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Michael Eisenbrey—Response 5

QUESTION

Is it worthwhile to extend an antiessentialist critique to the idea of biological sex?

ABSTRACT

In his essay "Research on Men and Masculinities: Some Implications of Recent Theory for Future Work," Alan Petersen muddies the waters surrounding sex to no constructive end, obscuring the ways in which the value or purpose of sex are perniciously constructed.

BODY

Maybe this is just the logic of poststructuralism running up against the limits of my imagination, but I struggled with Petersen's attempt to extend an antiessentialist argument to biological sex. Sexual reproduction, definitionally, is about an essential binary: sperm and egg. There are other methods of reproduction in the animal kingdom, and there are, theoretically, other possibilities for human reproduction in the future, but sexual reproduction is all we've got for now.

Petersen acknowledges that "insofar as masculinity studies fails to critically examine man-made explanations of the world, it offers no profound oppositional discourse" (63), but he doesn't attempt to remedy the situation. He never really explains how sex can be divorced from essentialist dualism, or what would be gained by doing so. Instead, he tries to bolster his argument by conflating race and sex—"race has either been totally neglected or viewed, like sex, as a natural category" (62)—which I think is misleading. The scientific basis for a construction of race as something inherent and natural has been discredited (insofar as there are essential genetic differences among human beings, they are so various and so widely distributed through the population that any attempt to draw racial boundaries with them would have to be arbitrary, and would undoubtedly be inaccurate besides, even in its own terms). Sex, on the other hand, can be reduced to a binary with a "natural" basis.

To reduce it to the dualistic relationship between viable sperm and fertile egg is all kinds of problematic, of course, not least because it privileges sexual reproduction and devalues homosexuality, asexuality, non-reproductive sexuality, etc. (it also encourages us to construct the sex of anyone biologically incapable of producing viable sperm or fertile eggs as defective or pathological), but I think that's just where Petersen goes astray. By drawing focus away from the ways in which the value of sex is socially constructed, and looking instead, inconclusively, at the possibility that sex is all a fiction anyway, he leaves the idea that "normal" or "healthy" biological sex has great value unchallenged—and that idea is the basis for the current climate of homophobia and anti-abortion and anti-sex-education activism in the United States, or, at a scarier extreme, the basis for the Nazi program of eugenics (in which they murdered homosexuals, disabled people, the elderly, and supposedly genetically "defective" ethnicities—everybody who could not contribute, reproductively, to their ideal society).

DMU Timestamp: April 18, 2012 21:11





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