Gender Theory in Troubled Times. Rachel Alsop

Gender Theory in Troubled Times - Rachel Alsop


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As Deborah Cameron remarks regarding many of the claims of this sort: ‘the only evidence for historic sex differences is the modern sex differences it is meant to explain’ (Cameron 2007: 112).

      Several things went wrong in the early days of sex differences and brain imaging research. With respect to sex differences, there was a frustrating backward focus on historical beliefs in stereotypes … Studies were designed based on the go-to list of the ‘robust’ differences between females and males, generated over the centuries, or the data were interpreted in terms of stereotypical female/male characteristics … One major breakthrough in recent years has been the realization that, even in adulthood, our brains are continually being changed, not just by the education we receive, but also by the jobs we do, the hobbies we have, the sports we play. … If, for example, being male means that you have much greater experience of constructing things or manipulating complex 3D representations (such as playing with Lego), it is very likely that this will be shown in your brain. Brains reflect the lives they have lived, not just the sex of their owners. … With input from exciting breakthroughs in neuroscience, the neat, binary distinctiveness of these labels is being challenged – we are coming to realize that nature is inextricably entangled with nurture. What used to be thought fixed and inevitable is being shown to be plastic and flexible; the powerful biology-changing effects of our physical and our social worlds are being revealed. (Rippon 2019)

      In the 1980s, the failures which theorists detected in attempts to explain psychological and behavioural sex differences in terms of hardwired biological differences led to the making of one of the most influential distinctions in feminist gender theory – namely, that between sex and gender. For most working with this distinction (for example, Oakley 1985) sex differences – the division into male and female bodies – were seen as biological differences, which it was the domain of the biological sciences to investigate and define. Gender was the term used for the behavioural and psychological traits associated with these different bodies. Gender, here conceived of as masculinity


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