Behavioral events: mental states, body, and gender

Abstract

Various disciplines and feminist epistemologies have highlighted the deterministic biases permeating the predominant scientific discourse. Nevertheless, I consider that none of the criticisms problematizes the cause-effect logic structuring physical and symbolic gender relations. In this respect, a temporal linearity is naturalized that prioritizes biological aspects over typically gendered behaviors, such as aggression and competition. This naturalization results from insufficiently problematizing the mind-body relationship in Gender Studies. I propose a cross between Donald Davidson’s concept of event and anomalous monism and certain contributions from the new feminist materialisms, and argue that there is a temporal synchronization between our biological and psychological states. At the same time, I highlight the irreducibility of mental aspects. I conclude that interpreting gendered behaviors in this way permits an ontology of the body that dilutes the cause-effect logic, an androcentric logic inherited from modern science and predicated on an inherently CIS-Heteronormative biologism.