Connor,
I think that we talked past each other perhaps because the terms of the
debate are few with multiple meanings. I shall attempt some clarifications
and replies.
>First off, this is a basic collapsing of the terms 'gender' and
>'sex,' not to mention 'sex' and 'sexuality,' into a sloppy whole. It
>does not necessarily follow from what sort of body one has what one's
>sexuality is, and if one rejects the biological determinist position,
>then one must be open to some form of social or psychological
>constructionism.
actually I was trying just the opposite. One's sex and gender are not the
same thing, though the way the previous person used the term seemed to me
to be using sexuality to refer to gender. Part of the problem derives from
how much one accepts Foucault's analysis of the deployment of sexuality. I
am not convinced. However, I offer the following definitions: one's sex is
determined by one's sexual organs: this means that there are more than two
sexes. One's gender is determined by one's social upbringing and perhaps
biological or at least genetic inclinations. There may be a multiplicity
of genders also. I do not think I implied that one's sexuality (and by
this I beleive I meant gender) follows from one's biology. This should
have been clear in the rest of the post.
>
>Furthermore, re: 'gender':
>
>A significant portion of the population is born with 'indeterminate'
>genitalia at birth; it is then up to the doctor, usually, to assign
>those persons a gender. What gender that is depends partly on the
>percieved suitability of the present anatomy, and to a great extent
>on the social prejudices of the doctor and/or the parents. If one
>wants it, this is a clear-cut case of at least one instance of a
>socially constructed gender--not just the gender identity, mind you,
>but the body itself.
1) What is "significant"? 2) what is "indeterminate gentilia"? 3) what's
your source and stats? 4) perhaps birth is not the time at which one's
"sex" or "gender" should be assigned? Obnviously from my previous
statements, gender can't be assigned until further social construction.
What I take you to mean by gender here is "man" or "woman" as opposed to
"male" or "female".
>> So, your reply here does not
>> address the point I wqs making (or really just asking a question about).
>> Further, I find it very difficult to put any reliance on or accept the
>> words of a person who hae claimed that all heterosexual sex is rape.
>It's not even worth debating the assertions behind that claim? Such a
>person is *a priori* wrong?
>
In certain cases yes. It seems to me that a person should be able to
discount the claim in this case from personal experience just as one would
discount Rush Limbaugh's claims that all feminists want as many abortions
performed as possible. I am certain that some liberals who would listen to
and be affronted by rejection of Mackinnon would reject Rush more quickly
and yet look with disdain on me.
>An interesting equivocation between "having sex" and "being sexed."
>Is sexuality active or passive? An attribute or a performance?
>Something one owns, or something one does? Your language here is
>unclear.
Obviously you mistook my pun for an equivocation. I meant one has sex not
in the sense of the act but in the sense of a biological classification.
>
>Further, what does it mean, then, if you admit that "sexuality" (I
>presume here you mean identification of object choice) is
>constructed, but (thank Godd!) we still "have" sex. If sexuality is
>constructed, then just what significance does this "sex" that we have
>(or that is done to us) take on?
>
Here I am attempting to stay oin a fence because of recently reading some
stuff by C.S. Lewis. Since I do accept that we have actual selves and true
natures, I can accept that we have biological classifications along a
certain parameter and I can also hold that our genders should be based on
this classification. This sis oemthing that I am still questioning so
don't go hog wild with my essentialism yet. It might be that our genders
should not be based on biologyu, but our bhiology still serves a certain
function.
>What differentiates rape from the abuse of "jews, barbarians, etc.",
>is the fact that rape cuts across and through all of these categories
>of oppressed persons--there has been a rape of jewish women,
>barbarian women...rape is a category that is inflicted upon both
>women as a class in general, individualized women, and women *of* a
>particular class in specific. The rape of a captive population's
>women acts an act of supplementary terror, over and above the
>generalized terror.
