Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference

"We are living through a time of enormous cultural change involving broad reconsideration of ideas about individual sex, gender, their boundaries, their meanings, and their mutabilities. There is a growing realization of the diversity of lived gender identities and sexual experiences. Performance All the Way Down is a manifesto for today. It initiates needed dialogue between feminist thought and the science of sex by explaining all the avenues of sexual differentiation from zygote to gendered adult to argue, with an absorbing clarity, against the existence of the sexual binary. Richard O. Prum, author of The Evolution of Beauty, turns his attention in this book from beauty to sex. What is sex? And what does it mean, scientifically, to question the essentialist, binary concept of sex? Performance All the Way Down poses a new view on these complex questions. For Prum argues that the ways in which a single-celled, fertilized zygote becomes a complex, conscious organism with gender and sexual behavior is best described scientifically as a complex performative continuum. His idea of the performative phenotype challenges the twentieth century isolation of developmental biology from evolutionary biology and the strict conception of gene-level selection, providing an alternative view of what being genetic actually means"--
An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female.     The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but sex: what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity.      In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.   Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.