Saturday, January 26, 2013

January 26, 2013 (From Sex Journal)



My  computer's flash drive has been stolen. The only serious loss, since everything on the flash drive is also on the computer, were the January entries in
Sex Journal.. A lot of my journal writing, in January, took place in Sex Journal, as I read several dozen scholarly articles on Sex and Gender. So it was a tiny loss. I believe I posted at least a few of the entries on my blog..
    
This was our second break-in within a year. Both resulted in our front glass door busted ($300 each time). Mo, my partner,  got sort of depressed. I had been pretty sick, with the flu, so it didn't bother me. They stole $150 and all the candy snacks–also not the Diet Cola but the red-can Coca Cola. And my flash drive.
     I was driven from the bookshop, where I live, by Lauren and Joshua Ling, who were worried it was too cold and lonely for me. I spent a week, recuperating, at their home on Walker Avenue. They looked after me swell. But it left the bookshop unattended, and crazy (druggies?) thieves broke in. The first break-in, I was here, and suddenly appeared, and the poor thief was startled out of his wits, crashing through the glass in the broken front door in his panic to escape.
     While I was with the Lings, although not feeling well, I did hunt down a very few more scholarly articles about sex and gender. In the Sex Journal, I include a photograph of Elizabeth Grocz, an Australian feminist theorist and critic who currently is a guest at the finest Women & Gender Department in the U. S., at Rutgers University. She figures in a splendidly interesting essay I found in that great journal, Signs.*
      I had never heard of "Evolutionary Psychology." Have you? Evolutionary Psychology seems to be the bellweather, using Darwin in universal accounts of human experience (everything from art to gender). For there seems to still be this science war divide between Nature and Nurture, right up to the present. Carluccio uses our heroine, Elizabeth Grocz as the Nurture champion feminist post-structuralist, a 2004 definitive study. Carluccio says cleverly that.even if you embrace Darwin completely, as my chess buddy Charlie does, how to you describe the Biology? Grocz dismisses Evolutionary Psychology, just when I found it.
     Carluccio explores the concept of Tendency in both Darwin and Post-Structuralism, to show Evolutionary Psychology can resolve some of the artificially created problems (differences) between Science and the Humanities. She finds the first use of Tendencies, after Darwin, in William Keith Brooks (1879), "The Condition of Women from a Zoological Perspective." Brooks thought, "Men and women tend toward a particular kind of intellect."
     Carluccio then glanced at up-to-date recent Tendency thinking in evolution, i.e. David M. Boss (2000), evolutionary psychologist, "Men and women tend to have different experiences of romantic jealousy."
     Carluccio demonstrates, at least for me, how both 1879 and 2000 both make assumptions in using Tendency: because Tendency hypothesis shifts multiple times as they proceed; because Tendency is merely oneof a multiple of interconnected complexes–a "constellation of concepts" (P. 433)–functions, tendencies, and cognitive fictions–through which we shepherd, as I see it, shepherd the embodied mind too far from the body–which then reflects a stretched version of itself back to itself.
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*Dana Carluccio, "The Cognitive Functions of Gender in Evolutionary Psychology and Poststructuralist Theory," Signs 38:2 (Winter, 2013), 431–457


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