Date: Sat, 03 May 2003 11:42:27 +0200
From: Torgeir Fjeld <torgeir-AT-iafrica.com>
Subject: Gendered math genes (was Re: bourdieu on literary prizes)


At 02:15 03.05.2003, Pam Stello wrote:
>Bradford DeLong wrote:
>
>So is the myth of individual genius something created in popular
>culture (and that then functions as a background force justifying
>hierarchy and devaluing collective and group action)? Or does it
>extend its tentacles into modern science also?
>
>Universal knowledge in math is signified as male as part of the genius 
>myth and stands in contrast to the humanities and social sciences that are 
>signifed as female.

Thanks to Pam&others for making a worthwhile discussion on this list. Let's 
continue this trend! I'm quite content with simply reading about your ideas 
for now, but let me just chip in with a couple of thoughts on this thread:

1. While I agree with that hard sciences are dominantly signified as male 
and the liberal arts&social sciences as female (see eg. the work of Evelyn 
Fox-Keller and my former teacher at UMN, Ellen Messer-Davidow), I'd want to 
add the picture is somewhat more complicated seen from Norway, where I am 
now. As it turns out, women score better in _all subjects_ in the secondary 
schools, apart from phys.ed. At the universities, more women are enrolled 
in _all major faculties_ than men. However, the gender distinction Pam 
discusses does apply among tenured faculty, where there's still a massive 
predominance of male professors. (As an aside, the faculty of mathematics 
and natural sciences ('hard science') here actually has the lowest entrance 
requirements in terms of exit scores from high schools (there's no entrance 
tests, no equivalent to the SAT/GRE -- yet, but the system is increasingly 
moved towards the US model, so who knows?)

2. The notion of the individual genius in pop culture reminds me of 
Gramsci's short essay on the superman. I'll just paste in a quote here:

Popular Origin of the 'Superman'

Every time one comes upon some admirer of Nietzsche, it is worth asking
oneself and trying to find out if his 'superman' ideas, opposed to
conventional morality, are of genuine Nietzschean origin. In other words,
are they result of a mental elaboration located in the sphere of 'high
culture' or do they have much more modest origins? Are they, for example,
connected to serial literature? (And was Nietzsche himself entirely
uninfluenced by French serial novels? It should be remembered that this
literature, now relegated to the porter's lodge and below stairs was once
very popular among intellectuals [...], as the thriller is today.) In any
case it seems that one can claim that much of the would-be Nietzschean
'supermanism' has its source and doctrinal model not in the _Zarathustra_
but merely in Alexandre Dumas's _The Count of Monte-Cristo_. The type
represented most perfectly by Dumas in _Monte-Cristo_ is frequently
repeated in his other novels. It can for example be identified in Athos of
_The Three Musketeers_.

[...]

(The petty bourgeoisie and the petty intellectuals are particularly
influenced by such novelistic images, which are their 'opium', their
'artificial paradise', in contrast with the narrowness and pinched
circumstances of their real and immediate life.) From this comes the
popularity of certain sayings like 'It is better to live one day as a lion
than a hundred years as a sheep', particularly successful among those who
are really and irremediably sheep. How many of these 'sheep' say: Oh! If
only I had power even just for one day, etc.; the desire to be an implacable
'executioner' is the aspiration of someone who feels the influence of
Monte-Cristo.

[Gramsci, Antonio, "Popular Origin of the 'Superman'", _Selections from
Cultural Writings_, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, 355-357]

3. The terms 'desire' and 'fetishism' are beautifully discussed in Linda 
William's _Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" 
(Berkeley, 1999 [1989]), part. chapter 4, "Fetishism and Hard Core: Marx, 
Freud, and the 'Money Shot'" (93-119).

Best,
tor

Torgeir Fjeld
mailto:torgeir-AT-iafrica.com
http://home.no.net/torgfje/
Home: (+47) 22 59 25 55
Mob.: (+47) 92 86 16 94


**********************************************************************
Contributions: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Commands: majordomo-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Requests: bourdieu-approval-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu