Confusing Identity: Feelings, Biology, and Gender

1. Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Confusing Identity: Feelings, Biology, and Gender

2. Four Guiding Questions To what extent are we able to shape, control, and educate our feelings? Can feelings and emotions be gendered? Gender: biology or social/personal construction? Do we choose who we are? Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Confusing Identity: Feelings, Biology, and Gender 1. Too Emotional: Passions, Politics, and Research in Gender Studies 2. The Philosopher Princess: Identity, Affectivity, and Gender • 3. The Feeling Brain: Biology, Feelings, and Gender 4. Mark Rothko, no. 3, 1967

3. Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Too Emotional: Passions, Politics, and Research in Gender Studies (Punch Magazine, July 1910)

4. 1992 1999 2009 Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 The Science Wars (1990s) Self-help Literature and the New Biologism Social History of Science Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962) + ‘A Political Physiology of Dominance’ + ‘Primatology is Politics by Other Means’ (Haraway 1978, 1984) • Social Constructionism(s)  The predominance of social and cultural factors in our understanding of the world, of human characteristics such as gender, sexuality, and not least personal • Postmodernism  No permanent structures and ’The Rage Against Reason’ (Bernstein 1986) ✖ • The Hard Sciences Strike Back: The Alan Sokal Hoax (1996)  A echo of The Two Cultures (P.S. Snow • 1959), that is, the problematic relationship between the sciences and the humanities

5. Two Irreconcilable Cultures? (P.S. Snow 1959) At leastTwoVeryDifferentConceptions of the Body  Darwin (1859, 1871, 1872)  Evolution and Sex • Foucault (1962, 1976-1984)  • Biopolitics, Powerrelations, and • Subjection Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011  Genetics (1953, 2000)  DNA and Human Genome Project Poststructuralism (1960s-1980s)  Suspicion and Deconstruction of Reason Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology (1975, 1992)  Evolution and Behaviour • Performativity and Discursive • Formations (1990)  Freedom and • The Dissoultion of Essentialisms The Anonymous Body  Behavioural Neuroscience and Neuroethics (1990s, 2002)  Brain, Feeling, and Behaviour  Material Feminisms (2000s)  Quantum Physics and Posthumanism ’Two Forms of Blindness’ (Kitcher 2010) The Personal and Politicized Body Scientism Reductive popular science Evolutionary atavism Biopolitical myths Intellectualism A world apart Toothless critique Philosophical distortions

6. Intimate and Intimidating Feelings  Our Complex Body ‘Our physical form and life history provide ample testimony to the strangeness of humans (…) Human females can survive for decades after menopause; in other primate species, the cessation of ovulary cycling essentially coincides with senescence and death(…)In addition, the human disease profile differs in important respects from that of other primates. Even ignoring our intellectual abilities and cultural accretions, people are most peculiar beasts’ (Todd M. Preuss, What Is It Like to Be a Human? 2004, p. 5) Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Sexuality Biophysical conditions Feelings, desires, instincts The Human Body Object Subject Phenomenological ‘mineness’ Socio-political Gender Other People Thoughts and actions

7. Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 The Philosopher Princess: Identity, Affectivity, and Gender Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, ca. 1642 (Gerrit van Honthorst, National Portrait Gallery, London)

8. René Descartes (1596-1650) Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680) Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 26 letters 33 letters Questions about Identity and Melancholy A Philosophical Correspondence (1643-1649) (Gerrit Van Honthorst, ca. 1642, Philip Mould Fine Paintings) (Frans Hals, ca. 1649, Louvre)

9. Cogito ergo sum Cartesian Substance Dualism Mind Body Res extensa Res cogitans The embodied self Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Elisabeth’s Melancholy (the spring of 1645) Two separate substances, one sadness ‘Know thus that I have a body imbued with a larger part of the weaknesses of my sex, so that it is affected very easily by the afflictions of the soul and has none of the strength to bring itself back into line (…)In people who cannot exercise much, it does not take a long oppression of the heart by sadness to obstruct the spleen and infect the rest of the body with its vapors (…) This anxiety is no sooner calmed by reasoning than a new disaster produces another anxiety. If my life were entirely known to you, I think the fact that a sensitive mind, such as my own, has conserved itself for so long amidst so many difficulties, in a body so weak, with no counsel but that of her own reason and with no consolation but that of her own conscience, would seem more strange to you than the cause of this present malady’ (Elisabeth to Descartes, 24 May 1645, 88-89) Personal Identity  Who and What I am (Les Passions de l’ame, 1649) Mind Body Our Emotional Life Sentioquis sum

10. Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 The Feeling Brain: Sex, Feelings, and Gender (Source, Alexander & Hines 2002, 473)

11. Gender Dysphoria ? Sexual Identity Personal Identity Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Cross-Species Studies Gonadal Hormones Affective Values (Oxford University Press 1998) (Oxford University Press 2004)

12. The Multidimensionality of Sexual Identity Sexual Identity (Green 1987) a) Core Gender Identity b) Sexual Orientation c) Gender Role Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 The enacting of roles or behaviours that are culturally associated with gender or that show sex differences Sense of self as being a male or female The sex of preferred erotic partner, both in fantasy and in behaviour Humans and other animals = a question of degree, not of kind Principal human distinction = Neocortex Gender Dysphoria

13. The Biological Dimension of Psychosexual Malleability Sex (biology)/Gender (cultural) distinction  Problematic Brain Gender Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Genes/Anatomy Culture/Experience Gonadal Hormones Organizational influence (pre-, neo-, and perinatal) on body structure Activational influence on changes in our body landscape throughout our life Neither Anatomy nor Culture is Destiny

14. Gender and Body Dynamics in the 21st Century October 12, 2011 Thinking About Who and What We Are  Our Feelings Mark Rothko, No. 3, 1967 (YaleUniversity Art Gallery)