spirits,_ or the works of William
Lockridge, Kathleen M. Brown, or others whom I've cited in
past posts, can produce other, but less clear-cut,
examples.) One can, for instance, see in the antipornography
activism of Nikki Craft (see her contributions to _Fight
Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence,_ ed. Frédérique
Delacoste and Felice Newman, 1st ed. [Minneapolis: Cleis
Press, 1981]), or the antipimping work of Evelina Giobbe
("Confronting the Liberal Lies about Prostitution," in _The
Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism,_ ed. Dorchen
Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond [New York: Pergamon Press,
1990]), a clear resistance to gender as a first principle of
social organization. John Stoltenberg's activism and
writing have carried forward a principled resistance to
gender hierarchy as the sexual dynamic of male supremacy
that was a part of (though not necessarily the dominant
perspective in) the gay liberation movement in its earliest
years in the U.S. (Allen Young's contributions to _Out of
the Closets,_ co-edited with Karla Jay, 2nd ed. [New York
Univ. Press, 1990 (1970)] are particularly sharp). It is
through the historical agency of such activists, and that of
thousands of others whose names we'll probably never know,
that the possibility of even being able to conceive of "the
end of manhood" continues its tenuous existence.
Where do we get the capacity to question gender? I'll be
brief, and say that it comes from the same human
qualities that make it possible to reform gender. The
rarity of such questioning in history also points to the
conditions necessary for its emergence, the most
favorable appearing to have obtained in the late 20th c.
The tenuousness of "anti-gender's" existence does say
something about the depth and pervasiveness of gender as a
none-too-democratic principle of social organization, the
continuation of which draws on sources of power both local
(even those dedicated to ending it must struggle with their
deep internalization of it) and distant (the examples are
many, including, say, the international traffic in women).
It also says something about human beings and their cultural
adaptation to life on this planet: that changing the first
principles of a culture, any culture, is perhaps the most
ambitious project that humans may jointly undertake. It's
easier to destroy whole cultures (as colonialists have
sometimes managed to do) than to build successful movements
for such thoroughgoing and risky kinds of social change.
Hence the persistence of an apparently gloomy tone in much
of what I've posted to date. I don't see anti-gender as
pessimism, but its opposite; nor is it "man-hating," but
rather predicates the demand that men change on men's human
capacity to change. Still, I understand why, in the face of
the history of sexuality and the glacial slowness of the
process, it is indeed quite possible to despair, and why
some who helped to develop the anti-gender perspective now
repudiate their former idealism as naive. But that's not
the only possible response.
Such deep change literally takes many generations to
complete. But it begins in effective activism, however
partial and incremental. That's how I regard the
antipornography ordinance, and Craft's street theater, and
the lesbian-feminist life-partnerships of my closest
friends: as demonstration projects that might inspire an
increasingly comprehensive movement to end gender as the
only way to end gender hierarchy.
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Dept. of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 19:57:37 -0500
From: Gail Bederman <Gail.Bederman.1@nd.edu>
Subject: Conference: Future of the Queer Past, Sept 14-17, 2000
I thought people on this list might be interested in the following
gay/lesbian history conference, to be held in Chicago in September.
(Organized by George Chauncey, among others). I don't remember
seeing an announcement posted on this list, so I've copied the first
page from their website.
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/cgs/queerpast.html
The Future of the Queer Past:
A Transnational History Conference
September 14 -17, 2000 at The University of Chicago
The Future of the Queer Past is being organized by the
Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies and
the Department of History at the University of Chicago, with the
assistance of an external advisory committee.
The Future of the Queer Past, an international meeting of
historians and other scholars studying historical processes from
diverse disciplinary perspectives, will be held at the University of
Chicago on Thursday-Sunday, September 14-17, 2000. Two hundred
faculty, graduate students, artists, curators, and independent
scholars studying a wide range of issues throughout the world and
across history are scheduled to speak at conference sessions.
The conference offers historians, other interested scholars
and artists a rare and critically important opportunity to meet one
another and to collectively chart the development of the field,
assess its strengths and weaknesses, and explore new directions for
its future.
The conference's transnational thematic organization also
encourages historians to reassess the periodizations and explanatory
frameworks they have developed for particular periods and national
histories by placing them in a broader historical and transnational
context, as well as to track and explore the ramifications of the
transnational circulation of people, discourses, and social
movements, and to compare the developments in different localities
and explore the connections among them.
The performance and critical analysis of creative
interventions into popular historical memory will also be a central
part of the conference.
Anyone interested in these issues is welcome to attend the
conference. All speakers, discussants, and other people attending the
conference must register for the conference and pay the registration
fee. We encourage you to register as soon as possible, and reduced
rates are available to those who register by August 1st.
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Conference: Future of the Queer Past, Sept 14-17, 2000
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 21:28:17 +0100
Thanks for posting this information Gail.
Incidentally there is a link to the website for this conference on my Useful
Links: History of Sexuality page
http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah/sexlinks.htm
and I'm always delighted to have information about future conferences to
add. If your conference doesn't have a website, or not as yet, I'm prepared
to create a small Contact/CFP details page on my site.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Confessions; or The man without qualities?
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 22:21:17 +0100
Thank you, Ivan, for your kind words -- in return for which, I will
grudgingly acknowledge that your history of ideas approach even to the
subject of science can lead to interesting and valuable insights.
Your summary of the key points of our different positions is good, and I'm
happy to leave it there.
I quite agree with you that we don't want to get into a long series of True
Confessions, and I regret having done so myself, as in reading through my
post I see too much embarrassing puling and whining. And I won't ask you
what you were doing on Hampstead Heath.
All the best,
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Gender identity determined in the womb
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 22:02:55 +0100
Michael Murphy says:
>
>If anything Rictor's example shows that the truth of the body is
>always a product of social intervention, sometimes in the form of a
>scalpel.
>
No, you've mis-read the whole point of the report, which was that the body
retains its own truth despite massive social intervention in the form of a
scalpel followed by conditioning. This study and others like it is being
used precisely as an argument for stopping what you rightly call mutilation.
