Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Diderot’s fascination with sex as a social phenomenon and yours — how does that tie the two of you together as thinkers? I think both of us are very interested in not just sexuality, but also gender and how an enormous amount that is artificial, an enormous amount that is culturally contingent or culturally invented, an enormous amount that’s even performative surround performances of sexuality and performances of gender. In Terra Ignota, for example, there are people who are living in a largely genderless future in which only gender-neutral language is used. And people are not intended to publicly acknowledge gender, nonetheless are sexually excited by gender because of its taboo-ness — not because I’m presenting gender as something that is biologically ingrained or innate, but because our society has spent literal thousands of years developing complex ways to perform gender in not only language, but in clothing, in physicality and comportment, in patterns of inflection, in how we walk, which are performed differently in different societies. The adoption of genderless language isn’t, by itself, going to mean that people abandon this ancient vocabulary of performance. It’s fascinating to look at the redeployment in transformation over time of so sophisticated a cultural construction as gender, and I think both Diderot and I are interested in that, inasmuch as it gets to the edges of what is biology versus what is culture and how 90 percent of it is culture. De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?…

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