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In their article, “Toward a Theory of Gender,” Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna urge us to believe that gender is primarily “socially constructed” as opposed to a natural, biological fact. In their 20 questions-like game employed to figure out what constitutes gender, Kessler and McKenna find that “certain information (biological and physical) is seen as more important than other information (role behavior)” in the process of gender attribution. More specifically, knowledge of which genitals the person has always constitutes the gender of that person. Moreover, once that gender attribution is made, it is the umbrella through which to observe

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All quotes are from Chapter 7 of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse: Occupation/Collaboration except for the quote from Catharine MacKinnon

Reading—Not Writing—the Patriarchy: Limits of Language in Eugenides and Cixous

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Calliope’s[1] mosaic karotype: an objection to mind-body dualism

Isaiah Berlin in his essay “The Sense of Reality” claims that novelists are better able than scientists to delve beneath the surface of human consciousness and private feelings. Because novelists seek understanding rather than knowledge, they are able to deal with particulars instead of searching for universals and larger systems. I think Grobstein’s lecture walked this line carefully, between avoiding generalizations and attempting to share facts with our class. Rather than stating a definition of sex and gender (as many former professors and high school teachers have done to us – “sex is the bits. Gender is

I am interested in the tension in Woolf’s letters between positions of insider and outsider status in society. On the one hand, Woolf points out that women (or, as she is very explicit to specify: “daughters of educated men”) are less able to create change because they do not hold the traditional positions of power in society. She writes, “All the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch” (18). Yet, on the other hand, Woolf also suggests that it is this very outsider status that allows these women to effect more meaningful change. “We believe that we can help you most effectively by

The following is a lesson plan for high school students about morality and the brain.  The lesson can be taught in the context of a larger curriculum about the brain or can stand alone.  The focus of the lesson is to give the students insight into moral decision making and to raise questions about the ways they make moral decisions.

I’ve tried to keep the lesson itself relatively simple and geared towards big questions.  Since many of these questions remain the topic of scholarly debate I’ve included some links detailing some of this dialogue. 

Please add comments on how you think this lesson can be improved or fleshed out. I hope to use this lesson in the upcoming year in High Schools around the city of Philadelphia.

I am still in the process of adding parts to the lesson, fleshing it out and adding the appropriate footnotes.

Morality:  Pull the lever or push the fat guy and other dilemmas that will have you scratching your brain about the nature of morality.   

Goals

We know that all brain operations involve pattern analysis and model making. The brain is biologically organized to process information through the construction of internal models. It searches and finds patterns in what it senses.  It extracts the features of patterns from the data and assembles those features into a model of the perceived object.