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Posts Tagged ‘Essentialist’

Question by Russell H: Gender: biological or social construct? Essentialist or constructionist? How do you explain transsexuals?
One of the things that I’ve noticed is that the majority of feminists I’ve heard from or spoke to agree more or less with the constructionist view than the biological essentialist, less grounded in hard science and more from social science literature. As we’re seeing the more we discover about gender and the pre-natal process of androgenization of the brain in the second semester, the more it collides with the more sociological constructionist stand-point.

For those who doubt me, what about the case of David Reimer, a guy whose penis was inadvertently damaged during circumcision, and afterwards was given a vagina, was raised as a female, but after many years of sex reassignment and estrogen injections, never identified as female, didn’t act like a female, and described the experiences as traumatic rather than therapeutic.
The thing is with the constructionist view, if the mind is a blank page, then it is changeable, and if that’s changeable then society’s changeable. The problem with the theory that personality and gender differences are entirely the result of environment, not heredity, is that it is indeed a prescription for just the kind of coercion and tyranny that most conspicuously tried to exploit its possibilities: if everything that we are is just socialization, then the reasonable thing is to socialize us in the best way possible, and that would be through the agency of those who know best. Those who know best, in turn, would be those politically favoured, or at least self-appointed with enough fanfare.
The socialization, in turn, would be a thorough indoctrination which, if done to adults, would have been called brain washing — but then the brain was supposed to have been blank in the first place. Cambodia took this to the logical extreme: if you simply kill the parents, then that leaves the children in the hands of the state by default.
Fortunately, the last line of defence against totalitarianism was the simple fact of human nature. All the power of the state could not really make the “New Man,” and no amount of lies could cover that up indefinitely. The Soviet Union crumbled to reveal the people of 1913 emerging from the shadows, wanting the same things out of life that they did then, without all the bombast, promises, fanfare, and lies.
Meanwhile, the legal regime promoted by feminism in the West serves to damage the position of housewives and mothers, with “no fault” divorce (now being rethought even by feminists), anti-discrimination law and “affirmative action” to promote women and disadvantage traditional breadwinner males in the workplace, and, just as importantly, the denigration of the very idea that a husband owes support to his wife.
If the “personal is political”, then every single action we perform in our house has political connotations, in the end capitalism produces the idea that the personal and political are separate.
Maybe you could say Marxism and Feminism are similar in more ways than one, Marxism was designed to destroy classes in the way Gender Feminism was designed to destroy gender, and therefore mould society into their own ideologies.

Are you an essentialist or a constructionist, or a combination?
Of course transsexuals are not natural, but that doesn’t mean they’re socialised to want to be the opposite sex to that of their body. In other words if a transexual has a male body but a female brain, do you think that he was socialised to feel and want to be a woman.

Best answer:

Answer by Libertad V
Actually there’s a form of marxist feminist which support your point of view since understand as materialism as the cause of male domination. Well… in my point of view that’s not very accurate. Male domination (and role gender but not gender by itself) is a social construction. The trans is the best example, they have born into a body who decided is not according wiht what they are, so they can change the materia in order to fit to her or his individual identity, which can’t be decided for nature or society.

And marxism is not “designed” and is not a tool, is a theory to explain the power and the relation on power relationships and the production media

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