Reducing gender
Posting is going to slow down while the move to Chicago ramps up. However, I want to clarify the question I asked about reduction yesterday. (And again, these posts are the equivalent of Moleskine scribbles, since I’m just encountering the ideas and talking out loud.)
I think that another way of framing the question I have about gender, science, history and experience is this: What is the relationship between perception and our concepts? This is a central philosophical question, one that can be seen from different angles. In the article I talked about last, the central assumption is that the “lived body isn’t reducible to physical facts.” I said, well, what do you mean by reducible?
A “lived body” is shorthand for a situated perspective, in which my perception of self and world is “enculturated”, or influenced by historical concepts. The implication is that the way I perceive myself can be very different from another, physically and biologically identical copy in another historical moment. Granted, this kind of thought experiment isn’t explicit in the article, but listen to Judith “Jack” Halberstam talking about being a “lesbian”:
If we argue that a nineteenth-century masculine woman was a “lesbian” we assume that her desire and her gender presentation were organized and recognized according to contemporary models of sexuality and gender. If we call her butch, we confer upon her a vernacular word that she would not have used and would not have had access to.
Furthermore, the assumption that such a woman was “pre-lesbian” or lesbian lacking access to the language of identity presumes that all organizations of gender and sexuality in the past have simply progressed slowly and inevitably towards the organizations we favor today. If we recognize a nineteenth-century cross-identified woman within the rubric of “female masculinity,” we can then grapple with the question of what her masculinity may have meant to her, to her lovers and to her society. (Source, italics mine.)
So, even if there is something biologically shared between me (a twenty-first century female attracted to other females) and a nineteenth century version of me, it’s possible that my counterpart could have a different self-perception due to the concepts available to her at the time. At least, that’s what I think Halberstam and Young would say.
Of course, this doesn’t require dualism, since the differences could be explained in terms of physical properties, right? After all, “history” is about time, space, material objects and people with physical brain states. What’s being argued for here doesn’t have to be that there’s something immaterial “left over” once we account for all of this…right? Concepts arise from physical arrangements of brain states. Those conceptions, reflexively turned upon myself, can then impact further brain states.
I suppose where I’m going is that given two identical versions of CK, one in the twenty-first century, one in the nineteenth, they would diverge into non-identical versions once they interacted with the surrounding world.
But this is too analytic and abstract a thought experiment for what Young is saying. She’s getting at the thesis that there could not be two such identical CK versions, because the world precedes me. (Aside: I wonder whether this would fit with ontological holism in any way.) CK’s self-conception does not start as a blank slate, then pick and choose what cultural categories to accept or reject. There are certain categories which we have by default (I think, probably a few of these are supra-cultural, due to brain hardwiring, but teasing out which ones is difficult). But there does seem to be some freedom for creating new categories or rejecting old ones as incomplete. Understanding this freedom and boundedness to the world is part of why I’ve been trying to grapple with John McDowell as well as Buddhist philosophers.
Finally, is it true that concepts influence, “deeply”, our perception–of the world, or ourselves? One story, at the extreme of this idea, was recently popularized in the film What the Bleep Do We Know!? (and in response I would say to the filmmakers, apparently you don’t know much). The tale is that when Columbus arrived in the New World, the Indians could not see the ships appearing over the horizon, because they had no concept of “ship.” Norwood Russell Hanson argued that Tycho Brae and Johannes Kepler, watching the sunrise, would have two drastically different experiences because of their conception of the world.[1]
A while ago, I wondered (but didn’t post about) whether the promise of Buddhist meditation is philosophically understandable if our conception of the world is inextricably bound to our perception of it. Can we have experience “beyond categories” and still be recognizeably human? Gender is one of the categories that Buddhism promises to supplant with the goal of nirvana. I’m curious about whether this is talked about in its scriptures, and about how Buddhist feminists understand gender.
Thankfully, I’ll soon be in a setting where I can do more structured research and narrow down my range of interests. I think that the central axis is pretty clear: the pole is drawn along the topics of metaphysics epistemology and mind, and there is, rotating around it, a constellation of interests such as Buddhist epistemology, feminism, gender, religious belief, justification, concept formation, perceptions, etc.
[1] For a discussion of his theory, see the article “Experience and Theory” by Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell, in Zygon, Vol 31, No 9 (March 2004).
Image: Picasso, Tete de Femme, 1962.