The Gender Vendors (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | A. L. Jones | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Genesis, honor crimes, Aristotle’s biology, the Catholic Church.

Witch hunts, Freud’s hysteria, resistance to women’s rights.

All can be traced back to an ancient metaphor that says men give life; women merely give birth.

The Gender Vendors tracks ‘the seed and the soil’ from Abraham to Freud to the present.

The story matters to everyone who cares about gender equality and why it is taking so long to achieve.

The Gender Vendors pursues a Western historical trail of lies about sex and gender.

Among numerous ancient Western tropes about gender and procreation, ‘the seed and the soil’ is arguably the oldest, most potent, and most invisible in its apparent naturalness.

As metaphor for gender and procreation, seed-and-soil constructs the father as the sole generating parent and the mother as nurturing medium, like soil, for the man’s seed-child. In other words, men give life; women merely give birth.

What were the historical conditions that produced this notion that only men can engender life? After all, prehistoric forager tribes associated Woman with Earth as parthenogenic creator of new life and all-giving nourisher of humankind. Why did this dynamic, high-status construction give way to the notion of Woman as passive soil awaiting insemination by the life-giving male—the idea of male supremacy in procreation?

Seed-and-soil permeates the ancient Hebrew, Greco-Roman, Christian, and Islamic mythic histories that constitute the foundational narratives of Western culture.

And as a result of the revival of Aristotelian thought in thirteenth-century Europe, this dangerously wrong notion—that women merely provide base matter to be ensouled by men—entered the European natural-philosophical canon and remained there into the twentieth century.

Its legacy persists in contemporary gender inequality and sexual violence.

The Gender Vendors examines seed-and-soil in the context of the psychology of gender, honor and chastity codes, female genital mutilation, the taboo on male femininity, femiphobia (the fear of being feminine or feminized), sexual violence, institutionalized abuse, the early modern witch hunts, the medicalization and criminalization of gender nonconformity, and campaigns against women’s rights.