Has anyone considered the anomaly of having a metaphysics of gender? I mean how is it not self-contradictory to point to a biological woman and say she lacks the qualities of her gender. Quite patently -- which is to say materially -- she does not.

I am trying to highlight the way that metaphysics works, because we mostly don't even realise that we are appealing to metaphysics to justify our particular perspectives. For instance, in the case where one uses a figure of speech, "that person does not have the characteristics of a parent," one is actually appealing to values, which can shift of change according to historical time and place, and culture. But what is particularly pernicious is to confuse one's values with the actual substance of what one is intending to critique. If I say that a parent does not have the qualities of a parent, perhaps it is because they are not sufficiently nurturing to my taste, or their abusiveness towards their children goes against my sense of ethics. Therefore, what I am really saying is that they are a bad parent.

But one does well not to confuse the two levels of reasoning -- values and material fact. For instance, if I am biologically female, then it stands to reason that everything I say or do must be according to my "female" nature. There is nothing whatsoever that I can say or do that would possibly contradict it. On the other hand, I may still, in the eyes of some people, be a "bad" female. But this attribution of badness is according to the viewer's own values and beliefs, and does not penetrate to the level of my material substance. At that (second) level, I can't help being what I am, as a material fact, no matter what positive or negative evaluations this being-as-I-am happens to accrue to it. This second level is much more fundamental, indeed absolute.

Kwame E. Bidi: Hmm...quite convincing! I love your deductions. Let me stretch the discussion a bit further: I also know for instance, that biological endowments are not necessarily static and unchanging phenomena. No. They evolve, change and and a...re most susceptible to the influence of social and cultural circumstances. A biological endowment of 'femaleness' is therefore, potentially changeable. The level of change of one's femaleness could be influenced to any degree on the biological continuum by social machinations.

This reasoning, if valid, implies necessarily that a female, could deviate from her own biological constitution of femaleness (material substance) to a social or cultural constitution to any degree. Since the influence of culture on one's biological identity differs from culture to culture, it could be well said, technically, I think that a woman lacks the qualities of her gender without contradiction.


Jennifer: I was never arguing that a human female's biological status had anything stable to characterise it, except for the broadest anatomical determinan...ts. So it hardly matters if a female deviates from her physiological constitution on the basis of cultural influences. This of course will occur, practically and materially.

Rather than pointing out what can and does occur, however, I am engaging in an exercise of pointing out a moment of mental deception (which could be viewed, rather, as the WAY in which some of these modes of being are confused in our minds (eg. being female). In thus failing to maintain the distinction between ontological fact and cultural evaluation, we actually internalise cultural evaluations and change the very nature of our ontological beings (almost always in the sense of narrowing our identities and thus also our potential). Althusser calls this process "interpellation".

It is, as I say, a practical inevitability that our raw ontological beings should be interpellated by culture in this way. But I am also saying that the fact that we allow ourselves to be interpellated (ie. more narrowly constituted than our original state 'in nature") is based upon our own mental confusion -- our inability to maintain a necessary sense of distinction between the material bedrock of our identity, and the metaphysical notions (evaluations) of that identity that ultimately shape it.