I posted this Buzzfeed post about gendering babies (when gender is a social construct) on my Facebook page, and it created some really interesting conversations. A friend of mine who is an English professor specializing in queer rhetoric shared it as well and it began making the rounds in his social media circle, which then led to an interesting blog post by an academic friend of his, and then another post analyzing that post by my friend.

One one level, this is a good look at the way social media and networking spreads ideas. Buzzfeed makes a dumb, “funny” post by mining a bunch of other people’s tweets and…tumbles? The post is shared around, and eventually creates some thoughtful and important discourse to add to the topic.

This discourse takes some things we have discussed in class to a whole new level:

. We must be careful in dismissing anything as a “construct.” This line of thinking suggests that gender is a construct, which is to say made up, which is to say not real and so of no real value. Making the good reducible to some form of biological essentialism or even realism has a checkered past to say the least. I am much more interested in an argument that says gender is a bad construct. Justice is no more or less a construct than gender. Is gender as we know it a good construct or a bad construct? And for who? And when? A whole of host of interesting questions and contingencies present themselves when we start this way. Plus, it avoids the very biological essentialism that critics of these treatments of gender rightly want to avoid. William Connolly once argued, “social constructionism” shouldn’t be the conclusion of an argument but an invitation to argue.

– Rivers, Nathaniel A. “On Throwing Out the Construct with the Bathwater.” Pure Sophist Monster 22 Aug 2016. Web. 23 Aug 2016.

*Also of note, I don’t think this idea of gender as a social construct would have been the topic of a Buzzfeed post at all even a year or two ago. It is crazy how quickly this issue has changed in public consciousness. I think this goes back to what Kavanagh had to say about the “success” of gender analysis.