>
BVut can you say that rape in war time is not simply rape of the conquered
enemy's women? In any case, I agree that rape cuts through all
categotries, though I wonder oif this is as true as we beleive. My
question is why. It does not seem implausible to me to admit this and
still hold that rape is a power ploy and not a sexual ploy. This si why I
brought up domination of nature.
>
>> >- in his characterization of hysterization of women as 1 of the 4 unified
>> >strategies in the deployment of sexual power/knowledge, Foucault seems not
>> >to consider that rape could be the primary tool through which women are
>> >"hysterized".
>> >
>> Now this is an intersting insight and I am not sure how to treat it because
>> I am not sure what you mean by "hysterized." But still, the point I take
>> it is that throuhg the implicit threat of rape, men exert a certain control
>> over women which makes them prone to thie hysterization. This agin has
>> nothing to do with sex but with power.
>>
>
>Again, as I observed some time ago, there is here an implicit
>conflation between descriptive and prescriptive statements. You
>*asserts* that rape as sexual control has nothing to do with "sex,"
>thus either making an implicit empirical unproven claim about what
>constitutes "sex," or making a normative claim about what "sex"
>*should* constitute.
I did not assert anything about rape as "sexual control"! I argued that
rape was not sexual control. Further, my earliest post on this subject
came from the standpoint of what I know of findings in psychological
studies. I do not, then, have an unproven empirical claim. I have an
empirical claim which is discussed in all of the textbooks on rape that I
have seen (sorry I no longer own those text books).
>If you are making the first sort of claim you need to demonstrate how
>sex is not empirically and essentially connected with violence; if
>you are making the second, all you need to do is show why sex *ought*
>not to be about violence. This is much simpler in a
>social-constructionist view of sexuality.
Well, I, for one, am not always violent when I am engaged in sex, and I
take it most people are not (but then, I have always been niave about these
sorts of things). I do not become sexually aroused everytime I see a
violent scence in a movie. I do know of studeios which "show" that men
exposed to violent matieral are more likely to be violent when engaged in
sex later, but I am not aware of any which discuss the relationship between
violence and excitement. Perhaps I need more facts. In any case, I have
no qualms with asserting on a normative basis that sex ought not be about
violence- nothing should be about violence.
>>
> Bwah? I read what you were saying before is that sexuality is *not*
>socially constructed; now you are making a claim that males are
>"sexually constructed. . .to be aggressive and powerful." If "sex"
>is just "sex," then you either must show that the construction of
>males to be violent has nothing to do with gender (in which case,
>what *does* it have to do with?), or you have to make some sort of
>empirical claim. Either way, you really seem to be contradicting
>yourself.
>
I never said that sexuality was not constructed, you seem to be either
conflating or equivocating. Why must I show that if sex is just sex, than
the construction of males as violent has nothing to do with gender. Being
male is being gendered!!!! What I take your point to be, however, is that
I must show that haveing a penis and bveing socially constructed to be
violent are unrelated. That is a non-sequitur! As hunter-gatherers, women
were kept in the "house" because they carried children, etc. Men went
hunting, thus engaging in violence. From this simple
biological-environemntal matrix, genders arose. It probably has a lot to
do with hgow we evolved from apes and became meat eaters which probablyt
occured beofre homo sapiens appeared on the scence. In any case, today we
sometimes teach women to be violent: notice female boxing and wrestling.
Further, how mush of this is not localized in some societies: weren't
Native American women considered strong? Our biology can determine some
things we do or some ways we act.
Our problem today with understanding this siomple yet important point is
that we are not aware of the necessities imposed upon an emerging speicies
cpaable of technological advancement but too "primitive" for it.
Procreation was the thing. Thus, those who carried the furture child had to
stay away from danger when they could, so they didn't go hunting.
Throughout history, as our minds developed and we bagan to see things in a
different light, we labeled and we essentialized. Soem thinggs we
essentialized need not have been. Our world is completely different from
our ancestors in which the first social construction took place and from
which most of our social construction derives.