I can see that the report in the New York Times was not particularly clear
when it rather blandly remarked that "Reiner also called for a thorough
review of the practice of sex reassignment of children", but what Reiner has
pretty much called for is the cessation of such surgery until the children
are old enough to take an active role in deciding what action to take.
Reiner is quite in agreement with you that doctors have abused their power
and wrongly taken action in accordance with the phallocentric prejudice that
penis=boy, therefore no penis=girl, when in fact these are boys despite the
absence of a penis (it has been well known for a long time that androgen
creates more than just a penis), and that their biologically constituted
male gender cannot be altered by imposing on it a socially constructed
female gender.
I attach a fuller commentary on this and related studies, which may make
things clearer. I appreciate that some people might think that studies such
as this do not come within the field covered by this list. But I think that
especially these boundary situations (i.e. intersex, transgender, etc.) are
really quite interesting in helping us get a fuller understanding of some of
the complexities of sex and gender, complexities that I don't think are
easily resolved by relying for our knowledge wholly upon culture rather than
biology.
The Scientist 14[14]:6
July 10, 2000
NEWS
Reevaluating Sex Reassignment
Evidence supports nature over nurture in establishing gender identity
By Ricki Lewis
Results of two studies from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center challenge
accepted medical practice of "sex reassignment"--surgically converting XY
males with absent or minuscule penises into anatomical females, then
raising them as girls. The investigations, which are the first to go
beyond individual case reports, reveal outcomes that are remarkably
consistent with rare instances of infants who lost their penises in
accidents and who were reassigned as females. Both clinical trials and
case reports powerfully argue for nature over nurture in establishing
gender identity.
William Reiner, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and urologist at the
Johns Hopkins Children's Center, reported the studies at the Lawson
Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society meeting in Boston on May 12, 2000.
"These children demonstrate that normal male gender identity can develop
not only in the absence of the penis, but even after the removal of the
testicles and unequivocal rearing as female. The studies suggest that male
gender identity is directly related to normal male patterns of hormone
exposure in utero," he says. The investigations began in 1995.
In one study, Reiner and director of pediatric urology John Gearhart
followed 14 children born with cloacal exstrophy. "These kids have a
pelvic field defect that is probably a problem in genetic timing in the
embryo, a control gene that is turned off too soon, or on too late. A
number of anomalies are associated with this problem. A boy has no penis,
but normal testicles. In a girl, there is no clitoris but usually a
vagina. She is raised as a girl," explains Reiner.
The first study followed 14 XY individuals--genetic males, with an
intersex appearance of no penis but normal testicles, and normal male
hormone levels at birth. Twelve of the children were reassigned female,
yet the parents reported that all displayed typical male behavior
throughout childhood. Six of the 12 switched themselves to the male gender
between the ages of 5 and 12 years, and the two children not subjected to
surgery are psychologically well-adjusted males who do not have penises,
Reiner reports. "All of these children act like boys as soon as anyone
observes them," he adds. Reiner describes one telling case of a child
reassigned to being female. "The dad of one 2 1/2-year-old had raised
another son and daughter. He said that the 2 1/2-year-old acts exactly
like his son, no matter what they do. He loves cars, trucks, and Legos,
makes guttural sounds when playing with them, and doesn't go near dolls."
Reiner advised the parents to raise the child as a boy, which they had
already decided to do.
The second study describes 12 additional children Reiner sees at the Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic for Gender Identity and Psychosexual
Disorders at Hopkins. Eight of the 12 have reassigned themselves to the
gender dictated by their XY chromosomes and molded by their prenatal
hormone exposure. Apparently, the 60 millionths of an ounce of
testosterone surging through a male body does more than build a penis.
The controversy over sex reassignment came to public attention three years
ago with an account of the life of "John/Joan" that won a National
Magazine Award.1 "John/Joan," actually the man now known as David Reimer,
was born in 1965 as Bruce, identical twin to Brian. But he was raised as
Brenda from the age of 22 months, when he was castrated after his parents
approved sex reassignment following a botched circumcision performed at 8
months. Hailed as a resounding success in the literature by the
psychologist in charge, Hopkins' John Money, the case served as a
precedent for many others. But reality was far different.2 Brenda, always
uneasy in her dress-clad body, actually suffered a terrible childhood of
relentless ridicule and confusion, and when finally told the truth at age
14, immediately became David. He eventually married, adopted his
stepchildren, and today is a grandfather.
The medical community also learned the true outcome of David's case about
three years ago and faced the inescapable conclusion that perhaps
thousands of individuals may have been sex-reassigned into misery.3 In a
paper that went against three decades of dogma, University of Hawaii,
Manoa, professor of anatomy and reproductive biology Milton Diamond and
psychiatrist Keith Sigmundson revealed David's disastrous past. The pair
had interesting ties to the case: Diamond was part of the research team at
the University of Kansas that had identified the masculinizing effects of
testosterone on fetal guinea pigs in 1959; Sigmundson was Reimer's
psychiatrist in his hometown of Winnipeg.
Candidates for sex reassignment aren't rare. About one in 2,000 births is
an "intersex," a person with ambiguous genitalia, or reproductive
structures from both sexes. And a few cases of "ablatio penis" similar to
Bruce/Brenda/David dot the medical literature.4 Thanks to Diamond,
Sigmundson, and David Reimer, some of these people are beginning to speak
out.
The Web site for the Ann Arbor-based Intersex Society of North America
(ISNA) reveals further, albeit anecdotal, evidence of problems with sex
reassignment.5 Here, reassigned females report overwhelming confusion
during childhood and adolescence, and either bisexuality, homosexuality,
or avoidance of sexual activity. All are angry at the surgeries they
endured without their consent or understanding. In contrast, sex
reassignment surgery works well for transsexuals, whose gender identity is
at odds with their chromosomal and gonadal sex, and who request the
surgery.
Making a Biological "He" into a Social "She"
The traditional medical decision to endow a child whose penis never
developed fully or was damaged is based on a yardstick of sorts. If a
newborn's stretched organ is longer than an inch, he is deemed a he; if
the protrusion is under 3/8 of an inch, she is a she. Those falling in
between have their organs shortened, a penis becoming a clitoris. Further
plastic surgeries and hormone treatments during puberty complete the
transformation, with external female genitalia sculpted from scrotal
tissue.
