HT: Vince Eckhart

1. HT: Vince Eckhart

2. HT: Vince Eckhart

5. However, if we might learn one thing quickly from evolutionary biologists, it is that the concept of essentialism is incomprehensible to people who study living organisms. ‘Nature’ is in constant flux, all living beings constantly shifting in coordinated and uncoordinated adjustments to each other. A significant engine of this change and these adjustments, of the profligate variety, and extraordinary design of creatures, is sexual reproduction. To say that sexual difference is socially constructed, as though we humans are the ones that construct it in each generation and every locale, disavows the networks that join us to all other human beings in history, and to all other forms of life in time. These networks exist by sexual reproduction. We are related to each other through sex. Does sex have a history, as Butler famously queried? Yes. But the history of sex is much older than the history of modern Europeans. It is the history of life. And within that history, human beings have proved to be ingenious at responding to chronic predicaments of sexual reproduction in ubiquitous but also highly imaginative ways. K.R. Skerrett (unpub.) Sexual difference is not socially constructed: What this means for feminist theorists.