Over the next several weeks, the term intervention will become an important part of your life. (Whether you like it or not...) Most obviously because is the name of a major assignment we will give you on Tuesday: you and your project group will be tasked with identifying a problem in science and culture, analyzing it in as much depth and breadth as possible, and then creating a piece of public writing that does something about it. This is not an easy task, so we thought an example might be helpful, at the outset. Hence we're reading Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body. It was not written as a response to Ogas and Gaddam's A Billion Wicked Thoughts (it came out about a decade earlier), but it might as well have been. It intervenes into the same complicated web of issues that we've been working through since Day One -- including but not limited to the Cartesian split, doubt and certainty, determinism, legitimation, the ways in which bodies and minds are (or are not) affected by culture and society, semantic contagion, links and knots, the pile of unsorted data at the back of the lab...
In this blog post, based on your reading of the preface and first chapter ("Dueling Dualisms") of Sexing the Body -- as well as the corresponding (many) endnotes, the cover, the table of contents, the other front matter, the acknowledgements, and the back cover -- we want you to start making sense of how, and how well, Sexing the Body works as an intervention into this set of issues. Use last week's discussion of A Billion Wicked Thoughts as a guide; all the same questions apply. These include: how did you feel, reading it -- and why? Recall that Ogaddam's tone, which we described as confident and certain, made some of us (e.g. Jeehye) feel comfortable and assured and others (e.g. Emily) feel annoyed and put off -- how does Fausto-Sterling's tone make you feel, and why? By what methods does she legitimate her arguments -- and with what effect? Fausto-Sterling, like Lewontin and unlike Ogaddam and Pinker, takes an explicit political position. Does this bring her closer to "truth," "the facts," and/or "reality"? Why?
Feel free to answer any or all of these questions, in whatever order. Feel free to bring in Ogaddam, and/or any of the earlier texts, if they help you. Feel free to narrate from your own life experience, if it relates. Whatever you need to do in order to take us, in the most compelling way possible, through your initial encounter with the unique, perpetually controversial intervention that is Sexing the Body.
Have fun!
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