Digesting Difference: Metabolism and the Question of Sexual Difference

Abstract

Elizabeth Grosz’s research program offers a thoughtful and complex argument for sexual difference as ontology. Gathering together Grosz’s considerable writing, which she synthesizes in her most recent book, Becoming Undone , this essay explores Grosz’s engagement of sexual difference through evolutionary theory. This refraction invites challenging questions with which feminist theory might think through one of its defining issues. A close reading of Grosz’s work reveals contradictions, tensions, and problems in discussions of being versus becoming; duration versus the stasis of sexual difference; and neo-Darwinian humanism versus Darwinian inhumanism, and the former’s consequent normalizing of sexual difference. The essay concludes with a discussion of metabolism as sexual difference’s potential foil. Refracting metabolism – as a force – through evolutionary theory excites the significant contradictions that sexual difference as ontology sustains in Grosz’s analysis.

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