Sounds delightful. Have you enjoyed Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body yet? Delightful story. Let me know if you can ever figure out whether the narrator is a man or a woman. Loved it! One of my all time favorites. I hope you are right about Middlesex being a pre-saging of our future cultural awareness. Maybe then we will stop changing the 3 types of hermaphrodites into boys or girls.

That would be nice. Let people be who they are vs. changing them so they fit into our ready-made categories ...

Thanks for the book suggestion. After reading Middlesex and The Time Traveller's Wife, I'm currently reading a political suspense (a.k.a. Mind Candy) book.

Also, having just moved, I organized my bookshelves into "have read" and "need to read" shelves. "Need to read" is more than double the size of "have read" and is close to staging a mutiny and taking over all of the shelves. Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Joyce: Here I come!

I applaud your "need to read" and "have read" shelving strategy. I have a book fetish, so for me such a strategy might be catastrophic and certainly overwhelming.

I do have a short pile in my office of "next to read" books, but they are all work-related. I should set aside more reading time (in between work, hubby, kids and all).

Good luck with Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Joyce. I would start with Shakespeare sonnets since it is easy to move through the poems. We have an awesome Shakespeare Festival here, so that has helped me get through a bunch of the plays. Ah, to have time to read such things for pleasure! I am so jealous.

I created more time by giving away my television. Actually, I could say that I don't have the time since I need to find full-time work, but reading is my sanity, and it keeps me sharp for teaching English. After reading hundreds upon hundreds of pages of student papers each semester, I need to read for pleasure to remind myself that reading isn't a chore.

:)

I don't have television either, but I do have movies. Lots of movies. And I fall victim, too often, to cuddling up to watch, passively, a movie rather than reading a book. Though recently my husband and I agreed to have reading nights together. I hope we can make it a habit. Seems the best way for me, personally, to integrate exercise and brain exercise (reading) is to add it in to the activities I do with my partner.

Do you have any other books, besides Middlesex, that deal with gender issues? I can add them to the list of dreaming to read books.

I COMPLETELY forgot that the Middlesex discussion was in Coffee Klatsch, and I posted my response in the Book Club group.

Oh well, these are the things I do.

Anyway, I wrote a list here: http://www.omidyar.net/group/bookclub/news/40/

:) Kim

Jean asked Kim (less than a year ago):

Do you have any other books, besides Middlesex, that deal with gender issues? I can add them to the list of dreaming to read books.

I really enjoyed Patricia Highsmith's last work: "Small g: a summer's idyll". On the surface it is a kind of detective story, but the enlightened social values it embodies are effortlessly woven into the fabric of the book, creating a social world in which gender issues are seen and experienced from a variety of perspectives, all of them severed from the conventional mainstream prejudices.

At least that's how I remember it.

:)

Oh great a tagging feature; I've been out of touch! I'm very happy about this, but I'm an awful tagger:-(

David brings up a conversation between Jean and Kim about books dealing with gender issues. My brain is very Swiss Cheese like, there are an awful of of holes in it. But a book that I thought relevant to Linda's examination of economics is "Gender" by Ivan Illich.

The book was controversial in its day--no longer in print--but I'm not sure I've got a good feel about the outlines of the controversy. Something I've noticed in online discussions is a generation gap in the language of ideas, especially about cultural studies. I went to college in the early 1970's. Actually I flunked out and then went back to get my degree in Education in the mid 1980's, but my real Liberal Arts education was in the first go round. Women's Studies was just emerging at that time.

I remember in the 1980's seeing a woman shaking and in tears speaking at a school board meeting about the adoption of new reading textbooks: "I don't want my children reading books put together by homosexual deconstructionists!" I knew about Derrida and Foucault, but just barely. So I truly wondered about the woman's concerns about literary criticism; imagining literary criticism as obliquely connected to reading texts. I still think that reading texts are quite traditional, at least they are constructed with with learning objectives primarily directed at skills and knowledge. But long story short, I've come to realize that there really was a sea change in the ways that people in academia talked about cultural studies between the time I went to school and now.

It seems to me that the criticism of Illich's book boils down to Illich being a sexist, patriarchal pig who's clever with language. Of course I'm a guy, but I didn't find Illich's views to be so. My theory about the controversy is a clash of jargon; the book perhaps didn't sound post-modern enough to the critics. Although, Illich was greatly influenced by Foucault, so probably my theory is a crock. I guess the nub of the criticism may revolve around Illich insisting that a gendered worldview is more conducive to human living than an industrial unisex worldview.

"An industrial society," argues Ivan Illich, "cannot exist unless it imposes certain unisex assumptions: the assumptions that both sexes are made for the same work, perceive the same reality, an have, with some minor cosmetic variations, the same needs." In such a society, men and women are seen to be in competition for scarce commodities--goods, services, money, leisure, prestige, etc.--an the call for justice is a call for "equality."

Almost half of the book deals with gender in economic terms. Not really thinking of gender, per se, it was these sections that made me think of Linda's study.

Gendered lives lead to complementary relationships. I guess my thinking really is stuck in the 1970's, in any case I've been fascinated how Gregory Bateson analyzed complementary relationships in various settings: first in his anthropological field studies, in his National Character studies during WW II, and then in his studies of schizophrenia in the 1950's.

Bateson defines binary relationships as symmetrical when the behaviors of A and B are "regarded as similar and linked so that more of the given behavior by A stimulates more of it in B." Relationships are complementary when "the behaviors of A and B are dissimilar but mutually fit together...so that more of A's behavior stimulates more of B's fitting behavior."

Bateson looks at the logic of things in a formal way. He points out that both both symmetrical and complimentary relationships are the logical opposites of one another. He also notes that mixed systems are less subject to runaway negative feedback loops.

Illich quite well understand the formal logic of complimentary relationships. So even if his anti-modern views about gender are objectionable the formal logic of his arguments is instructive. The book, "Gender" is also useful as a critique of how limited the prevailing views of economics are, through the lens of gender, of course, but the the critique is much larger.

As I say, "Gender" is not in print and it's not online. The Wikipedia article on Illich has some great links to Illich's work online and his work seems very relevant to Linda's work.

Two other resources on gender: First, Barbara Welter's “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18:2 (Summer 1966). 151-174. Second, Keguro Macharia, a gay Kenyan Ph.D. candidate and his blog Gukira Gender seems relevant to Buddhist economics and development more generally.