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Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference
An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female. Ìý
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The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity.Ìý Ìý
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In Performance All the Way Down , MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with 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 individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.
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Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, 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.
Ìý
The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity.Ìý Ìý
Ìý
In Performance All the Way Down , MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with 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 individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.
Ìý
Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, 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.
403 pages, Paperback
Published November 16, 2023
18 people are currently reading
267 people want to read
About the author
Richard O. Prum
6Ìýbooks76ÌýfollowersRichard O. Prum is William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. Prum describes himself as "an evolutionary ornithologist with broad interests in diverse topics," including phylogenetics, behavior, feathers, structural coloration, evolution and development, sexual selection, and historical biogeography. He has conducted field work throughout the world, and has studied fossil theropod dinosaurs in China. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.
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March 21, 2025I was curious to read a book that seeks to synthesize a scientific field (evolutionary developmental biology) with an academic tradition that is explicitly political and very often critical to the natural sciences, namely feminist queer theory. Within the latter tradition you do find academics that are explicitly anti-science; who interpret scientific concepts as purely racist, misogynous instruments developed to maintain political status quo and oppress ethnic and sexual minorities. This seemed to me like an odd partner to invite in for cross-diciplinary research, but I decided to give the book a try.
My curiosity was soon replaced with disappointment, however. Several times the author uses historic examples of misuse of scientific concepts as arguments against that science. It is strange to read a trained scientist handle the distinction between descriptive science and normative interpretations so carelessly. Eugenics was a bad political idea inspired by misunderstood concepts from population genetics. The problem was obviously politics and not science. On the contrary, population genetics has helped us to better understand many important principles in biology, like how processes such as genetic drift and natural selection shapes heritable variation in natural populations. (NB! I do not imply, however, that queer theory and other critical theories are without merit in the philosophy of science).
Even though the motivation for this cross-diciplinary investigation at least in part appears to have been politically motivated, it is not given that there can't be useful synergies anyway. Prum himself is convinced that his cross-diciplinary exercise has been fruitful. He utilizes concepts that have been used to describe cultural change and reinterprets them applied to biological development (embryology and beyond). Concepts like "discourse", "agency" and "performativity" are given new meanings when applied to the developing body. However, it is hard to judge how fruitful this exercise actually has been. The text is quite hard to access. The author alternates between advanced scientific terminology and equally inaccessible jargon from philosophy/humanities. Very few readers would be familiar with both. Are we supposed to feel stupid or impressed by the authors intellectual broadness? This is really not effective communication. I guess many readers will be overwhelmed and give up long before finishing the book.
Development is a process. The relationship between genotype and phenotype is a dynamic one. Traditional evo-devo obviously takes this into account. I therefore struggle to see what the dynamic concepts derived from queer theory adds to the table. Prum mentions a few examples of hypotheses that he claims was inspired by his novel "performative science". Although I agree that these hypotheses are interesting I am unable see that they couldn't equally well have been formulated in the framework of classical evolutionary biology. For instance, one hypothesis is about signal interference between the gestating parent and the embryo across the placenta - a scenario that has been repteatedly analyzed in classical evolutionary biology, for instance in the case of the immunity reaction to the Rhesus factor during human pregnancies.
In conclusion, this book is full of problematic mingling of politics and science.
My curiosity was soon replaced with disappointment, however. Several times the author uses historic examples of misuse of scientific concepts as arguments against that science. It is strange to read a trained scientist handle the distinction between descriptive science and normative interpretations so carelessly. Eugenics was a bad political idea inspired by misunderstood concepts from population genetics. The problem was obviously politics and not science. On the contrary, population genetics has helped us to better understand many important principles in biology, like how processes such as genetic drift and natural selection shapes heritable variation in natural populations. (NB! I do not imply, however, that queer theory and other critical theories are without merit in the philosophy of science).
Even though the motivation for this cross-diciplinary investigation at least in part appears to have been politically motivated, it is not given that there can't be useful synergies anyway. Prum himself is convinced that his cross-diciplinary exercise has been fruitful. He utilizes concepts that have been used to describe cultural change and reinterprets them applied to biological development (embryology and beyond). Concepts like "discourse", "agency" and "performativity" are given new meanings when applied to the developing body. However, it is hard to judge how fruitful this exercise actually has been. The text is quite hard to access. The author alternates between advanced scientific terminology and equally inaccessible jargon from philosophy/humanities. Very few readers would be familiar with both. Are we supposed to feel stupid or impressed by the authors intellectual broadness? This is really not effective communication. I guess many readers will be overwhelmed and give up long before finishing the book.
