Talk about messing with gender construction

I'm writing again.  And reading again.  Which always makes me wonder why I stop doing it because I enjoy it so much.  In a nutshell, progress is good.

Here's my mind-blowing idea, though.  For one of my chapters I'm talking about cross-dressing in theater (shocking, I know, I never talk about costumes or disguises or gender, and couldn't possibly be interested in something that's ALL THREE!) and how it works across the Comedia.

I'm using Stephanie Merrim's commentary on Juan Huarte de San Juan (a 16th-century intellectual/philosopher/humanist/physician....you know, one of those guys who did EVERYTHING, like Copernicus) and his evaluation of biological sex.  He basically goes with the Aristotelian concept of things, with "woman is an imperfectly formed man" but takes it one step further: given a little internal "heat" (not like boiling her, this is a more nebulous old concept), a woman could BECOME a man.  He establishes a continuum of gender ranging from "pure" man to "pure" woman and allows people to fall anywhere in-between.

My commentary on this centers on how fascinating it is that despite this flexibility/variability, socially constructed gender (as opposed to biological sex and the characteristics/personality traits viewed as inherent to it) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain was still SO RIGID.

So last night as I was writing this up, I got to thinking about how we're sort of on the opposite of that theses days.  We know that in terms of biological sex we're pretty different (ie, a woman isn't just a man with the same plumbing only inside), more complementary;  but along with that, we don't ascribe personality traits/characteristics so universally as inherent to one sex.  We accept a range of behaviors for both genders.

Then I got to thinking about how in many ways the LDS church is still stuck in the 16th-century....we're all children of God, all valued, doctrinally we accept things like women being intelligent and men being nurturing etc - sort of a one-sex model with some variation....but there are still RIGIDLY constructed cultural roles for men (breadwinner) versus women (homemaker).

And (here's the point of the post!)

last night I dreamed that President Packer (of COURSE it was him) used Huarte de San Juan and Juan de Mariana (the "you women best not be talking in public!" early modern Spanish moralist) to justify gender roles in a talk, and people believed it.

If only a dissertation chapter could have the same tone as a blog post.  I need a break.