Performance All the Way Down
Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference
Performance All the Way Down
Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference
The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but sex: what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity.
In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.
Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.
368 pages | 16 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2023
Biological Sciences: Physiology, Biomechanics, and Morphology
Reviews
Table of Contents
Prologue
An Ornithologist for Intersectionality
A Performative Continuum
What Is the Role of Metaphor in Biology?
What Is at Stake?
The Stakes for Evolutionary Biology
Mind the Gap
Why Queer Biology?
Where Are We Going?
Historical Ontology
Sex Is a History
Sex Difference versus Sexual Difference
Sex and Race
Sexual Development and Differentiation
The Sexual Phenotype
Sex Determination and Sex Reversal
Discourse
Agency
Queer and Queering
Elements of Performativity
Performativity and Trans Experience
Between Butler and Barad
What Is Molecular Discourse?
Want to Go to the Movies on Friday?
How Discourse Becomes Genetic Action within Cells
The Choreography of Gene Expression
The Performative Phenotypic Landscape
Canonical versus Performative Pathways
How Does the Body Regulate Growth over Space?
What Is the Role of Physical Forces in Development?
Performativity of Cellular Discourse
Are Genes Causes?
Agency in Developmental Biology
Citationality and Homology
Posthuman Power
Physiology and Immunity
Neurobiology and Psychology
Sexual Selection
What Is Not Performative in Biology?
Why Performative Biology Now?
On Gene Nomenclature
How Do Gonads Differentiate?
Reproductive Tract Development
Genital Development
Post-embryonic Sexual Development
Sexual Development Summary
Moving beyond Pathology
Chromosomal Contributions to Differences in Sexual Development
Genetic Variations in Gonad Development
X Chromosome Inactivation
Genital and Reproductive Tract Development
Noncoding Genetic Variation
How Does the Environment Affect Sexual Development?
Queer Science
Evolutionary Variability of Sexual Development Initiation
Why Sexual Differentiation Mechanisms Are Generatively Queering
Sexually Disruptive Selection
Evolution of the Molecular Discourse of Sexual Development
Evolution of Sexual Transition
Evolution Is Incompatible with Sexual Essences
Norms and Innovation
Placental Performativity
Limits of the Binary Bottleneck
Performativity of Illness and Disability
Recalibrating Causality
Biology Is Ready to Think Performatively
Pluralism and the Phenotype
What Is Evolutionary Biology About?
A Posthuman Genealogy of Performative Discourse
Is There Gender in Nature?
“What Is Sex?” Revisited
Toward a Scientific/Cultural Concept of Gender/Sex
Performative Perspectives on Transsexual Experience
Sex and Race as Scientific Apparatuses
Sex and Race Categories in Biomedical Research
Post-disciplinary Material Feminisms
An Intellectually Queer Space in Science
Appendixes
Appendix 2. Acquired Immunity
Appendix 3. Current Models of the Genotype-Phenotype Relationship
Appendix 4. Modularity
Appendix 5. Genetic Assimilation
Appendix 6. Why Gene-Level Selection Is Insufficient
Appendix 7. Internal Selection
Bibliography
Index
Excerpt
We are living through a time of enormous cultural change involving broad reconsideration of ideas about individual sex and gender, their boundaries, their meanings, and their mutabilities. There is a growing realization of the diversity of lived gender identities and sexual experiences. In many cultures, an ever-larger number of people are declaring transgender, nonbinary, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other nonnormative identities and orientations.
These cultural changes have not gone unopposed. Having lost the legal battles in the United States to prevent marriage equality and protections against sexual discrimination in the workplace, political and religious conservatives have mounted a new wave of efforts to legally enforce strictly binary definitions of sex and gender in the United States. Under the Trump administration, the United States Department of Health and Human Services adopted a new federal definition of individual sex as “unchangeable and determined on a biologic basis.” New federal rules established that “sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” and that “the sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”1 This legal change eliminated federal recognition of the over 1.4 million transgender Americans, which could have dramatic impact on their access to health care, legal protections, and civil protections in schools, jails, shelters, and other public institutions. This legal definition of sex has since been rescinded by the Biden administration, but the political challenges continue.
In 2020, Idaho became the first US state to permanently define an individual’s sex as the sex on their birth certificate, and to prevent transgender girls from participating in scholastic sports.2 Since 2021, a tsunami of state legislation defining sex as a binary fact established at birth, prohibiting transgender girls from participating in sports, and restricting or prohibiting medical treatments for transgender minors have been proposed or adopted in dozens of American states. In February 2022, the Texas governor instructed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to say that gender-affirming medical treatments, including puberty-blocking drugs and hormone therapies, constitute child abuse under Texas law. These political efforts to constrain the rights of transgender youth, transgender adults, and their families are moving so fast that it is impossible to accurately summarize them here.
In February 2021, in response to a trans pride flag hung across the hallway outside the office of another congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican representative of Georgia’s Fourteenth Congressional District, placed a large sign outside her office door in the United States Capital building stating: There are only TWO Genders: MALE & FEMALE “Trust the Science!”.
Putting aside Greene’s refusal to trust the science on global climate change, evolution, the prevention of gun violence, vaccination, epidemiology, and a host of other vital issues, we have to ask ourselves, “To what science is Greene referring?” What is science communicating to the public about sex and gender that gives Greene the impression that science unequivocally supports her views?
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