A genre
It’s hard not to suspect a new Sokal Hoax.
I mean come on. “According to this definition pregnancy or the potential for pregnancy define womanhood.” Well yes, Genius, they do. If you look you’ll find that that applies to other mammals too. You know what there would be if they didn’t? Nothing, that’s what. Without reproduction there is nothing. P.D. James wrote a novel about that very scenario – a world in which human reproduction had simply stopped. In a world like that it takes only a few decades for living humans to disappear entirely. Not just thin out, not just become scarce, but go extinct. Like the dinosaurs. Get it?
It’s too obvious not to get. Must be a new Sokal.
The rest of the burble is just typical pomo litcrit word-flapping. A genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. Burble burble burble. Admire the clever academic with the fancy words like “affective” and “genre.” The childish “trick” here is just to pretend that because there’s more to say about pregnancy than the biological facts, therefore the biological facts are wholly irrelevant. Yuh huh. There’s more to say about a sunset than the astronomical facts, therefore the earth does not rotate.
The name suggests it was written by a man; someone who has never experienced pregnancy deigns to tell those of us who have what it means. Why am I not surprised?
It is my sad conviction that the options are either that or something worse. And when I say “options” I’m being entirely hypothetical. There is obviously no possibility of the former, so something worse it is.
If only we could have stopped destroying our own habitat in time.
As a ‘cis’ man of a certain age I suggest:
“…enlarged prostate is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience…involving peeing and aging in a larger sense.”
@1 I looked her up when this paper was first brought to my attention, and she basically looked like a normal-looking young woman (though I guess genderspecial in her head) – but all of her online information seems to now have been locked down or deleted.
Yale University website, Sociology Department: page for Carlo Sariego, archived on 18th April. This page is currently behind a firewall.
Page on the website of Health Policy Research Scholars, ‘a leadership development program for full-time doctoral students from historically marginalized backgrounds’. Sariego is ‘Carlo’ in the text, but ‘Chloe’ in the url.
A web search under “Chloe Sariego” throws up a number of references. It looks as though ‘Carlo’ is quite a recent persona.
This is still up:
https://healthpolicyresearch-scholars.org/scholars/chloe-sariego/
So, on the strength of the description of her dissertation, the article mentioned in the OP was probably not meant as a hoax, but ends up sounding like one. I shudder at the thought of any policy “advice” she might offer on the strength of her “research”. I don’t think her suggestions are going to result in robust policies that will work in the world outside the rarified, mutual-citation bubble of genderist academia. I might sound like a big meany, but reality is absolutely merciless.
In her dissertation, I’m guessing she’s going to attempt to explode “the seamless connection between dimorphic sex and gender” in order to convince everyone that men can become pregnant. Of course, that will require redefining “man” and “woman”, “male” and “female”, but we’ve seen this movie before. Bait and switch word games all the way down, because sex is dimorphic, and gender is bullshit. Only one of the two sexes is capable of becoming pregnant and bearing children. The other one does not and can’t, and no amount of verbiage, or wishful thinking will change that. “Genders” don’t become pregnant, or play cricket, or swim laps, or bicycle, or anything. Only sexed bodies can do these things. “Identity,” “desire”, and “possibility” do not outrank material reality. An empty sack and a gender identity bursting with desire and possibility is worth the empty sack.
As for “the overlap between reproductive health and gender affirming care”, in many cases the two are going to be antithetical, as “gender affirming care”, taken to its (il)logical extreme of sterilizing mutilation, destroys the potential for reproduction altogether. You can’t “expand the potentialities for queer family making” if “what we want” is not possible. Clownfish and barramundis might suggest a world of open-ended possibility and transformational power to a sociologist, but it only underlines the recalcitrant, unimaginativeness and inflexibility of mammalian reproductive biology. Tell all the stories you want, redefine everything: gametes can’t hear you.
If “pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience…involving birth and becoming in a larger sense,” does that mean it can be prevented by a good spell-checker, or a really harsh, critical review? Birth is just “involved,” rather than the entire goal? SPOILER ALERT: ONLY WOMEN GET PREGNANT. Nothing in your dissertation, or any articles, or research, or policy suggestions can change that. Yet you pretend it does, and you want it to. WHY? This kind of watering down and obfuscation can only harm women’s health care, abortion rights, and sex-based rights and needs. Why are you working so hard to bring this about? Yet again, trans “rights” come at the expense of women. Same old same old. Oh, you rebel you! Way to smash that binary!
Just as genderspeak tries to excize “femaleness” out of being a woman (so that males can partake), pretending that pregnancy is some other kind of non-biological phenomenon, then sure as shit, it will be claimed by males as well. TiMs already claim to have periods, PMS, and pump themselves full of hormones in order to “lactate”. Now, thanks to the thinking behind papers like this, they’ll claim to be “politically, aestheticly, and affectively” pregnant, “becoming” in a larger and more important way than just giving birth to some mewling, puking sprog like any boring, dime-a-dozen cis-woman can. And they’ll claim to do it better, too.
Just as a point of interest, has anyone ever seen Carlo Sariego and Chase Strangeo in the same room, at the same time?