Ontology of Sex
Product Description
Poststructuralism, particularly through the writings of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, has achieved remarkable success in challenging our belief in natural sex categories and instincts. Here, Carrie Hull endorses the progressive ideals of poststructuralism while demonstrating the superiority of a realist account of sex and sexuality. Embracing biological and cultural variability, Hull nonetheless shows that the sexed body is naturally structured and deeply meaningful.
Poststructuralist philosophers have argued that biological sex is a continuum rather than a binary, and that sex identity and drive are entirely performances of cultural norms rather than expressions of innate qualities. Hull draws parallels with Nelson Goodman, W.V.O. Quine, and B.F. Skinner to show that these poststructuralist theories are rooted in a nominalist, relativist, and behaviourist philosophy, and develops an alternative framework using arguments from contemporary and c… More >>
The past twenty years have seen an explosion of poststructuralism-inspired scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. While Foucault’s and Butler’s writings have been useful in pointing to the constructedness of social meanings of gender and sexuality, leading to valuable critiques of the hegemonic sexual morality, Hull argues that their writings have reductively attributed all sexuality and gender conventions to discourse. Accordingly, they have overlooked the importance of biology in shaping our understandings.
According to Hull, the source of error in poststructural sexuality theory is a faulty nominalist ontology that denies the existence of real objects. Hull spends the bulk of her book tying this nominalist ontology with the behaviorism of Skinner, showing how they both relate to the work of Butler and Foucault. In the end, Hull suggests that a critical realist ontology, not a nominalist one, can lead to a deeper understanding of the shared role of biology and society in shaping our transitive, socially construed understandings of gender and sexuality.
The scant consideration this book has received is more the consequence of the politics and of academia than of the quality of Hull’s work. The Ontology of Sex is a sophisticated work that debunks the trendy but ultimately naive constructivism that has become so dominant in the social sciences.
Rating: 5 / 5