To add, I'm a firm believer in sexual difference, but "the body" as such is neither a unity nor a point of origin, and the ideological claims about women's bodies "just being weaker" run the gamut from appeals to nature (even male chimps and lion are stronger), to pseudo rational-empirical inferences (I believe in equality, but it can't be a coincidence that every record for speed and strength is held by men), etc...
If anything, it's the pure numbers which DON'T matter. The work of ideology chooses, frames, and presents the cold-hard statistics in such a way that they appear self-evident. I think of arguments like "Asians are good at math because I can show you statistics X, Y, Z of how they perform on standardized math tests." What nonsense. Maybe Slovakian-Americans statistically perform well on the AP Bio exam. No one says Slovaks are great at science (not that i'm aware of). It's a non-ideological fact.
So with female bodies.... The body is a concept, and it's unintelligible unless interpreted in relation to the supporting disourse, which is of course unified in framing the female body according to an integral otherness. So the logic that "studies show female bodies do just as well or within XYZ %) is wrong, in my opinion. The first step is to reject this totalizing, numerical approach. Shouldn't we try to retrieve the female body from it's suppression beneath male values and categories?
Right on re: the racist doxa about black people and athletics (I posted a while back on this topic: the ambivalence in racist valuations of other people (e.g. the gaze that ascribes sexual prowess or mystique to certain women of color).
3 comments:
Cool. Another doxa is that blacks are inherently better atheletes. Here's a pdf link to an article to that end:
http://vertr.com/misc/School%20Archive/Spring%2008/Comm%20416/Readings/Oates%20-%20The%20Erotic%20Gaze%20in%20the%20NFL%20Draft.pdf
To add, I'm a firm believer in sexual difference, but "the body" as such is neither a unity nor a point of origin, and the ideological claims about women's bodies "just being weaker" run the gamut from appeals to nature (even male chimps and lion are stronger), to pseudo rational-empirical inferences (I believe in equality, but it can't be a coincidence that every record for speed and strength is held by men), etc...
If anything, it's the pure numbers which DON'T matter. The work of ideology chooses, frames, and presents the cold-hard statistics in such a way that they appear self-evident. I think of arguments like "Asians are good at math because I can show you statistics X, Y, Z of how they perform on standardized math tests." What nonsense. Maybe Slovakian-Americans statistically perform well on the AP Bio exam. No one says Slovaks are great at science (not that i'm aware of). It's a non-ideological fact.
So with female bodies.... The body is a concept, and it's unintelligible unless interpreted in relation to the supporting disourse, which is of course unified in framing the female body according to an integral otherness. So the logic that "studies show female bodies do just as well or within XYZ %) is wrong, in my opinion. The first step is to reject this totalizing, numerical approach. Shouldn't we try to retrieve the female body from it's suppression beneath male values and categories?
Right on re: the racist doxa about black people and athletics (I posted a while back on this topic: the ambivalence in racist valuations of other people (e.g. the gaze that ascribes sexual prowess or mystique to certain women of color).
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