>
>This is a phenomenological/empirical claim; the question is, *why* do
>men do this? If we are talking genealogies of desire here, which is what the
>construction vs. biologism debate seems to be doing, then one needs
>to make some observations about where this perspective comes from. I
>mean, this really says no more than "Most serial killers find their
>knives and guns to be their focus of power and women to be their
>target of choice; it's not surprising that serial killers therefore
>kill women using knives and guns."
But the knife and the gun is just an extension of the penis. I think you
missed the boat here.
>Again, undefined terms. If a serial killer has an ejaculation from
>killing someone, how exactly do you sort out whether that
>physiological response was triggered by "power" or "desire,"
>empirically? Unless you are speaking in normative terms...
>
I'm sorry but there are no undefined terms. I am not interested in the
abnormal buyt the normal. The seriel killer is abnormal and should not be
the way he/she is. How that person repsonds to killing someone is a
product of bad socialization or faulty wiring. In any case, I am open to
it being established that exerting violence causes sexual excitement. What
you need to show is that everytime somoene has sex they have violent or
power repsonses or everytime somoone commits an act of violence or power
they have a sexual response.
>> Gender inequAlity has nothinf to do with sexual desire but with power.
>>
>
>Again, see above. Normative or empirical?
>
No, that doesn't work, What you said above does not affect my statement.
You are making the affirmative claim, the burden of proof rests on you
>>
>> Feeling a little haughty.
>
>Please try and avoid ad hominems.
>
I wasn't and same to you.
>
>> I still don't think you have proved your point.
>> Many of your analyses and quotes can be used to support the opposing
>> opinion. However, what has been shown most emphatically is the
>> interconnectedness of jurdico-discursive power and dsiplinary power. What
>> I have tried to point out is that rape is an overt juridical form of power.
>> What your analysis has helped shown is that it is supported and perhaps
>> enforced by an underlying discplinary power or bio-power. Rape is the
>> overt form, but the institution of rape-laws, the distinction between
>> genders, the obvious male-dominance in society shows that what functions in
>> the control of people is the threat of being raped and of being treated
>> like a female, which means, from a socially constructed viewpoint,
>> powerless, weak, servant. "Males" are socially constructed as aggressive
>> domineering individuals, while "females" are socially constructed as
>> powerless individuals. "Males" call women who are not "females" dykes
>> becuase they do not fall into their socially constructed category of weak
>> and so are really "males." It also imposes a certain challenge to "males"
>> to dominate these women since they are stepping out of line.
>>
>
>
>Given that you are granting all this, I am extremely perplexed by
>your "desire" (or is it a power move?) to retreat to some sort of a
>notion of the underlying body and empirical sexuality as some sort of
>substratum upon which power is exercized.
Why? On what else would power be exercised? If we are only socially
constructed, there is no "punch" to power? See my earlier posts opn
bio-power.
>
>You are again moving rather quickly and somewhat bewilderingly
>through several distinct levels of analysis and making wildly
>differing claims involving empirical, normative, descriptive,
>prescriptive, causal, and phenomenological aspects of the situation.
Sorry, I didn't know I had to classify my claims.
>What is "man's desire to dominate nature?" Is this an empirical claim
>about the essence of "man"? Do you mean man, homo sapiens {YES, sorry},
>or the
>socially constructed "man" you mentioned above? Why do you use the
>word "desire" when you seemed very anxious above to differentiate
>"desire" from "power"? Are you now admitting a "desire" to dominate?
>Why is a hole seen as being close to "nature," whatever *that* means?
Not a hole but the vagina and the anus themselves. Man's desrie to
dominate nature, if I may borrow from Marcuse, is his attempt to escape
Thanatos- that is escape death. It is some attempt to find something
immortal, powerful, undestructible in one's self. Is it essentialist?
Well, maybe (after the fall). I am using desire in a broader sense now.
I'm sorry but the limitations of the language cause the problem with using
"desire" and "power". Beofre, I was differentiating sexual desire from the
desire to dominate, for which I used the term "power." Now I no longer
need to.
