Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Neutralité masculine »

Abstract When Feminists have challenged the proclaimed gender neutrality of “malestream” political thought, they have frequently lighted on the abstract individualism of supposedly ungendered citizens as a target for their critique. In Zillah Eisenstein’s The Female Body and The Law, this provides the starting point for a new theory of equality that no longer relies on us being treated the same; in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract it underpins a critique of contractual models as necessarily premised on a masculine notion of the body as separable from the self; in Susan Moller Okin’s justice, Gender and the Family it is developed into a vision of a genderless society as the precondition for fully just relations. My concern here is with the further implications for democracy, and more specifically, with the arguments that subsequently open up over group identities and group representation. The feminist challenge to the abstract, degendered individual has combined with the earlier critique of those who took class as the only or only interesting social divide, to usher in a new politics based around heterogeneity and difference.

Abstract Male and female sexuality are subservient to distinct brain controls, although they also share many influences. The primordial plan for both female and male fetuses, in mammals but not in birds, is initially feminine. Some have called this the “default” plan, since masculinization results from the organizational effects of fetal testosterone, which, in humans, occur during the second trimester of pregnancy. Others would call it the “without fault” plan, since the female brain coordinates the use of both cerebral hemispheres more effectively than does the male brain. Contrary to some creation myths, in mammals maleness arises from femaleness, rather than the other way around. If all biochemical events go according to the masculinization plan during this phase of gender specialization, the initially feminine brain is masculinized in utero by the timed secretion of testosterone and its conversion to the active organizational hormone, estrogen. The developing female brain is protected by prophylactic molecules, such as alpha-fetoprotein, which neutralize the effects of maternal estrogens that would otherwise tend to masculinize the brain. To be masculinized means that certain areas of the brain, especially specific nuclear groups in the anterior hypothalamus, grow larger in males than in females, while other areas remain smaller, such as the corpus callosum, which connects the two cerebral hemispheres. These brain organizational effects of early hormone secretions go a long way toward explaining some homosexual tendencies, for the hormones that ultimately trigger the organization of the male brain (testosterone aromatized to estrogen) are distinct from those that trigger the organization of the male body (testosterone converted to dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, by 5a-reductase). Due to this branching of control factors for brain and body organization, it is quite possible for a male-type body to contain a female-type brain, and for a female-type body to contain a male-type brain. It has been repeatedly shown in animal models that maternal stress can hinder the normal process of brain masculinization by desynchronizing the underlying physiological processes: If neonatal testosterone is secreted too early, before receptors are available to receive the message, normal masculinization does not occur. Maternal stress also impairs aromatase activity, which retards conversion of testosterone to estrogen. These different gender potentials in the brain, laid down during fetal development, are activated by the maturation of gonadal steroid synthesis during puberty. It is also known that male and female sexual urges emerge from different neural systems.