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- Title
Sex Differences: Inherited or Acquired? Mutable or Immutable? -- A Meeting by Chance between Zhang Kangkang and Evolutionary Feminism.
- Authors
Qingbo Xu
- Abstract
Instead of reducing sex differences to biological preformation and reasserting patriarchal containment of women, evolutionary feminism recognizes the biological infrastructure of sex differences in humans and other species, and unravels not only why and how these differences exist, but what they are, from a fundamental, ultimate level. Often echoing with evolutionary feminism at a distance, Zhang Kangkang acknowledges sex differences as manifestations of inherent, genetically transmitted predispositions, and indicates that because there are inherited dispositions that shape and delimit men's and women's responses to the variations in the environment, their mind cannot be inscribed at will by upbringing, socializing or political ideologies such as those prevailed during the Cultural Revolution in China. These ideas of Zhang and evolutionary feminism would be discounted as reductionist, essentialist, and determinist assessments of female nature. Both of the them have been subject to wide-ranging criticisms and hostility from feminists. But they do not, at all, presume inherent rigidity or genetic determinism. Right on the contrary, circumstantially contingent variation is precisely what evolutionary theory aims at uncovering. Yet in spite of recent dramatic socio-ecological changes, adaptions that have evolved and formed in the past may still linger in the present. The differences between the sexes are also not extinct, yet they may already be non-adaptive or ill-adaptive, and subject to both natural and social punishment, as shown in Zhang's stories. Understanding the evolutionary forces behind sex differences, far from condemning us to unalterable sex roles fixed by nature, enables us to recognize both the persistence and mutability of sex forms and differences.
- Subjects
CHINA; FEMINISM; GENDER differences (Psychology); ZHANG Kangkang; CULTURAL Revolution, China, 1966-1976; FEMINISTS; GENETIC sex determination; GENDER role
- Publication
Quarterly Journal of Chinese Studies, 2013, Vol 1, Issue 3, p47
- ISSN
2224-2716
- Publication type
Article