Jeff
I think that we talked past each other perhaps because the terms of the
debate are few with multiple meanings. I shall attempt some clarifications
and replies.
>First off, this is a basic collapsing of the terms 'gender' and
>'sex,' not to mention 'sex' and 'sexuality,' into a sloppy whole. It
>does not necessarily follow from what sort of body one has what one's
>sexuality is, and if one rejects the biological determinist position,
>then one must be open to some form of social or psychological
>constructionism.
actually I was trying just the opposite. One's sex and gender are not the
same thing, though the way the previous person used the term seemed to me
to be using sexuality to refer to gender. Part of the problem derives from
how much one accepts Foucault's analysis of the deployment of sexuality. I
am not convinced. However, I offer the following definitions: one's sex is
determined by one's sexual organs: this means that there are more than two
sexes. One's gender is determined by one's social upbringing and perhaps
biological or at least genetic inclinations. There may be a multiplicity
of genders also. I do not think I implied that one's sexuality (and by
this I beleive I meant gender) follows from one's biology. This should
have been clear in the rest of the post.
>
>Furthermore, re: 'gender':
>
>A significant portion of the population is born with 'indeterminate'
>genitalia at birth; it is then up to the doctor, usually, to assign
>those persons a gender. What gender that is depends partly on the
>percieved suitability of the present anatomy, and to a great extent
>on the social prejudices of the doctor and/or the parents. If one
>wants it, this is a clear-cut case of at least one instance of a
>socially constructed gender--not just the gender identity, mind you,
>but the body itself.
1) What is "significant"? 2) what is "indeterminate gentilia"? 3) what's
your source and stats? 4) perhaps birth is not the time at which one's
"sex" or "gender" should be assigned? Obnviously from my previous
statements, gender can't be assigned until further social construction.
What I take you to mean by gender here is "man" or "woman" as opposed to
"male" or "female".
>> So, your reply here does not
>> address the point I wqs making (or really just asking a question about).
>> Further, I find it very difficult to put any reliance on or accept the
>> words of a person who hae claimed that all heterosexual sex is rape.
>It's not even worth debating the assertions behind that claim? Such a
>person is *a priori* wrong?
>
In certain cases yes. It seems to me that a person should be able to
discount the claim in this case from personal experience just as one would
discount Rush Limbaugh's claims that all feminists want as many abortions
performed as possible. I am certain that some liberals who would listen to
and be affronted by rejection of Mackinnon would reject Rush more quickly
and yet look with disdain on me.
>An interesting equivocation between "having sex" and "being sexed."
>Is sexuality active or passive? An attribute or a performance?
>Something one owns, or something one does? Your language here is
>unclear.
Obviously you mistook my pun for an equivocation. I meant one has sex not
in the sense of the act but in the sense of a biological classification.
>
>Further, what does it mean, then, if you admit that "sexuality" (I
>presume here you mean identification of object choice) is
>constructed, but (thank Godd!) we still "have" sex. If sexuality is
>constructed, then just what significance does this "sex" that we have
>(or that is done to us) take on?
>
Here I am attempting to stay oin a fence because of recently reading some
stuff by C.S. Lewis. Since I do accept that we have actual selves and true
natures, I can accept that we have biological classifications along a
certain parameter and I can also hold that our genders should be based on
this classification. This sis oemthing that I am still questioning so
don't go hog wild with my essentialism yet. It might be that our genders
should not be based on biologyu, but our bhiology still serves a certain
function.
>What differentiates rape from the abuse of "jews, barbarians, etc.",
>is the fact that rape cuts across and through all of these categories
>of oppressed persons--there has been a rape of jewish women,
>barbarian women...rape is a category that is inflicted upon both
>women as a class in general, individualized women, and women *of* a
>particular class in specific. The rape of a captive population's
>women acts an act of supplementary terror, over and above the
>generalized terror.
