The modern debate on gender elucidates some apparent contradictions: Is gender essential, something we know within us? Or is gender a social construct? Is sex real or not? Does Christianity affirm or deny the body? Abigail Favale, Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, has traced the evolutions of sex, gender, and feminism from Genesis to Tumblr.
Join in this episode to hear Grant and Abigail discuss the gender paradigm, capitalism, fertility, and the question “What is a woman, essentially?”
2:23 - Gender today more falls under a “gender paradigm” than a “gender ideology” because everyone is influenced by it, even if subconsciously.
6:18 - Catholic tradition harmonizes masculine and feminine imagery.
9:29 - “I think it's true that Christian tradition, especially in Catholicism, safeguards the dignity of the body specifically in a way that almost every other philosophical and theoretical system has abandoned.”
13:08 - Judith Butler radicalizes the idea of gender by affirming that everything, even sex, is a socially constructed emphasis on arbitrary characteristics. This serves her goal of deconstructing heterosexuality.
17:23 - The Butlerian idea that “gender is a social construct” is at odds with the gender identity theory that gender is a pre-social essence.
20:06 - Because human beings by nature are not anti-realists, it is unsurprising that an essentialist gender identity was constructed upon the ruins of sex.
21:04 - Intentionally conflating “sex” and “gender” can help reclaim the word “gender.”
26:19 - The trans woman could be seen as the completion of the feminist project, completely liberating the self-determining will from the limits of fertility and sexuality.
29:09 - “Contraception has shifted our cultural imagination about what it even means to be a woman and what it even means to be a man. So when we think about what it is to be a woman, we no longer think about this innate potential for gestation and motherhood. Now it's much more about boobs and high heels and a particular social role or behavior. It's like this aesthetic, it's like this avatar.”
31:51 - Trans feminism trickled down from Judith Butler, but also has trickled up from Tumblr.
36:20 - “Trans feminism is so highly influenced by consumerism, where the body itself becomes this consumerist object that you change and alter.”
41:49 - A person that embraces the gender paradigm in an ideological way necessarily departs from a Christian paradigm.
47:55 - Pregnancy is a source of fruitful suffering. Infertility can also be a fruitful suffering.
49:06 - Whether or not they bear biological children, every woman is called to live out the vocation of motherhood.
50:37 - Ways to support adolescents who feel alienated from their bodies include encouraging activities that engage the body in positive ways and teaching them how to suffer well.
Links:
Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender
McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame
Abigail Favale on Catholic Female Iconography
St. Catherine of Siena - Podcast
Abigail Favale on Evangelical Gnosticism
Book club on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Witherspoon Institute on John Money and Sexologists