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The Fate of Gender: "it's not dead yet"

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http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...778&cn=400

EXCERPT: Frank Browning's "The Fate of Gender" is a polemical monograph. As such, it is not necessarily to the very select audience of queer theorists and feminist philosophers that he addresses his book. It is a book meant for the wider audience, those who still think about gender in binary fixed terms and it is with them, no matter if they belong to the conservative right or the liberal left, that Browning seeks to engage. As such, it is an ambitious book with a wide ranging claim – that gender is not dead (yet). If we learn something from the nature/nurture divide, it is the lesson that nature and nurture are almost indistinguishable and both are in transit, in constant movement over a wide range of identities, orientations and genders.

[...] According to Browning, it is clear where history is going (hence the human future in the title of the book) – to a world of gender fluidity and multiple sexual identities. Browning does not claim that the movement is rapid or constant, but many of the book chapters are dedicated to the difference between the fifties and today's world. Maybe it is a generational gap, maybe it is my own critical pessimism, but though the statistics are there one remains unconvinced. Browning grew up in the fifties and sixties and I wouldn't have deemed it a proper critique if he didn't mention it a few times and gave his personal experience an argumentative force. Growing up myself within the 'gender revolution' I cannot share in this experience of 'liberation' since everywhere we look basic women's rights that were once perceived to be acquired and undebatable are reopened for discussion and put into question (Browning treats this point only in the epilogue and minimize it to 'just a backlash' that proves the direction of history). There is nothing in history that implies that its movement is one directional....
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