Alexander Avila聊gender的这期好棒！开头比较慢热，但后面讲到biological sex和gender的概念在历史上怎么被发明/生产(invent/produce)而不是发现(discover)、解释Judith Butler经常被误读的gender的performative属性、gender attachment是如何在所有人的成长过程中经由experience乃至trauma成型的新理论就非常精彩流畅。而且他把trans的gender affirming讲解得非常好：不是脑子里天生有个声音告诉自己是个男的/女的，而是在成长的过程中发现自己不能在assigned gender (role)下be at home。顺着这个角度继续推进一步，性别也好性向也好，描述的不是什么人的“本质”/essence，而是人(在当下)想要的某种生存/生活的方式。但我们现在的社会把生活中不同面向的细节给捆绑打包了(e.g. dominant、violent、主外、不参与育儿等等打包成了”男性“)，而想要过一种大体上接近被定义为normative male的生活就必须是或者成为一个被社会/政府/医学认证的男性，女性亦然，性向亦然(在这个意义上，变性手术是一个得到“认证”的途径而非自身就是目的)。这个视角还可以进一步扩展到其它的维度：并不是最近突然大量发明了各种不同的identity/身份，而是在现代社会/政府/资本主义对人的高度governance和control之下，人必须把自己fit进一个被“认可”的category才能被允许过某种生活。在这种bureacracy分类管理思路笼罩下，新的identity被不断发明出来是sympton/coping mechanism而不是source problem。Queer和trans以及fluid gender和sexuality的“危险性”就在于ta们无法/拒绝被干净地归类、与既定的categories并不aligned，ta们的存在本身暴露了当前categorization的“不完美”/可疑之处(因此要被“消除”或者声称“不存在”)。也是在这个意义上，LGBTQ+运动和女权运动是相通的：从根本上拒绝这种打包分类。
还有一个我觉得聊得很有意思的是他对“知识”和各种“现代科学”(包括biology)光环背后的梳理分析——“知识”是怎样被produce(而非宣称的discover)出来的，什么样的“知识”被允许/鼓励生产并被认证为“科学”：
“Did the rules for knowledge production actually improve from the Medieval to the Classical Age? Well, not really. You could even say that *Nature History* lost a lot of valuable information even if the actual collected facts became more accurate over time. The method of organizing and understanding these facts changed in ways that were neither nor worse than what proceeded them. The Classical Period didn't get better or worse at creating knowledge. The rules just changed for a mess of sociological and historical reasons. Knowledge is not an objective and linear pursuit of truth, but a contingent changing and socially negotiated process. [...] Much of our lives are governed by these invisible relationships and patterns of thought. That doesn't mean that these aren't real and powerful relationships, but they are not inherent and universal. The frameworks we use to understand the world are given to us by language and culture. [...] When we apply biological thinking to human beings, we start to project our cultural ideas onto human body. We take invisible abstractions, like function, and combine them with our own cultural assumptions to give those assumptions the scientific mark of approval. But biological functions, organic systems, scientific legitimacy, they are just ideas. They're ideas that can be used in the service of creative liberating theories or repressive regimes.”
“But suddenly there is a conceptual shift in the 19th century, a society transition from the Classical to the Modern Period as society industrialized and capitalism became the ruling social feeling. People began to understand the world in a different way. The modern lens saw the world in terms of systems, functions, hierarchies, and instruments. And when it turned that lens onto living beings, it birthed the modern concept of Life, and with it, the study of Life, Biology. [...] It is not coincidence that the creation of capitalism coincided with the biological science. The two fit together perfectly. Capitalism at the level of both governance and industrial expansion requires bodily control, the non-sexy kind. The capitalists and the nation-states to maximize productivity and governance wanted to understand how the human body works, how it could be standardized and instrumentally controlled to work in the service of profit and power. So in the 19th century, governments and capitalists turned to new scientific disciplines for an answer, sociology, psychology, biology, economics, among others. Alongside powerful political and economic institutions, these new scientific disciplines produced knowledge with the aim of understanding and controlling populations in the service of powerful interests.”
现代科学并不“神圣”，它只不过接过了过去神学的“神圣”而已。神学曾经是统治工具，科学依然是统治工具。
Alexander Avila | How Conservatives Created (and Cancelled) Gender
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