Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference (science.culture) - Softcover

Prum, Richard O.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226829782 ISBN 13: 9780226829784

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2023

Synopsis

An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female.

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.

About this title

About the Author

Richard O. Prum is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, and the head curator of vertebrate zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum. He is the author of The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, one of the New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2017” and a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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? 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226829782
• ISBN 13: 9780226829784
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 403