Gary Berkovitz, director of pediatric endocrinology at the University of
Miami School of Medicine, explains the procedures. "We remove the testes
because they would make testosterone and virilize a girl. The phallus is
recessed. Current techniques emphasize maintenance of innervation, and
experimental evidence indicates that sensitivity in the new clitoris is
preserved. However, none of the children has grown to adulthood yet to see
if it works. The new techniques are very different than what was done 30
to 35 years ago."
Hormones are part of the picture too. "We initially try to re-create a
normal puberty, give a little estrogen at first, then progesterone. The
girl won't bleed because there is no uterus, but she can have normal
cycles. Often it is possible to do this with birth control pills as the
estrogen supplements. Breasts develop too, given appropriate hormonal
stimulation," Berkovitz says.
Female reassignments are typically done within days of birth; the more
complex phalloplasty is often undertaken later. "Surgeons can make a
vagina relatively easily, but it is hard to make a penis that is
functional," says Reiner. Berkovitz describes the technique. "Skin and
muscle bundles and accompanying vasculature are brought to an area of the
penis to supplement the length. In most cases, there is a small phallus
with corporal tissue capable of erection and skin capable of normal
sensation." Testosterone injections or patches are given beginning at
puberty, although sometimes low doses are administered earlier for social
reasons. "Little boys have to learn to pee standing up. And little
children also look at each other" and can be cruel when a boy appears to
be different, he adds.
But all too often, appearances cannot mask the upheaval within. Happy
endings for XY individuals assigned to femaleness, at least so far, appear
to be rare, or at least unreported. Adding to the trauma are the
procedures. "The surgeries permanently destroy fertility and negatively
impact sexual sensation, as well as substantially increasing the risk of
infections, scarring, and so on," says Alice Dreger, assistant professor
of science and technology studies at Michigan State University in East
Lansing, who has researched and written extensively on intersexuality.6
A Question of Ethics
The reasons for sex reassignment have ranged from nature/nurture
considerations, to good intent, to the practical matter of surgical
expediency. "There was no scientific evidence about what was the right way
to do things. Mistakes have been made. A lot of people wanted to do well
by their patients and made decisions according to what seemed the right
thing to do," relates William Futrell, a professor of plastic surgery at
the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
But some in the field question the assumptions fueling those good
intentions. "The first erroneous assumption is that sexual intercourse is
the most important thing that a human does, which is certainly not true.
Second is that the penis is the most important sexual organ. That is
simply idiotic. The brain is the most important sexual organ. The brain
tells the individual what to do with the penis, the vagina, or any other
part of the anatomy," says Reiner.
He and Dreger trace the roots of sex reassignment to the behavioral
movement of the 1950s and 1960s. "Tremendous importance has been placed on
the penis. But to a boy born without a penis, he doesn't know what he is
missing. It was felt that when such a boy was born, he could be converted
to whatever you wanted," says Reiner. John Money, who declined comment for
this article, is widely regarded as the father of the field. "Since the
work of John Money starting in the 1950s, many clinicians treating
intersex (and supposedly related conditions like traumatic loss of the
penis in early childhood) have believed that gender identity is mostly
determined by nurture, specifically social/parental/self responses to
having a phallus or not having a visible phallus early in childhood," adds
Dreger.
It is the traditional timing of female sex reassignment that opens a
bioethical can of worms. "Since the 1960s, the paradigm has been to assign
kids with pelvic field defects as females within two days of birth, and
they are castrated," reports Reiner. But that paradigm may be shifting,
adds Dreger, to delaying surgery until the person can decide. "Gender
identity is very complicated, and it looks from the evidence like the
various components interact and matter in different ways for different
individuals. That's why unconsenting children and adults should never be
subject to cosmetic, medically unnecessary surgeries designed to alter
their sexual tissue. We cannot predict what parts they may want later,"
Dreger says.
To help shift the age at which sex reassignment is offered, the Harry
Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association publishes standards of
care for treating gender identity disorders.7 A new set will be published
this summer. The stated goal of treatment is "lasting personal comfort
with the gendered self in order to maximize overall psychological
well-being and self-fulfillment," which can hardly be established at two
days of age. "Harry Benjamin practiced in the 1950s. Christine Jorgensen
was his patient. [Christine, born George, had surgery to become female.]
Nobody would operate on her here, so she went to Denmark. Dr. Benjamin was
interested in these patients, and developed criteria for treating them. He
made a simple statement, that if you can't change the mind to fit the
body, then change the body to fit the mind," says Futrell. Sex
reassignment attempts to do just the opposite.
For some patients, sex reassignment to create female genitalia may still
be appropriate. And care has come a long way from the time when groups of
curious interns would gaggle at the exposed crotch of a mortified
intersexed child, as several people recall in Dreger's book. "Most major
institutions have committees that are involved in medical, legal, social,
and religious aspects that help parents make decisions," says Futrell. And
he adds that the technology to reconstruct a penis, rather than removing
tissue to mimic a female, has come a long way.
With hindsight from the field of bioethics, born in the 1970s, sex
reassignment surgery as performed in the 1960s retrospectively hit all the
buttons--paternalism, informed consent, the doctor-patient relationship,
and the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm." Says Dreger, "The medical
treatment of intersex and traumatic loss of the penis has been a
40-plus-year, poorly run, unethical experiment. Someday this will rank up
there with Tuskegee." But with the new knowledge of long-term outcomes,
improved surgical techniques, and patient choice, sex reassignment in the
future promises to be a more carefully considered option.
Ricki Lewis (rickilewis@nasw.org) is a contributing editor for The
Scientist.
References
1. J. Colapinto, "The true story of John/Joan," Rolling Stone, 54-73,
92-6, December 11, 1997.
2. J. Colapinto, As Nature Made Him, New York, HarperCollins Publishers,
2000.
