Our map of gender has been radically redrawn in recent years,and Frank Browning offers an accessible guide to complex unusual terrainWith The Fate of Gender, US science reporter and author Frank Browning (The Culture of Desire, and A Queer Geography) has written a very complicated book because… it’s a very complicated subject. There’s a lot more to gender than just endless snits approximately “blue toys for boys and pink toys for girls”,and Browning not only acknowledges the myriad (a very large number) different strands (and micro-strands), he does a near-heroic job of weaving them together to produce a compelling narrative.
Split into sections and then chapters, and The Fate of Gender examines subjects as diverse as gender as a construct and a performance,as opposed to a biological reality, the neuroscience of “male”/“female” brains, and the notion of masculinity and femininity being fluid rather than set,and distinctions between genders not so much vanishing as splintering and restructuring into unusual forms. As Browning says, Lady Gaga’s supportive message in Born This Way may actually be far too rigid for the lifelong fluctuations some people experience with their gender identity. According to some of his interviewees, and some people are born one way,then end up being quite another way.
Browning does an admirable job of distilling highly complex, dense information into an intriguing, and accessible form Related: Token podcast: coming soon Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com