Performance All the Way Down

Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference

By: Richard O. Prum

Narrated by: Graham Winton

Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the 1990s—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings gender performativity into conversation with genetics, development, and evolutionary biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our personal sexual essences or fates.

In accessible language, Prum shows that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which individuals regulate and achieve their own becoming. Human development is a performative continuum from a fertilized egg to a complex adult with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, gender, and sexual behavior. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of distinct genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.

Sure to inspire a conversation, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.

©2023 Richard O. Prum (P)2023 Recorded Books

Science! Fun, Alluring, Hardcore Science.

This book is from a scientist - it's informative, intriguing, engaging, and thought-provoking, leaving me wanting more.

I needed to learn more about this topic, not from a politician, an influencer, a journalist, or a social scientist, but from a natural scientist who studies this systematically with a skeptical mind specialized beyond the human-centric methodology. This book provides a highly satisfactory analysis beyond our 23 pairs of chromosomes but always ties back to how the findings relate to a human phenomenon.

Sex/gender is not polarized, but a spectrum - this book tells you why and how. Performance is the action to conform, confront, and challenge social and cultural expectations. The author contests the nature versus nurture argument in biological versus self-imposed sex/gender preference. He also interrogates the basic unit of selection - genotype vs phenotype. With rich, illustrative, and well-organized examples, coupled with eloquent and beautifully- argued theories, this book helps me understand.

I highly recommend it to anyone curious about this topic and willing to keep an open mind.

If you like this book, check out the author's previous book, "The Evolution of Beauty, How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us" (2017). If you want to read more about natural selection in the animal kingdom, try "Power in the Wild: The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Ways Animals Strive for Control over Others" by Lee Alan Dugatkin (2022); if you want more on biology for feminists, check out "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" by Lucy Cooke (2022).