Biopolitics and Gender by Watts Meredith W

Author:Watts, Meredith W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780203100066
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Genetic Variation

There are many genetic sex-linked differences, including some of critical importance to the survival of the species (e.g., gamete production). The importance of certain others may be less intuitively obvious, and more dependent on environmental effects for optimal development. Spatial ability, for example, is a recessive genetic trait depending upon epigenesis for its expression or suppression.40 But, most sexual differences are in relation to an overwhelmingly preponderant communality of structures, function and behaviors common to the species genotype. As Boklage has explained:

“Genomic” includes “genetic,” but goes beyond it, in that most of the genome is not polymorphic . . ., not subject to the Mendelian segregation of viable variants, and thus not capable of showing effects that can ever be defined as genetic. Evolutionary change leading to speciation is necessarily genetic at its inception and throughout the operation of selective forces, but the achievement of speciation implies the fixation of basic species-specific traits into a nonsegregating, hence, “non-genetic” condition.41

Interestingly, from conception on, males are apparently more vulnerable than females to “environmental insult and developmental difficulty”42—including culturally instigated insult and difficulties.43

Can an underlying cause be found to explain this pervasive male vulnerability? Perhaps it is due to the fact that, unlike the female, to differentiate a male morphologically, physiologically and neuro-logically, androgen must be present in sufficient amount and at the appropriate times. If androgen is not available, demasculinization or feminization may ensue. Since male development is more complex than female development, it follows that there are more opportunities for an error to be made. A second possibility, not mutually exclusive of the first, is that the male Y chromosome carries much less genetic information than the second X carried by the female. Due to less information on the Y chromosome, sex-linked characteristics such as color-blindness, baldness and hemophilia are more common in males than females. Thus life-long vulnerabilities found in males can most probably be traced back to one or both sources of maleness: androgen and the Y chromosome. A final contributing factor may derive from the much more narrow definition of masculinity than feminity in Western cultures and consequent rigidity in rearing male offspring.44

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.