By Venla Oikkonen
ISBN-10: 0415635993
ISBN-13: 9780415635998
Since the early Nineteen Nineties, evolutionary psychology has produced greatly renowned visions of contemporary women and men as pushed by means of their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and replica in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical charm of evolutionary psychology via viewing it as a part of the Darwinian narrative culture.
Refusing to begin from the placement of disregarding evolutionary psychology as reactionary or scientifically invalid, the booklet examines evolutionary psychologists’ investments in such contested suggestions as teleology and version. The ebook lines the emergence of evolutionary mental narratives of gender, sexuality and replica, encompassing:
- Charles Darwin’s knowing of transformation and sexual difference
- Edward O. Wilson’s evolutionary mythology and the evolution-creationism controversy
- Richard Dawkins’ molecular service provider and new imaging technologies
- the connections among adultery, infertility and homosexuality in adaptationist thought.
Through renowned, literary and medical texts, the ebook identifies either the inventive strength and the structural weaknesses in evolutionary narratives, starting them up for feminist and queer revision. This publication could be of curiosity to scholars and students of the arts and social sciences, really in gender experiences, cultural experiences, literature, sexualities, and technological know-how and know-how studies.
Read or Download Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives PDF
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Extra info for Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives
Example text
While such a highlighting of the internal continuity of nature does not depend on a teleology of change, Darwin’s emphasis on beauty, harmony, and the sense of shared direction invests evolution with considerable epic potential. Darwin’s descent with modification is accompanied by a sense of irreversibility that adds to this foundational potential. Beer observes that evolution as imagined by Darwin “has no place for stasis. It debars return. It does not countenance absolute replication (cloning is its contrary), pure invariant cycle, or constant equilibrium” (Beer [1983] 2000: 8).
Echoing the sense of awe and beauty present in Darwin’s writing, Wilson’s text imagines the evolutionary epic as providing “the stimulus to imagination” (Wilson 1978: 205), and a view of origins that is “far more awesome than the first chapter of Genesis or the Ninevite epic of Gilgamesh” (Wilson 1978: 202). Wilson departs from Darwin, however, in maintaining that an “epic needs a hero” (Wilson 1978: 203). If we choose to read Darwin’s account of descent as a foundational narrative, it is first and foremost a narrative of the natural world in which no single independent and adventurous agent plays the lead (the “hairy, tailed quadruped” hardly counts as an epic hero).
In her seminal work Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer argues that The Origin borrows elements from a range of cultural and literary discourses, thereby engendering associative richness that was “capable of being extended or reclaimed into a number of conflicting systems” (Beer [1983] 2000: 3). As Beer suggests, this ambiguity has contributed significantly to the heterogeneity of twentieth-century evolutionary narratives. These debates about teleology (the assumption of predetermined trajectories) and foundationality (the assumption of fundamental consequences) are connected to the role of evolutionary origins in Darwin’s writing.
Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives by Venla Oikkonen
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