Gender is definitely cultural; sexuality is both cultural and biological , not all and completely cultural or absolutely socially determined ( socially determined = culturally determined = symbolically determined = politically determined = economically determined ; anything but biologically determined, instinctive ). Too many lefts claim there is no human _nature_ as to sex or gender; no instinct, no sexual species-being.
Gender difference is based first on biological sexual difference, but then supercedes , sublates biology; there is a certain overcoming of natural limits by way of sexual culture , but not full super-naturalness. Biology and instinct do not by culture disappear or dissolve; biology is also preserved in culture's supersessions of nature .Biology is is objective reality, with necessessities It is philosophically idealist to claim humans have no biologically determined , instinctive sexual behavior .
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2008/2008-June/009467.html
Someone challenges me with : "The problem is that they aren't even analogies. If you took the trouble to read the broader argument, you would realize that Butler is stating that the meaningfulness of sex is not accessible through 'materiality', rather it is discourse that makes the body meaningful by transforming that 'matter' into something meaningful. Also, keep in mind that discourse is something more than volunteeristic language within a Foucaultian perspective. It's inevitably tied into institutions and social interactions."
^^^ CB: This is true. But by becoming part of the system of meanings, sex doesn't lose its non-cultural or biological mental basis, does it ? The scientific meaning of sex is a report on an aspect of objective reality that is constructec based on biological empirical evidence and generalization . It is not _individually_ constructed , but constructed by scientific/biological community ; that is, socially _discovered_ based on the principles of scientce for discovert
Food or water are integrated into a culture's meaning system too. But a human individual's mental attitude toward food and water retains instinctive aspects. Meaningfulness is not the _only_ way in which a human individual relates mentally toward food and water. A thirst thought can only be abated by the _material_ impact of water in the digestive and circulatory systems. Symbols meaning water won't do the trick.
Basically my position is anti -anti-essentiallist, Cody Cody Warren. I'm a Marxist essentialist on sex and gender after Marx in the following : "In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment