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BENT in CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY Brunella Casalini1

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BENT in CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY Brunella Casalini1 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index THE 'MATERIALIST' BENT IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEORY Brunella Casalini1 Abstract: Since the late eighties, feminist To those who have fought against literature has produced a great number of racism and sexism biology has always seemed contributions on the body. It has forgotten, however, its more properly biological above all an enemy. Biological determinism dimension. Despite the desire to reconcile and essentialism have been, in fact, widely nature and nurture, this oversight has been encouraged by the fear of falling into some used in the past to mark the inferiority of forms of essentialism and the difficult dialogue groups characterized by certain physical between social sciences and natural sciences. In recent years, however, some authors have characteristics: women, blacks, disabled and tried to restore the body’s material dimension elderly persons. No wonder these groups have to center stage. This has happened because neuroscience and genomics have revived, in a lived their anatomy as a destiny to which they more or less hidden way, a biological had to surrender, relinquishing any hope of conception of race and sex. In this new context it has become more and more urgent to strive possible social change. for an alliance between the natural sciences, From the seventies to date, the the social sciences and feminism able to confront the challenges of the current phase of weapon used against sexism and racism has biocapitalism and biocolonialism. A new been mainly social constructivism. When the feminist materialism seems necessary to contrast the present form of reductionism, a UNESCO General Conference, in November molecular reductionism that decomposes the 1978, unanimously voted in favor of a body into molecules, manipulable and exploitable bits of informational sequences declaration stating that race is a social that are transformable into “biovalue”. As construct with no biological basis, this was Sarah Franklin maintains: “This instrumentalism has become inseparable from interpreted as the inevitable and permanent the capitalisation of life itself” (Franklin, 2000: decline in the use of the concept of “race”, at 189). least in the scientific field (cf. Haraway, 2004b; Keywords: biology, materialism, human and Fausto-Sterling, 2004). A few years earlier, non-human animals, race, sex, gender, feminism Anne Oakley, in her Sex, Gender and Society (1972), had adopted the distinction between 1. Race and sex between biological "sex" and "gender" as proposed by the reductionism and social constructivism psychologists John Money and Anke Ehrardt and the psychiatrist Robert Stoller, and the idea 1 Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Florence. 134 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index that gender should be considered as nothing (2010), the spread of neuro-sexism in more than a cultural interpretation of sex, and contemporary scientific and popular scientific that biology, compared to culture, plays a literature (see, for example, Pinker, 2002). For minimal role in determining the differences the Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron- between males and females (cf. Gremon, 2009; Cohen, for example, there is a female Warnke, 2011). Thus, biological empathetic brain and a male logical and predispositions can be overcome through systematic brain: “The female brain is education (cf. Oakley, 1972: 170). predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The In the patriarchal system, biological male brain is predominantly hard-wired for sex and social gender coincided and were understanding and building systems” (Baron- considered the same thing, so that natural Cohen, 2003: 1). The origin of this inferiority determined social inferiority. Now, differentiation, according to Baron-Cohen, according to social constructivism, the must be traced back to the fetal stage, to the separation of gender from sex leaves the sixth/seventh week of pregnancy. At this stage, natural status of sex undisputed: sex is an inert it is the level of testosterone that decides and unchangeable reality. At the same time, whether one will develop a male or a female though, the implications arising from brain. Baron-Cohen is explicit in emphasizing biological givenness are neutralized with the that these differences do not imply the importance attributed to the change in inferiority of one sex over the other, as has attitudes, mentality and values. been stated in the past. He even confesses that Nowadays, contemporary medicine he long hesitated to publish the results of his and biology, using a seemingly neutral and research for fear of not being considered objective language, are reproducing a politically correct (Baron-Cohen, 2003: 10- conception of sexual and racial differences that 11). However, as noted with some irony by seems to mark a dangerous return to the past, Cordelia Fine (2011: kindle edition), the idea with one key difference: if in the past the focus that women are more likely to put others at was on the phenotype, now it is on genotype. ease, and men to build and understand the The body, in fact, is decomposed into world, seems to evoke an all too traditional, molecules: genes and neurons are “at the helm predictable and stereotypical image of female of life itself" (Haraway, 1997: 161). psychology. Cordelia Fine has extensively In another recent work, Fatal documented, in her Delusions of Gender Invention. How Science, Politics and Big 135 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First unwanted consequences. It resulted, first of all, Century (2011), Dorothy Roberts documented in a further legitimization of old gender and the return to a new bio-politics of race, based racial stereotypes that have never really on cutting-edge research conducted in the field disappeared; second, in a shift of attention of genomics and biotecnology. Roberts away from the economic and social causes that denounced the danger arising from the are at the root of many of the current scientific attempt to link to genetic causes the inequalities in health between men and lower life expectancy of the American black women, colored and white peoples; and, last population and its most common diseases2, but not least, in giving a new form of thereby diverting attention away from the legitimacy to a biological conception of race economic, social and, not least, health and and sex: a conception resting no longer on a environmental injustices that affect racial reference to anatomical features, but on the minorities in the US.3 As Anne Fausto-Sterling more hidden reality of hormones and/or (2004) explains, the trend reported by Roberts molecular genetics, which is often spoken of as was to some extent also the perverse effect of if it were possible to trace their effects a move that initially seemed destined to independently from the interaction of the body produce inclusive and positive social effects: with the environment. namely, the introduction of clinical trials Countering this trend and following extended to women, ethnic and racial in Richard Lewontin's and Richard Levins's minorities.4 All this had some unexpected and footsteps (cf. Lewontin and Levins, 2007), 2 According to Dorothy Roberts, science is efficient than spending public money on social redefining race as a biological category inscribed in the intervention directed at changing lifestyles and genetic code. At the same time, based on the results of increasing the general level of education in order to genetic research, pharmaceutical companies are improve the health of particular groups (cf. A. Fausto- producing new drugs developed and marketed with a Sterling, 2004: 22). On this subject Fausto-Sterling's specific racial target in mind, such as the drug BilDil, works are all very important, see: Fausto-Sterling, approved in 2005 by the Food and Drug Administration 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2008. as a specific medicine for black people suffering from 4 In 1993 the US Congress decided to have a heart disease (cf. Roberts 2011: x-xi). sufficient number of women and ethnic minorities 3 Some genetic diseases, such as Hungtinton participate in the clinical trials sponsored by the disease, are unrelenting, and little or not at all influenced National Institute for Health. Its intention was to use the by environmental factors. In most cases, with regard to statistics for ascertaining whether certain medical other types of pathologies, however, the situation is treatments would work differently depending on gender, different. Many of the diseases that affect the highest ethnic or racial group. Behind this decision it is not mortality of the black population in the United States, difficult to recognize the implicit assumption that such as cancer, diabetes and hypertension, for example, gender, ethnicity and race can exert a fundamental have a much more complex etiology. Investing in influence through innate or genetically determined scientific research to find the genes that predispose a mechanisms (cf. Fausto-Sterling ,2004). person to such forms of diseases may be much less 136 DOI: 10.18351/2179-7137/ged.2015n2p134-147 Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas - Universidade Federal da Paraíba Nº 02 - Ano 2015 ISSN | 2179-7137 | http://periodicos.ufpb.br/ojs2/index.php/ged/index Stacy Alaimo suggests that we should rather lesions)” (Annandale 2007: kindle edition). In think of a "co-determination" of social and this new vision of the relationship between sex biological causes.
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