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Having read Ortner's "Is Female to Male..." before in another class, reading it again gave me more of an understanding. What was especially interesting was reading Ortner's work back to back with Roughgarden's.

There aren't many scientists-by-trade who take on questions of gender. The only other scientist/feminist that I can think of off the top of my head is Anne Fausto-Sterling. Both come to similar conclusions about the diversity within animal and human organisms on our planet in that they both seek to demonstrate that there really aren't only two sexes (Fausto-Sterling actually forwards the idea that there are 5, if I'm not mistaken).

So reading Ortner (her first article and then its commentary that she wrote later) after having read Roughgarden's work with its policy recommendation and interdisciplinary approach to providing evidence about the diversity of gender/sexual identity in our world, made it all the more evident to me the ways in which biological essentialism really underlie a lot of gender stereotypes that lead to some of the unproductive consequences of categories. Women are always linked closely with their bodies; in fact, they are sometimes made to be inseparable entities which is really frustrating to me.

So when Ortner asserts in her first "Is Female to Nature..." (I can never get the title right, honestly) that women are inevitably the intermediaries of nature and culture because of their socializing of babies and their production of meals (refining raw products), etc., I just wanted to shout "NO!" Not because it's wrong, because in a lot of cases its true (not all but a lot), but because it felt like it was perpetuating the linkage of body to woman and non-embodied to men.

Maybe I'm just getting suckered into Roughgarden's evidence because science has always been a huge factor in our culture for legitimating anything, but anthropology has always felt like a problematic field to me: trying to find universals, and using ethnographic observation methods instead of accumulating raw data (like sociology, right?), etc. I don't mean to butcher the field because I am by no means an expert (I'm an English major so social science is not exactly home turf for me).

Certainly the sciences have their own issues of objectivity, social awareness, etc., so... I'm rambling. This was absolutely not a fully-formed thought haha.