- Feb 5, 2002
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A conversation with Catholic literary scholar and former postmodern feminist Abigail Favale.
Deep confusion about sexual identity is a seeming cornerstone of contemporary society, plaguing not only our institutions and laws, but, sadly, the lived experiences of many. But according to Abigail Favale, a deeper linguistic confusion undergirds much of our inability to make sense of who we are in a way that fully integrates all the factors, including our bodies.
In fact, in an important 2019 piece for Church Life Journal entitled “The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender,” Favale argues that a widespread cultural neglect of our sexed bodies and inherent procreative potential as the basis for the distinction between men and women — and therefore for a person’s own sexual identity — is the source of many societal ills today.
Favale, an associate professor of English and the dean of the College of Humanities at George Fox University in Oregon, argues that a potent combination of widespread oral contraception and social theory gave rise to a concept of gender — that is, the socially conditioned roles men and women play — divorced from embodiment. Gender, rather than sex, has become the primary way people think and talk about their sexual identity, to the point now where a person’s self-identified gender is considered to be determinative of his or her biological sex, instead of the other way around.
Continued below.
Sex, Gender and a Whole Lot of Confusion
Deep confusion about sexual identity is a seeming cornerstone of contemporary society, plaguing not only our institutions and laws, but, sadly, the lived experiences of many. But according to Abigail Favale, a deeper linguistic confusion undergirds much of our inability to make sense of who we are in a way that fully integrates all the factors, including our bodies.
In fact, in an important 2019 piece for Church Life Journal entitled “The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender,” Favale argues that a widespread cultural neglect of our sexed bodies and inherent procreative potential as the basis for the distinction between men and women — and therefore for a person’s own sexual identity — is the source of many societal ills today.
Favale, an associate professor of English and the dean of the College of Humanities at George Fox University in Oregon, argues that a potent combination of widespread oral contraception and social theory gave rise to a concept of gender — that is, the socially conditioned roles men and women play — divorced from embodiment. Gender, rather than sex, has become the primary way people think and talk about their sexual identity, to the point now where a person’s self-identified gender is considered to be determinative of his or her biological sex, instead of the other way around.
Continued below.
Sex, Gender and a Whole Lot of Confusion
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