Comment on A Rational Education

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:21:34 GMT

I meant to engage with that specific concept. You seem to agree with my usage with respect to linguistics, so I assume you have some hostility towards feminist studies. I did reference that concept purposefully, please allow me to explain why.

The professor in my feminism course was a particle physicist, so she used quantum mechanics to draw metaphors for social circumstances.

For example, when establishing some idea such as "gender," we often consider only two options; male and female. These are unusually dense points in "genderspace," though by no means the only points, and they are bounded by our maps, not by the territory. Similarly, when dealing with Newtonian mechanics, we often refer to "position" and "momentum" as inherent properties of objects. This is not how things work, but it is helpful for our maps. Unfortunately, as we attempt to build smaller and smaller things, this ends up driving us crazy, because our maps have the wrong symbols written on them and don't make sense anymore. As our society becomes more diverse and more accepting, and as we attempt to raise the quality of life of its inhabitants, it becomes the case that the male/female dichotomy starts being harmful. Around 1% of the general population (I don't have a citation on me but I could find one) does not meet (every part of) the standard definition for male or female. Among other things, it may be difficult for these people to decide which bathroom to enter in a restaurant. By expanding our notions of gender, we can carve reality in more detail, but by studying gender we may find higher-definition joints.

If you can think of any other class in which that sort of analysis happens (and it almost certainly doesn't happen in every feminism class, although probably in more than you might expect), I would be very interested to hear about it.

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