Why read Performance All the Way Down?

Book cover of Performance All the Way Down

Book description

An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female.

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Performance All the Way Down as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Joshua L. Rosenbloom

Author

At a time when the President wants to assert that gender/sex is strictly binary, nothing could be more important or relevant than a book making a deeply scientifically grounded argument for the complexity of gender/sex. In this book the author melds the science of evolution and genetics with queer, feminist theory, taking both strands of thought seriously, to argue that every cell, and every organism is a performance of the instructions in the DNA it contains. In other words, that genetics is not destiny, but something much more contingent and reflective of circumstances.

The exposition could get pretty technical at…

From Joshua's 3 favorite reads in 2025.