Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference

Queer feminist theory applies to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations and debate over gender and sex. In Performance All the Way Down, Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. He shows that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. This book will inspire discussion and help scientists understand the human body in new ways.

Format: Unspecified
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 14 November 2023
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female. The idea that gender is a performance, a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties, has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but sex: what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity. In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues. Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists are essential to understanding the complexities of human development and behavior.

Dimension: 229 x 152 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226771755