"A brilliant, wide-ranging, masterful critique of the cultural
impact of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology on popular as
well as scholarly understandings of gender, sexuality and political
economy. There are no cheap, trendy shots at science here, nor
grandstand gestures to the prejudices of cultural relativists.
Lancaster displays the skills of a science journalist while
producing a major cultural studies opus."--Judith Stacey, author of
"In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the
Postmodern Age
"For several years now, the unsupported, illogical, and often
wacky claims of evolutionary psychology and other offspring of
sociobiology have creepingly--and creepily--achieved the status of
legitimate science in this culture. Finally, in "The Trouble with
Nature, we have a book that brilliantly exposes the speciousness of
recent--and widely accepted--arguments that gender differences,
parental roles, beauty ideals, male violence, and homosexuality are
genetically 'hard wired.' But Lancaster's book is not just a
refutation of this 'genomania.' It's also a cultural exploration of
its emergence and appeal at a time when sexuality, gender, and the
family, far from exhibiting some invariant, stable form, are
actually in radical flux. And it's also a wonderful read, which
draws on popular culture, anthropology, philosophy, history, and
scientific studies with equal ease and authority to demonstrate,
not that biology plays little or no role in human life, but that
cultural plasticity--not uniformity--is the real law of our
evolution."--Susan Bordo, author of "Unbearable Weight and "The
Male Body
"'What is a woman, man, homosexual or heterosexual?'--asks Roger
Lancaster inthis lively, engaging new book. And well may he ask as,
once again, academic pop stars hawk their biodetermined creations.
Eschewing simplistic caricatures, he offers vivid examples of the
ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities that characterize
real people, while showing how the biomyths serve to revivify
constricting ideologies about sex and family. An original and
fascinating book."--Ruth Hubbard, author of "Exploding the Gene
Myth and "The Politics of Women's Biology
"A major advance for the science of human behavior and for
thoughtful scholarship generally. Lancaster provides a
comprehensive analysis of essentialized ideas about sexuality,
gender, and sexual preference that are out there in American
popular culture, and--alas!--reinforced by crappy science. He
provides an immensely valuable counterpoint to the evolutionary
psychology and behavioral genetics that everyone knows about, but
that few are competent to consider critically. What a fun
book!"--Jonathan Marks, author of "What It Means to Be 98%
Chimpanzee
"Provocative, witty, illuminating and politically pointed, "The
Trouble with Nature shows us how the flat-footed fixities of
biological reductionism limit and constrain us, and why we need an
expansive progressive political imagination to free us."--Lisa
Duggan, co-author of "Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political
Culture
"A funny, ironic, and learned account of a deeply serious topic:
how the media and popular culture appropriate facts--real ones and
fake ones--about biology in order to make claims about how human
societies ought to be organized and understood. One might have
hoped that David Hume back in the eighteenth century would have put
a stop to suchfoolishness, but apparently not. Anyone needing an
antidote to the current crop of popular socio-biology books
flooding the market, anyone who needs convincing of the power of
culture, should read this wonderful book."--Thomas Laqueur, author
of "Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
"Sex, lies and videotape. Culture wars, science wars, and it's
the economy, stupid. With interdisciplinary brilliance and biting
wit, Lancaster makes sad sense of sociobiology's contemporary
renaissance while dissecting its popular and scholarly
practitioners. But Lancaster's decidedly queer perspective connects
science to shifting sexuality, family, and economic inequality in
the cultural stew of the present. E.M. Forster famously adjured us
to 'only connect.' What do Will and Grace have to do with
post-Fordist economies? Journalists' 'just-so' stories about ducks
and sex with the 9/11 terror? The Trouble with Nature connects us
all, in surprisingly new ways."--Micaela di Leonardo, author of
Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity
""The Trouble with Nature will be a valuable addition to my
library. It is a book I will want to share with colleagues and
students. A pleasure to read, it is full of insights about the
place of sexuality in popular consciousness. Lancaster has written
a personal and a political study, while avoiding many of the
cliches too common in contemporary cultural criticism."--Lawrence
Grossberg, Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and
Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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