Book club met this past week and we had a lovely time talking about Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans. A few people have asked and there’s no special procedure to join. If you’re a paid subscriber, vote on a book, vote on a time to meet, I’ll post the meeting time when the most people are available, read the book, and then simply join us on Zoom! We’d love to have you.
For late March/early April, what shall we read?
Material Girls is a timely and trenchant critique of the influential theory that we all have an inner feeling known as a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our biological sex.
Professor Kathleen Stock surveys the philosophical ideas that led to this point, and closely interrogates each one, from De Beauvoir’s statement that, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ (an assertion she contends has been misinterpreted and repurposed), to Judith Butler’s claim that language creates biological reality, rather than describing it. She looks at biological sex in a range of important contexts, including women-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.
Material Girls makes a clear, humane and feminist case for our retaining the ability to discuss reality, and concludes with a positive vision for the future, in which trans rights activists and feminists can collaborate to achieve some of their political aims.In Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for?
American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.Reshaping the Female Body: Medical sociologist Kathy Davis tries to codify the complex decision-making process women undergo when deciding whether to alter their appearance surgically and to reconcile how a feminist could choose to alter her body to fit the "gendered social order" and remain a feminist. So striving, she studies women in the Netherlands (one of the few nations in which cosmetic surgery is a publicly insured medical procedure) who are considering or have already been through cosmetic surgery. Against this backdrop of real cases she pits feminist theory, especially concerning beauty, and comes up with two diametrically opposed points of view. Davis herself takes a position somewhere between the extremes and consequently becomes rather an outcast from the feminist social theory community. Although she never resolves the dilemma posed by the extreme positions acceptably, she brings to the surface complicated issues of female identity, beauty, social acceptability, "normality," and self-esteem; as she does, she offers new perspectives on some rather tiresome feminist debates.
[Check the availability of this one near you before you vote… there are tons of cheap used copies online but new/Kindle versions are a bit spendy… I got it through my university and it’s fantastic—and some of you expressed interest in my Twitter thread about it.]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to gender:hacked by Eliza Mondegreen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.