It is my contention that the problem is not that gender itself is simplistic, but that it is too clear-cut if we consider it in isolation. If we look for the ways in which gender divides the social world in two, it will appear that it imposes its uncomplicated order on social materials. But part of…
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Caroline Levine
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AllFrom Complexity To The Surprisingly Simple (1)Show The Order So You Can Create Disorder (1)Complexity Within Organized Structure (1)In Defense of Nuance (1)Gender Classification (1)Narrative (1)Gradation (1)Secularization of Religious Concepts (1)Word Origins (1)Hierarchy (1)Taxonomic Intersection (1)Beyond Your Time (1)Attentive Readers (1)Conservation (1)Taxonomic Theory (1)
The gender binary has force, in short, because it is reductive.
As many different hierarchies simultaneously seek to impose their orders on us, they do not always align, and when they do collide, they are capable of generating more disorder than order. In fact, as they collide with other hierarchies and an array of other forms in social situations, hierarchies…
All hierarchies afford gradation.
The word hierarchy was first used in the sixth century CE, when it referred to levels of angelic choruses, but it soon came to be applied to the governance of the Church, to describe its strictly ordered levels of authority and subordination. Gradually, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth…
The word hierarchy comes from the Greek hieros, meaning ‘sacred,’ and arche, meaning ‘rule.
The form that best captures the experience of colliding forms is narrative.
I have always thought, none of our research matters unless it is generalizable, unless we can learn something from it that has implications beyond its own time.
The best close readers are always attentive to many different forms at different scales operating at once.