Drury, Megan R. F.
(2024)
Molecular sexings: a countersexual philosophy of science.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis challenges the established distinction between biological sex and psycho-cultural gender. The sex/gender paradigm that has given form to philosophical and political thought, and to feminist and LGBTQIA+ theory and activism, depends on the Western-dominated socio-technical system wherein sex and gender are mutually constitutive. Following Paul B. Preciado, I refer to this state of affairs as the heterocentric sex/gender system.
In analysing the heterocentric sex/gender system, it is possible to engage with the complexities of the phenomena socially referred to as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ beyond the constraint of a simple binary and, thereby, to provide a productive metaphysics of sex/gender that does not utilise the familiar terms of the contemporary debate.
The overarching contribution of this project is the development of an alternative theoretical approach to that of the sex/gender distinction which – despite its contested position within feminist, queer, and trans thought – has no doubt been the definitive paradigm. The approach I advance in this thesis is called molecular sexing. This view is defined by the acknowledgement of the multiple molecular processes that are continuously (homeostatically) operative alongside the perception of the body as it is understood today. The concept of a sexed body is a phantasy, one that is bound up with the belief in the separation of body and world; bodies are inescapably dynamic and temporal and, thus, continually unfolding. What is today thought of as one’s sex is simply a metastable state or surface effect of a multitude of continuous processes that continually seek dynamic equilibrium.
First, I demonstrate, through a review of the debate between advocates of gender identity and gender-critical theories, that the debate will remain unproductive for as long as the conceptual distinction between biological sex and psycho-cultural gender is retained. (Part I).
Second, I analyse and reject ‘gender-critical science’, both at the metascientific and the scientific levels. On both registers, popular candidate answers to the question what is sex? are insufficient. (Part II).
Third, and finally, I provide – by way of examining the protocols and practices of intersex sex assignment – an account of the heterocentric social machine and the heterosexualisation of bodies and desires. Subsequently, reading the orthodox interpretation of the sex/gender distinction and Irigarayan sexual differences as anthropologies of the heterocentric unconscious, I construct a line of flight that frees feminist, queer, and trans scholarship from the heterocentric epistemology of sexual difference. (Part III).
To summarise, this thesis makes the case for creative experimentation with concepts that move beyond the sex/gender distinction in order to revitalise the calls for a queer politics of disidentification that emerged during the 1990s and the early-2000s. This thesis is a work in countersexual thought and can be understood as a development of a countersexual philosophy of science.
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