Anyone who doesn’t accept that gender is socially constructed needs to explain to me why one of the cartoon turkeys on my Thanksgiving 5k shirt is wearing lipstick and a pearl necklace just so we know the race is open to women.
@spgreenhalgh the turkey trot flyer is overdetermined since if gender is naturally determined, we still want the marketing department to signal inclusivity.
@lukemperez But if the signals for gender inclusivity (in this case, makeup and jewelry) have nothing to do with biology, then the distinctions we're making can't be naturally determined.
@spgreenhalgh no not necessarily. Cultural manifestations might be nothing nothing more than economic signaling of natural differentiation (say, like a leprechaun to convey Irish-ness). And given the archeological evidence of jewelry into ancient (and perhaps pre-) history, the whole things ends up inconclusive since we can’t disaggregate which comes first.
@lukemperez I'm interested in your example because "Irishness" is clearly not a natural distinction either. Even if we can demonstrate that Irish people tend to share certain biological characteristics, what defines Irishness is going to be arbitrary social and cultural identity markers.
@spgreenhalgh first one that came to mind. My point is that many of these things are bound up in ways that make the whole question overdetermined and therefore indeterminate, we can’t say one way or the other. Neanderthals had jewelry like 100,000 years ago. So maybe it is all social construction all the way down, maybe not. We don’t have the data to say if the data are marketing flyers