Common Sense and Queer Matter
The study of barnacles would occupy much of Charles Darwin’s time from 1846 to 1854. His grappling with these creatures may also explain why the naturalist’s better known treatise on the evolutionary origin of species did not see publication until 1859. C
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Common Sense and Queer Matter
3.1
Introduction
The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. — Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks
The study of barnacles would occupy much of Charles Darwin’s time from 1846 to 1854. His grappling with these creatures may also explain why the naturalist’s better known treatise on the evolutionary origin of species did not see publication until 1859. Certain species’ hermaphroditism and variable sexual relations were quite perplexing for the naturalist. For this reason, barnacles invite us to think about the constitution of common sense and queer matter. I turn to writers who see common sense as a cultural system in need of critical attention. In particular, Antonio Gramsci’s conception of common sense as conformist but capable of being transformed is significant. His project, I argue, is amenable to feminist and queer scholars’ interrogation of the concepts sex, gender, and sexuality. Rather than catalogue their writings, however, I highlight key concepts and themes that may be useful to investigators who take biophysical evidence as an essential data point. I find the subset of feminist and queer scholars advocating for material-discursive practices especially stimulating. Their work is indicative of a history of internal critiques, which has proven intellectually and politically productive. Though few if any of these scholars have engaged with the bioarchaeological corpus, I believe that the study of archaeologically contextualized human remains has much to contribute to their efforts. Bioarchaeologists’ expansive time frames offer a more detailed (pre)history of the present. Additionally, their study of cultural cases with sex/gender systems distinct from the one active in contemporary Western society testifies to myriad ways of existing and knowing. Yet, as osteoporosis illustrates, an example I present at the chapter’s end, such work cannot be enacted © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 P.L. Geller, The Bioarchaeology of Socio-Sexual Lives, Bioarchaeology and Social Theory, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40995-5_3
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3 Common Sense and Queer Matter
effectively unless bioarchaeologists come to regard the body as intergenerational, plastic, biocultural, and lived-in.
3.2
Hermaphroditic Barnacles
“Truly the schemes and wonders of nature are illimitable,” wrote Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell early in September 1849. The improbable prompt for so poetic a comment was the naturalist’s ongoing study of Cirripedia, or barnacles. His monographs on these creatures—two volumes on living species and two on extinct, fossilized ones—attest to his painstaking dissection, microscopic examination, careful taxonomic classification, and slight obsession (Darwin 1851, 1854). Hermaphroditism, Darwin discovered, was quite distinctive amongst this subclass of crustaceans. (Don’t let their sh
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