tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post112630273509177614..comments2023-12-28T18:17:11.191-05:00Comments on Gruntled Center: Sex vs. GenderGruntledhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14377809238377382438noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post-1126978289694040722005-09-17T13:31:00.000-04:002005-09-17T13:31:00.000-04:00I agree almost wholly with your argument. I think...I agree almost wholly with your argument. <BR/><BR/>I think, though, that when men and women have a baby and are working together to care for an infant, they are at the moment in the life cycle when they are most shaped by biology. Sex is most relevant to gender where married couple and baby meet. <BR/><BR/>I think, too, that individual men and women have a huge range of possible choices of how to act, which go well beyond the norms of their genders. It is empirically the case, though, that in a whole population, men tend to choose masculine ways of acting, and women tend to choose feminine ones. These choices could, in principle, be different. In some areas -- cohabitation before marriage, for example -- we have seen a social revolution in men's and women's behavior. In the main, though, gender stays close to sex at the core of social reproduction. I think that is likely to be true for the forseeable future.Gruntledhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14377809238377382438noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16201378.post-1126968819146333242005-09-17T10:53:00.000-04:002005-09-17T10:53:00.000-04:00I have always thought that the arguments about sex...I have always thought that the arguments about sex and gender said more about the political than the academic commitments of those on either side of the debate.<BR/><BR/>In terms of the academic disagreement, it seems to me that those committed to the biological (sex) argument manifest a great amount of faith in the epistemological validity of sociology as a scientific endeavor modelled on the natural sciences, while those who emphasize gender reject the applicability of the natural scientific model, choosing instead to focus on the historical character of human practices.<BR/><BR/>As for the political commitments of the two positions, these days it appears that the social scientists are generally more 'conservative' and the historicists are more 'liberal'. However, I don't think that these particular political alignments necessarily follow from the academic alignments. For example, I'm quite skeptical about the relevance of the methodology of natural science to the understanding of human activity and quite sympathetic to the idea that much of what we do is the result of human choices which condition and are conditioned by other human choices, both past and present. However, the fact that sex/gender roles are in some sense constructed does not mean that they are either the result of a rational plan (demonic, benign, or otherwise), or that they are amenable to some utopian/egalitarian re-engineering project. Human differences (racial, sexual, national) don't have to be 'natural', i.e. genetic, in order to be real, compelling, and resistent to facile manipulation.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com