>
BVut can you say that rape in war time is not simply rape of the conquered
enemy's women? In any case, I agree that rape cuts through all
categotries, though I wonder oif this is as true as we beleive. My
question is why. It does not seem implausible to me to admit this and
still hold that rape is a power ploy and not a sexual ploy. This si why I
brought up domination of nature.
>
>> >- in his characterization of hysterization of women as 1 of the 4 unified
>> >strategies in the deployment of sexual power/knowledge, Foucault seems not
>> >to consider that rape could be the primary tool through which women are
>> >"hysterized".
>> >
>> Now this is an intersting insight and I am not sure how to treat it because
>> I am not sure what you mean by "hysterized." But still, the point I take
>> it is that throuhg the implicit threat of rape, men exert a certain control
>> over women which makes them prone to thie hysterization. This agin has
>> nothing to do with sex but with power.
>>
>
>Again, as I observed some time ago, there is here an implicit
>conflation between descriptive and prescriptive statements. You
>*asserts* that rape as sexual control has nothing to do with "sex,"
>thus either making an implicit empirical unproven claim about what
>constitutes "sex," or making a normative claim about what "sex"
>*should* constitute.
I did not assert anything about rape as "sexual control"! I argued that
rape was not sexual control. Further, my earliest post on this subject
came from the standpoint of what I know of findings in psychological
studies. I do not, then, have an unproven empirical claim. I have an
empirical claim which is discussed in all of the textbooks on rape that I
have seen (sorry I no longer own those text books).
>If you are making the first sort of claim you need to demonstrate how
>sex is not empirically and essentially connected with violence; if
>you are making the second, all you need to do is show why sex *ought*
>not to be about violence. This is much simpler in a
>social-constructionist view of sexuality.
Well, I, for one, am not always violent when I am engaged in sex, and I
take it most people are not (but then, I have always been niave about these
sorts of things). I do not become sexually aroused everytime I see a
violent scence in a movie. I do know of studeios which "show" that men
exposed to violent matieral are more likely to be violent when engaged in
sex later, but I am not aware of any which discuss the relationship between
violence and excitement. Perhaps I need more facts. In any case, I have
no qualms with asserting on a normative basis that sex ought not be about
violence- nothing should be about violence.
>>
> Bwah? I read what you were saying before is that sexuality is *not*
>socially constructed; now you are making a claim that males are
>"sexually constructed. . .to be aggressive and powerful." If "sex"
>is just "sex," then you either must show that the construction of
>males to be violent has nothing to do with gender (in which case,
>what *does* it have to do with?), or you have to make some sort of
>empirical claim. Either way, you really seem to be contradicting
>yourself.
>
I never said that sexuality was not constructed, you seem to be either
conflating or equivocating. Why must I show that if sex is just sex, than
the construction of males as violent has nothing to do with gender. Being
male is being gendered!!!! What I take your point to be, however, is that
I must show that haveing a penis and bveing socially constructed to be
violent are unrelated. That is a non-sequitur! As hunter-gatherers, women
were kept in the "house" because they carried children, etc. Men went
hunting, thus engaging in violence. From this simple
biological-environemntal matrix, genders arose. It probably has a lot to
do with hgow we evolved from apes and became meat eaters which probablyt
occured beofre homo sapiens appeared on the scence. In any case, today we
sometimes teach women to be violent: notice female boxing and wrestling.
Further, how mush of this is not localized in some societies: weren't
Native American women considered strong? Our biology can determine some
things we do or some ways we act.
Our problem today with understanding this siomple yet important point is
that we are not aware of the necessities imposed upon an emerging speicies
cpaable of technological advancement but too "primitive" for it.
Procreation was the thing. Thus, those who carried the furture child had to
stay away from danger when they could, so they didn't go hunting.
Throughout history, as our minds developed and we bagan to see things in a
different light, we labeled and we essentialized. Soem thinggs we
essentialized need not have been. Our world is completely different from
our ancestors in which the first social construction took place and from
which most of our social construction derives.
