Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”, Special Indian ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), xv.
26 Butler, Bodies, xv.
27 Butler, Bodies, xvi.
28 Butler, Bodies, xvi.
29 See Lena Gunnarsson, On the Ontology of Love, Sexuality and Power: Towards a Feminist-Realist Depth Approach (PhD, Örebro University, 2013), 25, chs. 3 and 6.
However, there is no consensus on how to categorize Butler. Lois McNay, political theorist, sees Butler’s view on subject, psyche and agency as a “constructivist perspective” (Lois McNay, “Subject, Psyche and Agency: The Work of Judith Butler,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 175-193, 176). The political theorist Moya Lloyd, on the other hand, argues that Butler should be called a “deconstructionist” (Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler: From Norms to Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 72). However, as sociologists John Hood-Williams and Wendy Cealey Harrison point out, Butler does not use Derrida in a particularly deconstructivist way but rather uses Derrida’s ideas methodologically (John Hood-Williams & Wendy Cealey Harrison, “Trouble with Gender,” The Sociological Review 46, no. 1 (1998): 73-94, 81). And theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, sees Butler as interrogating materiality as constructed through performativity (Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 22, no. 3 (2007): 416-418, 416. Political theorist Stephen K. White also views Butler as a constructivist thinker, but, importantly, with weak ontological assumptions (Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 85).
30 Vicky Kirby is correct, in my view, that “[t]he difficulty in Butler’s project is considerable, for she has to juggle a critique of construction while still defending its most basic tenets” (Vicky Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (New York: Routledge, 1997), 105). But Axel Honneth’s critique is not quite on the mark (Axel Honneth et al., Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, The Berkeley Tanner lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 69).
31 Arrhenius, Riktig, 20 [my translation].
32 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (London: Routledge, 1995), 47-49. See also Kirby, Telling, 68, 171. The problem of biologism and feminism links back to the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, according to Kirby. Here biologism, the thought that the woman is her body, was strongly established and later developed by Charcot’s colleague, Sigmund Freud (Kirby, Telling, 59).
33 Susan Oyama, Evolution's Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 82.
34 “Universal” here is well defined by the psychologist David Buss as “[f]eatures found across cultures, races, and populations are assumed to be more part of human nature than those features that are unique to certain subgroups or individuals” (David M. Buss, “Evolutionary Biology and Personality Psychology: Toward a Conception of Human Nature and Individual Differences,” American Psychologist 39, no. 10 (1984): 1135-1147, 1138). See also Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (London: Phoenix, 1996), 45f.
35 See Sarah S. Richardson & Stevens Hallam (eds.), Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015) and Haraway, Simians.
36 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 23-26; Pinker, Blank, 30-104. Interestingly, see Christian Smith for a not dissimilar critique, but from the area of sociology itself (Smith, Person?, ch. 1). Yet Smith does not agree with theories such as Tooby and Cosmides’ that he calls “naturalistic positivist empiricism” (Smith, Person?, 4).
37 John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Part I: Theoretical Considerations,” Ethology and Sociobiology 10, no. 1–3 (1989): 29-49, 34f.
38 Pinker, Blank, 143. For a problematization of that description, see David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018).
39 For a discussion on replicators versus vehicles and ‘survival machines’, see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19.
40 Conor Cunningham, Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2010), 42. See also David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
41 Although, as Cunningham argues, if one maintains the replicator/vehicle dualism as part of the theory of evolution then, as he phrases it, one introduces a “pre-Darwinian essentialism” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 67) into the theory of evolution that is in conflict with, in Cunningham’s words, the “very dynamic nature of the biological world, spelled out so well by Darwin” (Cunningham, Darwin's, 58). For how this anti-essentialist understanding has emerged in the last three decades and its implications for the view of nature/nurture, see Maurizio Meloni, “How biology became social, and what it means for social theory,” The Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (2014): 593-614 and further developed in Maurizio Meloni, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (New York: Routledge, 2019).
42 Jaime C. Confer et al., “Evolutionary Psychology: Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations,” American Psychologist 65, no. 2 (2010): 110-126, 116. Rightly, David Bjorklund and Anthony Pellegrini state that evolutionary developmental psychology has “come to rephrase the nature-nurture issue, asking not ‘how much’ of any characteristic is due to nature or nurture but rather ‘How do nature and nurture interact to produce a particular pattern of development?’” But, as they continue, “simply restating the question in this way advances the argument little. The developmental systems approach specifies how biological and environmental factors at multiple levels of organization transact to produce a particular pattern of ontogeny” (David F. Bjorklund & Anthony D. Pellegrini, The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2002), 335).
Similar claims were made for the theory preceding evolutionary psychology, namely that of sociobiology. There was a lively debate about the claims of sociobiology in the late 1970s and early 1980s and much attention was placed on the issue of nature and nurture. See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