3. M. Diamond and H.K. Sigmundson, "Sex reassignment at birth. Long-term
review and clinical implications," Archives of Pediatric Adolescent
Medicine, 151[3]:298-304, 1997.
4. S.J. Bradley et al. "Experiment of nurture: ablatio penis at 2 months,
sex reassignment at 7 months, and a psychosexual follow up in young
adulthood," Pediatrics, 102[1]:e9, 1998.
5. Intersex Society of North America, http://www.isna.org/
6. Alice Domurat Dreger, Intersex in the Age of Ethics, Hagerstown, Md.,
University Publishing Groups Inc., 1999.
7. Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association,
http://www.hbigda.org/
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 08:40:33 gmt
Subject: Remit of list
Rictor Norton wrote
>I attach a fuller commentary on this and related studies, which may make
>things clearer. I appreciate that some people might think that studies such
>as this do not come within the field covered by this list. But I think that
>especially these boundary situations (i.e. intersex, transgender, etc.) are
>really quite interesting in helping us get a fuller understanding of some of
>the complexities of sex and gender, complexities that I don't think are
>easily resolved by relying for our knowledge wholly upon culture rather than
>biology.
My own feeling on this more or less matches the above. We are, after all, living
in history ourselves. All intellectual tools which help us understand sex,
gender, society and history are surely appropriate for discussion here. Though
I would also hope that, as historians, we would apply a historicised understanding
to modern scientific developments.
That's my personal opinion. As list-owner, I'd rather this list was a 'broad
church' rather than having some strict line about what is and is not appropriate
- within the bounds of scholarly interest of course.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
homepage: http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 15:09:10 +0100
From: Paula Bartley <fa1912@wlv.ac.uk>
Subject: Suffrage city conference
Members might be interested in the Suffrage City conference to be held at
the University of Wolverhampton, Nov 11th this year. Some papers deal with
issues of sexuality eg Elizabeth Robins' books; the work of Emmeline
Pankhurst.
Have attached the provisional programme but if anyone is unable to access
it then I can send it to them directly.
Paula Bartley
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 11:48:46 -0500
From: Gail Bederman <Gail.Bederman.1@nd.edu>
Subject: From David Harley Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
(My colleague David Harley is travelling, and writes me: " I can't
easily get ListBot to accept the below, because it doesn't know where
I am, electronically. Could you forward it to HistSex for me?"
Done. Gail)
Rictor Norton wrote:
>Unfortunately, any non-social-constructionist who responds to her invitation
>to discuss the issue of motivation will automatically lose ground by
>appearing to accede to the social constructionist position that regularly
>reduces substantive arguments to ad hominem arguments. The moment we discuss
>the issue in her terms, we will appear to be agreeing with the social
>constructionist position that all knowledge issues are political issues or
>power issues.
David Harley:
This clearly is a problem. The social constructionist is obliged to treat
every intellectual position as a social construction, in order to avoid
asymmetry. Scientists gleefully say, "Well, if your position is a social
construction, why should we listen to you?" I think this arises from what we
might call "vulgar social construction". This is asymmetrical and purports to
be "unmasking" something or other as a social construction, while ignoring its
own identical status. The social construction metaphor, which should perhaps
be abandoned as too widely abused to be useful, does nothing more than draw
attention to the processes by which an intellectual construct is built. As
for whether this is always about power and politics, that rather depends on
what interests you think motivate groups of people in the course of their
everyday lives. Concepts produced by academics probably are usually motivated
by such considerations, along with an admixture of pride and personal vanity.
However, the social origins and uses of concepts have nothing whatsoever to do
with their truth or falsity. The Copernican theory was a social construction.
The circulation of the blood was a social construction. And none the worse
for that. Their truth value is quite a separate matter.
Rictor:
>It seems to me that hard-line social constructionism has made it extremely
>difficult to engage in the more traditional kind of gay and lesbian history
>that I've mentioned, and that it has discouraged primary research in favour
>of theory. Non-social-constructionist history has been pretty thoroughly
>dished as being naive and under-theorized.
David Harley:
In an age of scarce resources, scholars prefer projects that can be undertaken
in a local library rather than a distant archive. Moreover, linguistic and
palaeographic skills are not as widely distributed as they might be. So
"scholars" read translations or look at the illustrations of some old book and
then pretend they've read the original, or else dismiss the original as
irrelevant, the author being now dead. Such practices are more widespread in
English and cultural studies departments than in history departments, I
suspect, but they are beginning to be seen throughout academe. However, this
is merely an example of interests shaping the intellectual product.
A sound piece of social constructionist work, I would contend, actually
requires more rather than less familiarity with primary sources, because one
cannot take any of the building blocks provided by traditional historiography
for granted, and it is difficult to know where to stop the infinite regress of
social construction, boxes nesting in layer after layer.
Rictor:
For example, I would be
>interested in asking the question "Was Handel gay?" But a social
>constructionist position prevents that question from being taken seriously,
>because they would assert that (a) one cannot project "a modern construct
>such as 'gay' " back in time, and (b) a list of "the great queens of
>history" is a self-serving construct having no historical validity, and (c)
>the whole approach is naive and foolish.
David Harley:
I can see the polemical and personal uses to be made from such a discussion,
and I am a good deal more sympathetic to them than I am to scientists and
doctors whose only interest in history is "Was Newton a great scientist?" or
"Was Harvey right about the blood?" Nevertheless, I am not clear that the
ancestor worship of the scientists is fundamentally different from what Rictor
proposes, despite the fact that one is a discourse of established power and
the other a discourse of resistance. Maybe the kind of gay history that
Rictor wants to do needs to separate itself from academic history.
Rictor:
The implications of this approach,
>which allows the possibility of denying the existence of such things as the
>Holocaust, is what has led to a fairly widespread revulsion at social
>constructionist histories of "the Jew".
David Harley:
I don't think any self-respecting social constructionist would deny the
Holocaust. This is a slander that scientists often employ against science
studies practitioners. It is well known as half of the "Death and Furniture"
manoeuvre. I do not think Rictor is helping this discussion by associating
people who take different positions with Holocaust-deniers.
