Читать книгу Gender Theory in Troubled Times - Rachel Alsop - Страница 18

Sex difference research has been a continually thriving area for at least the last two hundred years (Cameron 2007; Fine 2012). There are two fundamental assumptions underlying this work which will be scrutinized separately here. First is the assumption that the binary division of bodies into male and female is part of the natural order of the world. Within this assumption, facts about our biology provide an explanatory grounding for our sexed categories in a way that makes a division into male and female a recognition of objective facts of nature, which, in some sense, demand attention. Objective here means having a unifying factor that is independent of our practices of classification. There are differing accounts of what the most basic biological determinants of this binary division are, and research into the biology of sexed difference explores the roles played by, for example, visible morphology, brains, hormones and chromosomes. But such exploration takes place within an assumption that the sexed kinds ‘male’ and ‘female’ are biological kinds, reflecting a naturally occurring grouping of properties that have important causal effects, particularly within the biology of reproduction – for example, ‘the ability to make a distinctive contribution to reproduction – i.e. [for females] to gestate, give birth to and breast-feed babies’ (Stone 2007: 44). We will return to evaluate these claims below.