COMMAND PERFORMANCE<\/span>: Once I\u2019ve actually finished Second Skins<\/span> I\u2019ll do a chapter-by-chapter. Like many academic works (e.g. Etienne Gilson\u2019s deeply-felt Heloise and Abelard<\/span>) this book opens with its toughest and most jargon-riddled chapter. I hesitate even to comment on the Judith Butler critique since I am a) unschooled and b) desperately anti-sympathetic to Butler\u2019s project. I basically felt like Prosser was defending\u2026 you know\u2026 common sense<\/span>\u2013which isn\u2019t really accurate, and certainly isn\u2019t an especially useful interpretive lens, even though I agree with and appreciate Prosser\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n But I was struck by how Prosser\u2019s work sidled up to what I know or believe without ever engaging directly! I genuinely think Second Skins<\/span> would be better if John Paul II\u2019s \u201ctheology of the body\u201d were engaged: He offers a theology of sexual difference, rather than solely a cultural history of sexual difference, and he does so while clearly separating sexual identity from gender expression. JPII lets Augustine cry. And so he challenges us to view sex as a real symbol, an enfleshed reality whose expression is deeply<\/span> culturally-contingent. He takes the body seriously, and still proclaims iconic womanhood. In these two respects he is basically the opposite of (Prosser\u2019s representation of) Butler, and I wish Prosser had gone mano-a-mano with him.<\/p>\n Moreover, I think the excision of conservatism from academic thought\u2013or the conservative recoil from academia, I\u2019m thinking it\u2019s both\u2013badly limited the metaphors available for Prosser. His basic project in the early chapters (it sort of changes later on, so hold on for my chapter-by-chapter review) is to reclaim the body against the Gnostic, moralizing, dissolvingly analytic tendency of queer theory. That\u2019s totally right-on and well taken! But Prosser kind of can\u2019t analyze gender in itself, because he lacks metaphors which allow for cultural constructions to be better or worse.<\/p>\n Wow, that was an obscure and abstracted paragraph! But the conclusion is really simple: Gender is like a lot of things. If Prosser were able to say that gender is like manners, or gender is like art, or gender is like tradition\u2026 he\u2019d be able to, I think, maintain and even strengthen his anthropology while accepting that some gender is better than others. Manners are culturally-contingent, yet not optional! They imply a moral stance. Art is notoriously difficult to delimit, yet I can actually name some forms of self-expression as beautiful and others as ugly, or distinguish between sublime and banal. Tradition is precisely the kind of repetition Prosser loves (and I love it too!), repetition as redescription\u2026 repetition in a new context as a simultaneous acknowledgment of, response to, and reshaping of that context. This is pretty much the second-most awesome thing about tradition. An aesthetic conservative vocabulary would, therefore, seriously help Prosser both explain his gender theory and give examples. \u2026I think.<\/p>\n And on a related note (I almost typed, \u201can elated note\u201d!), I think Prosser is mounting an oblique and perhaps-unintentional challenge to the basic queer-theory stance where every constraint is abhorrent. Prosser actually echoes Maggie Gallagher\u2019s Enemies of Eros<\/span> in his hints that the flesh truly does<\/span> constrain us. Maggie goes on to say that we fear the fleshly constraints of sex because we fear the ultimate fleshly constraint of death. Whether or not she\u2019s right about that, she\u2019s at least able to articulate an anthropology\u2013and, crucially, an understanding of womanhood\u2013in which the flesh constrains our choices and that\u2019s good<\/span>.<\/p>\n Every now and then I toy with the phrase, \u201cI am a conservative because\u2026.\u201d My favorite Mad Libs endings right now are, \u201c\u2026I believe suffering is a complex good, not a necessary evil,\u201d and \u201c\u2026submission is the best form of leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" COMMAND PERFORMANCE: Once I\u2019ve actually finished Second Skins I\u2019ll do a chapter-by-chapter. Like many academic works (e.g. Etienne Gilson\u2019s deeply-felt Heloise and Abelard) this book opens with its toughest and most jargon-riddled chapter. I hesitate even to comment on the Judith Butler critique since I am a) unschooled and b) desperately anti-sympathetic to Butler\u2019s project. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n