Rictor Norton:
>Further, not satisfied with denying me my sources, social constructionists
>have denied me the very words I would use to discuss my sort of history.
>Specifically, "gay" and "homosexual" are absolutely forbidden for use in
>discussing the past for the mere reason that these words did not exist in
>the past.
David Harley:
There should be no real problem as long as these are recognized as terms of
art rather than as social roles available at the time. We cannot choose to
act in accordance with models yet to be invented, which is why Newton never
tried to be a great scientist. Even social constructionists can hardly avoid
using anachronistic terms sometimes, and I suspect RN's adversaries are pretty
sloppy. Rictor ought to get his own back by looking for every time they use
"scientist" or "radical".
Rictor:
This, in my view, is a very naive view of both knowledge and
>history, but the conviction that all knowledge is linguistically mediated is
>a very tedious nut to crack. By no means impossible, just tedious.
David H:
And probably impossible without the mediation of language, eh?
David Harley,
Dept. of History,
University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, IN 46556
tel.: 219-631-7313
___________________________________________________________________Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 14:52:41 -0700 (MST)
From: Tim Hodgdon <Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu>
Subject: Re: David Harley to Rictor Norton on historical relativism
On Fri, 21 Jul 2000, Gail Bederman wrote:
. . .
> > Rictor:
> > The implications of this approach,
> > which allows the possibility of denying the existence of
> > such things as the
> > Holocaust, is what has led to a fairly widespread
> > revulsion at social
> >constructionist histories of "the Jew".
>
> David Harley:
> I don't think any self-respecting social constructionist would deny the
> Holocaust. This is a slander that scientists often employ against science
> studies practitioners. It is well known as half of the "Death and Furniture"
> manoeuvre. I do not think Rictor is helping this discussion by associating
> people who take different positions with Holocaust-deniers.
Hmm... Well, the problems that could result from
taking the "descent into discourse" to its logical extreme
of absolute historical relativism have drawn the attention
of some famous historical relativists. See _Probing the
limits of representation : Nazism and the "final solution,"_
ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992).
Hayden White's essay, "Historical emplotment and the problem
of truth" proposes a solution which seems workable to me,
but would without doubt invite yet another round of
deconstruction. This doesn't lead me to adopt Rictor
Norton's position, but rather to confirm my longstanding
preference for the kinds of social constructionism that
predate the postmodern turn (and which, I should add, have
retained their vitality in spite of being overshadowed and
disparaged as "essentialist" and "transhistorical").
Tim Hodgdon
Ph.D. candidate
Department of History
Arizona State University
Tim.Hodgdon@asu.edu
___________________________________________________________________From: MillerJimE@aol.com
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 18:28:17 EDT
Subject: Re: From David Harley Re: Rictor Norton and a textbook query
In a message dated 07/21/2000 3:45:07 PM Central Daylight Time,
Gail.Bederman.1@nd.edu writes:
<< Scientists gleefully say, "Well, if your position is a social
construction, why should we listen to you?" I think this arises from what we
might call "vulgar social construction". This is asymmetrical and purports
to
be "unmasking" something or other as a social construction, while ignoring
its
own identical status. >>
We''re getting somewhere here. This much I can agree with. However --
<< The Copernican theory was a social construction.
The circulation of the blood was a social construction. And none the worse
for that. Their truth value is quite a separate matter. >>
Maybe it is a problem with definitions. The circulation of the blood is
NOT a social construction. Our concept of its circulation is. Copernican
theory is a social construction, but not the earth's orbit around the sun.
And their truth value is not a separate matter. Their truth value is
precisely the core of their value as social constructions -- including their
survival value as theories.
Jim Miller
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Social constructionism etc.
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 10:15:40 +0100
David Harley comments:
>I don't think any self-respecting social constructionist would deny the
>Holocaust. This is a slander that scientists often employ against science
>studies practitioners. It is well known as half of the "Death and
Furniture"
>manoeuvre. I do not think Rictor is helping this discussion by associating
>people who take different positions with Holocaust-deniers.
Well, perhaps it is a slander, and I retract it insofar as I cannot cite
examples of people who have crossed that particular line. But I think it is
important to recognize the consequences of using strict constructivism with
regard to minority groups such as Jews and homosexuals. Anthony Julius in a
review (in The Guardian I think, I've lost the precise citation) of the book
_The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity_ (1995)
(which consists of essays collected by Linda Mochlin and Tamar Garb),
comments that if we take the view that what we hold to be our most private
self is itself a construct, then "two unappealing consequences follow.
First, if all Jews are 'constructed', then the difference between
'fictional' and 'real' Jews, or between fictional Jews that are merely
'stereotypical' and those that are fully realised, is not very important.
Second, giving an account of individual suffering, of the violations of
self, ceases to be interesting. . . . If, as one contributor says, ' "Real
Jews" and "fictitious Jews" occupy the same representational theatre', then
you disable yourself from protesting: 'I have been misrepresented!' . . .
One cannot write about persecution in a language in which that experience is
invisible."
The line of thought that ultimately rests upon the position that everything
is a *representation* (a construct) will inevitably remove the possibility
of judging that anything is a *misrepresentation*, and that's partly why I
think the constructivist line of reasoning will ultimately prove to be a
disempowering discourse, despite the first flush of excitement at being able
to deconstruct or "unmask" a construct that one has experienced as being
oppressive (there is a lot of essentialist motivation behind
constructionism, I feel).
--
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Re: Confessions; or The man without qualities?
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2000 10:19:19 -0500
From: "Michael J. Murphy" <mjmurphy@artsci.wustl.edu>
Ivan,
I'm not sure if Rictor would agree with your characterization of him and
his work--that's of course up to him. His patience in discussions on this
topic are to be commended, since other lists would have flamed out by
now.
But, do you think it's possible to access 'past events' in any way other
than through 'past knowledges.' In other words, are there only histories
of knowledges, some more self-conscious than others? To my thinking,
history can only be a writing of representations because that's all we
have left to us. It's the nooks and crannies of those representations
which are of such interest. No?
