YSM Issue 97.1

BRIDGING BIOLOGY AND FEMINISM
A REVIEW OF PERFORMANCE ALL THE WAY DOWN
BY RICHARD PRUM
BY GENEVIEVE KIM
SCIENCE
IN
IMAGE COURTESY OF FLICKR
In his book Performance All the Way Down, Yale curator and ornithologist Richard
Prum champions intersectionality to explore evolutionary and developmental
biology through the lens of queer feminist theory. “What can I—pale, male, and
Yale—bring to the discussion of the profound questions of sex and gender?” Prum
asks in the prologue. His book is a response to his own question: a thoughtful blend
of biological evidence, the history of feminist theory, and an appeal for conversations
about sex and gender to involve both.
Over the last seventy years, most traditional biological research involving sex has
reinforced the binary concept of ‘gender/sex’, a term Prum uses to encompass the
biological and cultural aspects of human sex and social behavior. In recent years,
however, the field of material feminism has worked to engage genetics and biology in
the understanding of gender. Feminist philosophers have suggested the idea of gender
as a performance, with every individual collecting and presenting their interpretation
of cultural norms and personal desires. Each person’s performance is constrained by
the boundaries drawn by their community around their understanding and acceptance
of gender. Using this feminist theory as a foundation, Prum proposes that the
phenotype—the observable features of an organism, as opposed to the genotype, which
is the organism’s heritable genetic material—is the biological and cultural performance
of a constantly developing self. That is to say, someone's sex/gender is not biologically
predetermined but is instead a collection of traits presented to society.
Prum details the continuous sequence of molecular pathways that lead to sexual
development as evidence for his case that the performance goes ‘all the way down’ to
the most microscopic aspects of self. He presents the phenomenon of evolution as being
generatively queering, as its randomness, which has led to changes in species, ends
up destabilizing sexual phenotypes. By using feminist queer theory’s vernacular and
incorporating empirically supported evidence, Prum not only challenges the idea
that science supports a gender binary but also the binary between sciences and
the humanities.
Prum’s work disrupts academic conventions because it unpacks the intersectionality
of knowledge, showing how scientific facts about the sexual body may be impossible to
dissociate from cultural norms and biases. He questions the strict delineation between
developmental and evolutionary biology and argues against gene-level selection,
where natural selection applies at the level of specific genes instead of at the level of
organisms, both long-standing scientific conventions. Instead, he uses a perspective
of the phenotype as a performance to incorporate developmental biology at the core
of evolution, cementing how much more interdisciplinary each field is than common
academia suggests. With feminist queer theory by his side and biological evidence
behind his claims, Prum explores the fundamental question of how one becomes
oneself. He turns common queer-phobic arguments on their head, showing how
science regards gender as a performance instead of an innate trait, revolutionizing the
way we think about gender. ■
36 Yale Scientific Magazine March 2024 www.yalescientific.org