>
>This is a phenomenological/empirical claim; the question is, *why* do
>men do this? If we are talking genealogies of desire here, which is what the
>construction vs. biologism debate seems to be doing, then one needs
>to make some observations about where this perspective comes from. I
>mean, this really says no more than "Most serial killers find their
>knives and guns to be their focus of power and women to be their
>target of choice; it's not surprising that serial killers therefore
>kill women using knives and guns."
But the knife and the gun is just an extension of the penis. I think you
missed the boat here.
>Again, undefined terms. If a serial killer has an ejaculation from
>killing someone, how exactly do you sort out whether that
>physiological response was triggered by "power" or "desire,"
>empirically? Unless you are speaking in normative terms...
>
I'm sorry but there are no undefined terms. I am not interested in the
abnormal buyt the normal. The seriel killer is abnormal and should not be
the way he/she is. How that person repsonds to killing someone is a
product of bad socialization or faulty wiring. In any case, I am open to
it being established that exerting violence causes sexual excitement. What
you need to show is that everytime somoene has sex they have violent or
power repsonses or everytime somoone commits an act of violence or power
they have a sexual response.
>> Gender inequAlity has nothinf to do with sexual desire but with power.
>>
>
>Again, see above. Normative or empirical?
>
No, that doesn't work, What you said above does not affect my statement.
You are making the affirmative claim, the burden of proof rests on you
>>
>> Feeling a little haughty.
>
>Please try and avoid ad hominems.
>
I wasn't and same to you.
>
>> I still don't think you have proved your point.
>> Many of your analyses and quotes can be used to support the opposing
>> opinion. However, what has been shown most emphatically is the
>> interconnectedness of jurdico-discursive power and dsiplinary power. What
>> I have tried to point out is that rape is an overt juridical form of power.
>> What your analysis has helped shown is that it is supported and perhaps
>> enforced by an underlying discplinary power or bio-power. Rape is the
>> overt form, but the institution of rape-laws, the distinction between
>> genders, the obvious male-dominance in society shows that what functions in
>> the control of people is the threat of being raped and of being treated
>> like a female, which means, from a socially constructed viewpoint,
>> powerless, weak, servant. "Males" are socially constructed as aggressive
>> domineering individuals, while "females" are socially constructed as
>> powerless individuals. "Males" call women who are not "females" dykes
>> becuase they do not fall into their socially constructed category of weak
>> and so are really "males." It also imposes a certain challenge to "males"
>> to dominate these women since they are stepping out of line.
>>
>
>
>Given that you are granting all this, I am extremely perplexed by
>your "desire" (or is it a power move?) to retreat to some sort of a
>notion of the underlying body and empirical sexuality as some sort of
>substratum upon which power is exercized.
Why? On what else would power be exercised? If we are only socially
constructed, there is no "punch" to power? See my earlier posts opn
bio-power.
>
>You are again moving rather quickly and somewhat bewilderingly
>through several distinct levels of analysis and making wildly
>differing claims involving empirical, normative, descriptive,
>prescriptive, causal, and phenomenological aspects of the situation.
Sorry, I didn't know I had to classify my claims.
>What is "man's desire to dominate nature?" Is this an empirical claim
>about the essence of "man"? Do you mean man, homo sapiens {YES, sorry},
>or the
>socially constructed "man" you mentioned above? Why do you use the
>word "desire" when you seemed very anxious above to differentiate
>"desire" from "power"? Are you now admitting a "desire" to dominate?
>Why is a hole seen as being close to "nature," whatever *that* means?
Not a hole but the vagina and the anus themselves. Man's desrie to
dominate nature, if I may borrow from Marcuse, is his attempt to escape
Thanatos- that is escape death. It is some attempt to find something
immortal, powerful, undestructible in one's self. Is it essentialist?
Well, maybe (after the fall). I am using desire in a broader sense now.
I'm sorry but the limitations of the language cause the problem with using
"desire" and "power". Beofre, I was differentiating sexual desire from the
desire to dominate, for which I used the term "power." Now I no longer
need to.
Jeff