PS, surely you have a cat or two you want to share with us? We have
three: Spike, Flake and a rent-a-puss named Midnight. The latter's on
loan from a friend who's moving. They are a constant source of
procrastination.
Mike Murphy
>In other words, I am interested in past knowledge, and Rictor is nterested
>in past events. No wonder that we keep speaking past one another (and in
>the spirit of good, academic discourse, not spite, I should add.)
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Hacking our way through social construction?
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 12:27:22 +0100
Dear Dar,
Thanks for yours. I thought that you would liek the below review of Hacking.
It is coming out in _Venereology_ sometimes. You should also look att he
forthcoming one by Martin Kusch (as well as his other work) if you are
interested in this sort o fthing.
I hope this finds you well.
Cheerio, Ivan
BTW, Kusch's book Psychological Knowledge might also do a lot to extend your
interest in applying Foucault. He, to my mind, is one of the superior
scholars in this sort of area, as well as arnold Davidson, but fo rother
reasons.
Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press,
Cambridge MA and London, 1999. ISBN 0-674-81200-X. HB $???
Ian Hacking has for some time been one of the most interesting philosophers
of science in the Anglophone world. He has written masterfully on the
construction of individuals (what he terms 'making up people'), as well as
on standard topics in the philosophy of science. He is also renowned as a
contributor to high-brow literary journals, such as the London Review of
Books. These qualifications make Hacking's timely meditations on the
so-called Science Wars, and on recent constructivist practices in the social
sciences, all the more pertinent. He is certainly qualified to speak from
on-high about many of the issues with which he grapples in The Social
Construction of What?
Social construction-the notion that the world is made up from the
social actions of people, and is not derived from experience in an
unmediated way-has, as Hacking rightly points out, become a ubiquitous
phrase in the social sciences and in history in recent years. It is a
signifier which is rapidly becoming devoid of meaning. This issue is no
clearer than in the vast array of things which are purportedly constructed
socially, as found in Hacking's inventory on page one. His list includes
items as disparate as gender, homosexual culture, the child viewer of
television and facts. Hacking's central complaint, however, is that many of
the authors writing about social construction really do not define what is
being constructed. Indeed, early in the book, Hacking suggests that if it
is the idea or the organisational matrix which is being analysed as
constructed, then adding the word 'social' has no meaning at all- ideas and
matrices are inherently social, and therefore it should be obvious to all
who study homosexual cultures or child television viewers that the
construction of matrices and ideas are social: hence there is no need for
the phrase 'social construction', except in special circumstances or for
rhetorical effect. Needless to say, Hacking is reacting to the over-use of
the term.
On closer analysis, I partially agree with Hacking. He suggests
that 'Social construction work is critical of the status quo.' (p. 6). His
schema for this argument follows: (1) The thing which was constructed need
not have existed; 'it is not inevitable.' If the thing being examined is
knowledge, ideas, social practices, etc., then I concur whole-heartedly.
Hacking then makes two additional points that constructivists 'often go
further, and urge that' (2) The thing which is constructed is 'quite bad as
it is' and (3) The thing constructed should be either "radically
transformed" or 'done away with' (p. 6). In other words, for Hacking,
constructivism is a conscious-raising activity with political ends. And, in
many historical works and in many sociological works, this is precisely the
aim of the authors. For instance, historians of gender are rarely merely
curious about past knowledges and practices which pertain to gender
subordination. They often try to change the status quo by showing that the
current practices are products of past errors. It should be noted that
there are many other varieties of constructivist: not all varieties are
interested in changing social ideology. A prime example is the sociology of
scientific knowledge (SSK), which to my mind is mis-represented by
juxtaposition with other, sloppier varieties of constructivism.
SSK is primarily concerned with the construction of scientific
knowledge by scientists. Particularly the Edinburgh School, which comes in
for cursory treatment on pages 90 and 202, shows how scientific knowledge
cannot be separated from the social institutions which hold science to be
knowledge (i.e., other scientists). The Edinburgh School also notes that
the way that science proceeds is based on interests: on non-epistemic
factors, not on purely rational structures. People agree with the
particular scientific claims which they were taught are appropriate, and
this is one sense that knowledge should be considered constructed or
mediated. Instead of describing the work of the Edinburgh School here, I
direct interested readers to the work of Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and
Martin Kusch in the first instance. Hacking's position is to separate the
Edinburgh School from other social constructivists: 'If we took the metaphor
of "construction" literally, we could hardly call the Edinburgh School
constructionist, but they certainly emphasise the social.' (pp.90-1). This
is in contradiction to the Edinburgh School's epistemological position: that
knowledge is social, and that the world is constructed through our beliefs
and actions based on knowledge.
Hacking's position, as far as I can see, owes a lot to the
aforementioned Science Wars. His book is in effect carving out a position
for philosophers of science who have collectively been under attack by
polemicists such as Jean Bricmont, Alan Sokal and Norman Gross. These
philippics have attacked science studies in general for trying to undermine
science (with their wicked allusions that science is not purely rational,
but also has a social component). Philosophers as stodgy as Karl Popper and
T.S. Kuhn have been lumped in with others ranging from-to choose some of the
more radical critics-psychoanalytical feminists Héléne Cixous and Luce
Irigary, deconstructionists such as Jacques Derrida, and historians such as
Foucault. Of course, social studies of science is also attacked. These
groups are, according to me, inappropriately linked, and often share nothing
except at a facile level. Hacking's aim is to separate philosophy of
science from some of these other science studies by inventing the group
"Social Constructivist" and exhibiting their inadequacies (although it must
be said that Hacking has endorsed the work of Michel Foucault, but in this
book Foucault is treated as a moralist rather than an historian of
science-he was both).
Hacking's practices are easily understood by considering the
writings of the sociologist, Thomas Gieryn, on boundary work: stress the
differences, and then undermine the opposition, therefore implying that
one's own work is sound. Hacking did have good reason for such
boundary-riding: his own work on 'making up people' is considered by many to
be constructivist, and a very good example of it at that! He would surely
not want to be associated with such cohorts, preferring Pierre Duhem,
Immanuel Kant and Rudolph Carnap as intellectual bed-fellows. This is
perhaps why he does not emphasise his own use of Foucault's ideas in The
Social Construction of What? as much as he does in his work concerned with
making up people.