Development is a process. The relationship between genotype and phenotype is a dynamic one. Traditional evo-devo obviously takes this into account. I therefore struggle to see what the dynamic concepts derived from queer theory adds to the table. Prum mentions a few examples of hypotheses that he claims was inspired by his novel "performative science". Although I agree that these hypotheses are interesting I am unable see that they couldn't equally well have been formulated in the framework of classical evolutionary biology. For instance, one hypothesis is about signal interference between the gestating parent and the embryo across the placenta - a scenario that has been repteatedly analyzed in classical evolutionary biology, for instance in the case of the immunity reaction to the Rhesus factor during human pregnancies.
In conclusion, this book is full of problematic mingling of politics and science.
February 18, 2025
Whereas Prum’s book The Evolution of Beauty - which is one of my favorite books of all time- was certainly written for the masses- this important work was written for the more hard science minded. I was swimming in chromosomes and hormones and proteins and signaling pathways - but fortunately he writes- and summarizes his points so well- that my beliefs about gender/sex are fully shook!
“In response to the questions posed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, “What is sex, anyway?� and “Does sex have a history?� we can now offer the biological answer that sex is a history—a hierarchical history of coevolved bodily traits with intra-active reproductive functions, and the iterated, individual histories of the material realization of those reproductive possibilities. Sex is not a prior or given fact about any body, because the genetic-discursive process of becoming an organism affords no inputs for any such essence, predetermined truth, or antecedent fact about sex. The sex of the individual is a self-realization, the product of a performative becoming. It is “turtles all the way down.� Or, as I prefer, turtles all the way up.�
“In response to the questions posed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, “What is sex, anyway?� and “Does sex have a history?� we can now offer the biological answer that sex is a history—a hierarchical history of coevolved bodily traits with intra-active reproductive functions, and the iterated, individual histories of the material realization of those reproductive possibilities. Sex is not a prior or given fact about any body, because the genetic-discursive process of becoming an organism affords no inputs for any such essence, predetermined truth, or antecedent fact about sex. The sex of the individual is a self-realization, the product of a performative becoming. It is “turtles all the way down.� Or, as I prefer, turtles all the way up.�
June 18, 2024
This book fundamentally changed my understanding of myself. Performance All The Way Down seeks to establish a practice and model of biology based in the feminist and philosophist concept of performativity and the acknowledgement of agency on the level of every ontological individual. Its thesis deconstructs a wider cultural and scientific ideal of individual sex as binary and deterministic. It argues against the supremacy of genes and chromosomes and master controllers of sex expression and against the flattening of biological processes like development into segmented ideas of phenotype, endocrine, etc Sex Difference, in favor of an understanding of sexual variation in all its forms as a sort of ecology, a web of inter- and intra- actions. This book posits selfhood as a performative act, the act of being actually as the act of becoming. The self is endlessly reiterative all the way down, each cell performing the work of itself all the way up to me, as an individual, performing the work of becoming myself. Sex is not an essence, a quality that the body has before observation, a deterministic quality that can sort animals definitely, or an intrinsic and unchanging trait of an individual. It is an act, a doing and becoming that is part of the body's life's work. I now understand myself and my body as endlessly becoming and performing myself, my transsexual being as part of the myriad of the endless potentiality of a self that doesn't just change but its, itself change.
December 27, 2024
I was very excited to read this book after my science book club chose it. I am super interested in learning more about biological sex, determinism, differences in presentation for sex, and how this affects gender and our society. I will say that Prum references many interesting and thought-provoking studies and this was hands down my favorite part of the book. Prum dances around a lot of ideas but I am not sure he ever comes to any actual points. I was super bothered by the word performative and its use in this book. I know it is likely that it is some extra meaning that I am putting on the word but I struggled to get past that. I also struggled with Prum’s use of the words gender and sex interchangeably. Prum states at the beginning of the book that he wants to make science accessible to social science types and the social science accessible to science types and honestly, I don’t think that he accomplished either of these things. There were so many times I had to go look things up to try to understand the social science. As someone comfortable with developmental and evolutionary biology I found myself backing up to reread sections and feeling like he didn’t explain things well. He didn’t even spend the time to define basic terms. In the last chapter of the book, Prum goes completely off the rails talking about how science shouldn’t bother to do any research based on sex because it is useless after he just spent an entire book talking about how sex is a spectrum and we need to change how we think about it. Mostly I left the book feeling extremely confused by the point he was trying to make and frustrated by his inability to make anything clear.
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