This has been a long lead up to my main problem with The Social
Construction of What?: that it does grave harm to varieties of SSK by
associating it with bad social constructivism, and by suggesting that it is
not constructivist at all. Instead of seriously addressing the
epistemological merits of the arguments put forward by the Edinburgh school
in particular (which are many), Hacking leaves them in the no-man's land of
the Science Wars, to be sniped upon by philosophers and bombarded by
polemicists. This is not to suggest that SSK cannot take care of itself,
but Hacking's ploy makes it appear that they should be in danger. A less
political analysis would have explained different schools of constructivism
rather than hastening a retreat to Continental epistemology (and thus
suggesting that his own work on making up people comes from a sounder
pedigree).
My final qualm with the book is its editing, which is well below
par. To take just one example, look up Elaine Showalter in the bibliography
and the index: she seems to have written nothing, and cannot be found on
page 120. Her appearance on page 126 with promise of an article published
in 1997 is most baffling (I did not check the whole index; this reference
struck me as interesting).
It should be clear by now that I found The Social Construction of
What? a frustrating book. It is nevertheless an entertaining read; witty,
amusing and with interesting examples. Hacking is the ideal man to comment
on the philosophy of science, and has, over the years, proved himself an
excellent critic, as evidenced in his final chapter on the
Sahlins/Obeyeskerere controversy over the death of Captain Cook. But it
would have been an additional bonus for Hacking to say what he really thinks
instead of observing from the side-line.
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Hacking our way through social construction?
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 12:39:51 +0100
Sorry about that folks, I did not realise that this was going to the list
(duh!).
Still, enjoy the review of Hacking, if your into that sort of thing... it
seems mildly relevant to the debates which have been bubbling of late.
At least you'll see that I try to edit my dreadful typing for list postings!
Cheerio, IJDC
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Confessions; or The man without qualities?
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 13:09:13 +0100
Dear Mike Murphy,
This is a tricky question, because I do not think that it really boils down
to past events v past knowledges. There are diffents sorts of knowledges;
there is an epistemological rupture between scientific and everyday
knowledge.
The knowledges in which I am interested are specific (scientific)
knowledges, not just knowledges of events in society, but knowledges of
specific, often artificial events (experimetns, case studies, etc). I would
not want to look at these as unmediated, obviously. But on the same hand,
the levels of mediation for past events (Boulton and Park wearing dresses
and writing each other love letters, for example) are not as highly
abstract, although still contained in court reports and submitted evidence.
So, yes, I would say that at a pragmatic level, one can access things which
happened in the past without having to go down the discursive route, but
that this is not as possible as knowledges become more esoteric and more
based on highly abstacted practices. For example, I would not want to make
the same kinds of statements about the discursive production of a medical
text on homosexuality by a psychiatrist and a record of births at the
foundling hospital of London which can be used to suggest that people had
sex before mariage. This is why I espouse Hacking's nominal realist
position, in some ways.
So, at the end of the day I would suggest that yes, there are histories of
other things than knowledges, although one might want to be reflexive about
one's own historical practices in order to realise that history is itself
constructed: it is not merely a list of past events.
A good discussion of these kinds of issues can be found in Paul Veyne's
"Writing history".
Cheerio, IJDC
___________________________________________________________________From: "Dalley-Crozier ,Dr Ivan" <i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Confessions; or The man without qualities?
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 2000 13:09:30 +0100
ps, no cats... sorry.
============================================
Ivan Dalley Crozier,
i.dalley-crozier@wellcome.ac.uk
"An entertaining essay might perhaps be
written on the sexlessness of historians;
but it would be entertaining and nothing
more: we do not know enough either about
the historians or sex."
--Lytton Strachey, 1931
============================================
___________________________________________________________________Subject: Lovers of Legend, Gay Myths and Folk Tales from Around the World
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 19:19:02 -0800
From: "andrei-f" <andrei-f@goplay.com>
Hello,
The preview copies of this book will soon be available (in
illustrated ms format). Would those members who have indicated they
wish to read and/or comment on this work (one with no scientific
pretensions, I might add), as well as any others who might have an
interest, please send me mailing addresses for shipping purposes.
The book is a short compilation of tales from four traditions, the
Greek, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese. Some translations are new,
while others are simply re-interpreted. Introductory and speculative
material is kept to a minimum, and the book is illustrated with
period art from the respective cultures.
Regards,
Andrei Foldes
___________________________________________________________________
From: JILL SHEARER <JAZZ32@GTE.NET>
Subject: Re: Lovers of Legend, Gay Myths and Folk Tales from Around the World
Could you tell me a little bit more about the book, and also how much you're
asking for it??
Jill Shearer
Jazz32@gte.net
___________________________________________________________________
Subject: Regarding "Lovers of Legend"
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 19:43:09 -0800
From: "andrei-f" <andrei-f@goplay.com>
A couple of people wanted to know how much I was asking for the book.
I am sorry if my post was confusing, money is not the point here. As
I wrote to one of the members who inquired about costs:
"... the preview copies are completely free, including shipping. The
expectation is that you will provide feedback in return, whether
positive that could be quoted on the jacket if you permitted it, or
negative, that could be taken to heart."
Andrei
___________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 14:41:37 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Jens =?iso-8859-1?Q?Rydstr=F6m?= <jens.rydstrom@historia.su.se>
Subject: Posthumous autobiographies request
Dear All,
I am working with a chapter for my dissertation in which I will compare
the autobiographies of John Adington Symonds (1840-1893) and the Swedish
philosopher Pontus Wikner (1837-1888), published posthumously in 1984 and
1971, respectively (JAS, Memoirs, Hutchinson 1984, PW Psykologiska
självbekännelser, Askild & Kärnekull 1971). I need to know if there are
many such autobiographies by men desiring men, trying to explain their
feelings for the afterworld. I know that Herman Bang (1857-1912) wrote one,
Gedanken zum Sexualitätsproblem, published in 1922 and perhaps one could
count in the diaries of Alexander von Platen (1796-1834) (Memorandum meines
Lebens, published in 1988) but are there more? And did women write such
testaments about their aberrant erotic and amourous feelings?
Hoping for help,
Jens
Jens Rydström tel: +46-8-84 50 60 (h)
Dept of History tel: +46-8-674 71 05 (w)
Stockholm University fax: +46-8-16 75 48 (w)
S-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden
Summer address:
c/o Loeb, Torarp Westregård, S-340 10 Lidhult, Sweden
Tel: +46-35-930 43
(until 25 Aug 2000)
jens.rydstrom@historia.su.se
http://www.historia.su.se/safari/artiklar/rydstrom.htm
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Posthumous autobiographies request
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 23:14:17 +0100
Would diaries, kept in code, but preserved, count? In which case there is
the fairly famous case of Anne Lister in England. As I understand it (there
are probably people on the list who know more about her and her diaries) the
portions of the diary which deal with her sexual relationships with other
women were encrypted and were only decoded relatively recently.
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
___________________________________________________________________
From: "Rictor Norton" <norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Posthumous autobiographies request
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 22:10:36 +0100
Two interesting works about homosexual autobiography are:
Müller, Klaus, with a Foreword by Rüdiger Lautmann
Aber in meinem Herzen sprach eine Stimme so laut: homosexuelle
Autobiographien und medizinische Pathographien im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.
Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1991.
Robinson, Paul
Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul
Monette. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Cultural analysis of 14
autobiographies, including John Addington Symonds, Goldsworthy Lowes
Dickinson, Christopher Isherwood, Andre Gide, Jean Genet, Julien Green, J.R.
Ackerley, Quentin Crisp, Jeb Alexander, Donald Vining, Stephen Spender.
The two collections of Anne Lister's lesbian diaries are:
Lister, Anne
I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries [1817-1824] of Anne Lister (1791-1840), ed.
Helena Whitbread. London: Virago, 1988.
Lister, Anne
No Priest But Love: Excerpts from the Diaries of Anne Lister, 1824-1826, ed.
Helena Whitbread. Otley, West Yorkshire: Smith Settle, 1992.
There's an article on her:
Clark, Anna
"Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity", Journal of the History of
Sexuality, 7(1) (1996), pp. 23-50.
There was also a full book on Lister within the past few years, but I can't
remember the citation.
My large website on John Addington Symonds might be useful: sitemap at:
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/symfram1.htm
-
Rictor Norton, London
mailto:norton@rictor.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.infopt.demon.co.uk/rcnorton.htm
___________________________________________________________________From:
"Alyson Brown" <alyson.brown@luton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 11:17:11 gmt
Subject: Re: autobiographies request
Dear list members
I am under taking some work on the nature of prison cultures in the
past in Britain. An aspect of this is how inmates coped with their
sexuality and sexual desires in this kind of single sex environment,
how this was expressed, or repressed, and the form this took
within any prison subcultures. I have, thus far, been primarilly
looking at prison autobiographies as well as writings on the
sociology of the prison. Can anyone recommend any material on
the nature of autobiographical material in revealing, and/or selecting
past sexual emotion and/or experience?
Thank you
Alyson Brown
___________________________________________________________________Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 17:02:04 +0100
From: Cristina Santos <cristina@sonata.fe.uc.pt>
Subject: *QL*: Same-Sex Relationships Study
>From: Michael.Henderson@cgu.edu (Michael Henderson)
>To: queerlaw@abacus.oxy.edu
>Subject: *QL*: Same-Sex Relationships Study
>X-Mailer: Netscape Messenger Express 3.5.2 [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE
5.0; AOL 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)]
>Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 07:21:27 -0700
>Sender: queerlaw-owner@abacus.oxy.edu
>Reply-To: Michael.Henderson@cgu.edu (Michael Henderson)
>X-Comment: This is the QUEERLAW list, hosted at abacus.oxy.edu,
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>
>PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CROSS-POST THIS TO ANY RELEVANT LISTS OR INDIVIDUALS
>
>Dear friends, colleagues, and extended family,
>
>I'm a gay graduate student working on my PhD at Claremont Graduate
>University. My dissertation is focusing on same-sex relationships,
>particularly the ways in which same-sex couples maintain their
>relationships in a society that doesn't always value them. I think this
>study has very important implications for our community, particulary in
>this time of intense debate over legal rights for same-sex couples.
>
>I could really use your help in completing this project! I am conducting
>an on-line survey that takes about 15-20 minutes to complete. Anyone who
>is in a same-sex romantic relationship for at least 6 months is eligible to
>
>participate. The survey is completely anonymous -- no names or e-mail
>addresses are captured or linked to respondent's information.
>
>The survey is located at:
>
>http://acad.cgu.edu/~hendersm/survey/page1.html
>
>(You may have to copy and paste this in your browser if it doesn't work as
>a link.)
>
>The login is: survey
>The password is: pride
>
>If you are in a same-sex relationship and have a few minutes, please visit
>the site and fill out the survey. I would truly appreciate it!
>
>Many thanks,
>
>Michael Henderson
>
>P.S. Feel free to e-mail me at hendersm@cgu.edu if you have any questions.
>
>Thanks!
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Ana Cristina Santos
Centre for Social Studies
Apartado 3087
3001-401 Coimbra - Portugal
Phone 00 351 239855583
___________________________________________________________________From: "Lesley Hall" <lesleyah@primex.co.uk>
Subject: Review of interest
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 20:38:16 +0100
(in German)
Hubertus Lutterbach. Sexualitaet im Mittelalter. Eine Kulturstudie =
anhand von Bussbuechern des 6. bis 12. Jahrhunderts. Beihefte zum Archiv =
fuer Kulturgeschichte, 43. Koeln: Boehlau, 1999. ix + 299 S. . DM 68,00 =
(gebunden), ISBN 3-412-10396-9.=20
by Joerg Feuchter, Institut fuer Geschichtswissenschaften, =
Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin.
at http://h-net2.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3D1665965057018
Lesley Hall
lesleyah@primex.co.uk
website http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah
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