by philosophers, and he was influenced in particular by some phenomenologists, Rola Ponzi and Hustrel.
And one of the ideas that he got from Hustrel was the natural attitude.
So, crudely from Hustrel, the idea of the natural attitude is this attitude that we have
is that there is an objective, independent world, independent of us, independent of our
possessions, independent of our negotiations and so forth.
This is an attitude.
And part of, at least at one, we should get Professor Shannon to talk about Hustrel,
who's focused in public, but I mean, sort of the idea, at least in part of Hustrel's
approach is that we bracket the belief in this objective, ongoing, constant world
and study the phenomenology of it without sort of letting the question about whether or not
there is an objective world sort of entering into the equation.
And the ethnomethodologist is borrowing from this, so the question is how, the ethnomethodologist
is interested in the question not only how do we create social reality, and how do we
create social reality as if we're independent of sociality.
I'm just going to read this book from Kastron Mechanic because I think it says it meant
a lot more than I could.
What are the methodological ways by which members of a group produce in each particular
situation, again this is the micro here in the ethnomethodology, in each particular
situation this sense of external, constant, objective facts which have their own independent
existence not contingent on any concrete interaction.
That's the ethnomethodologist is interested in.
And here not where you focus less on individual phenomenology but intersubjectivity and social
interaction.
He doesn't actually call it the natural attitude about sex or gender.
If you notice in the Kastron Mechanic, we talk about the natural attitude about gender.
The technical also talks about the natural attitude and the introduction to his book
Studies in Ethnomethodology.
He talks about sex rather than gender.
I actually kind of prefer the natural attitude about sex rather than gender, but I'm not
going to fight about it.
What's important about Kastron Mechanic is that they're using gender in a very broad
way.
In fact, I suspect that maybe some of the first people to ever do this.
They're using gender in a way that covers what we would normally call sex.
Folks, maybe, I'll talk about this later.
I think it's common wisdom we say that it was separate between sex and gender, right?
Biology, anatomy stuff, physical stuff you're born with and the social stuff.
The social roles that we're expected to.
You've got your males and your females, but that's sex, but gender comes in when blue
gets assigned to males and pink gets assigned to females.
Kastron Mechanic, our radical and early in the radicality, didn't say, look, we're just
going to call all of it gender.
Gender of sex as well is socially constructed.
So these call the whole thing gender.
So what is the natural attitude about gender?
Well, in part, it's the idea that gender of sex exists independently of social interact,
norm males or females independent of any kind of group, interactive activities.
Sorry, but I thought they basically tried to get rid of sex in their argument.
You say that everything focuses on gender so that the parts, the biological sex at that point,
they can just throw away, basically.
It's so insignificant we'll either roll it into this or just disregard it.
That's what I'm saying.
That's a big issue with how they did that though.
Okay, good.
Bear that in mind.
We're going to come back to that.
That's important.
Because yeah, I just want to highlight that now.
So the natural attitude about gender or sex.
There's a handy little in your, I don't want to spill anyone's thunder, they have a nice
little summary of the natural.
Barkinville's discussion is much lengthier.
If you can flip to this, if you can find this easily in your customer, who put the gender,
they break it down to four axioms.
There are two and only two genders.
Apparent violations are not really violations.
If you look long enough, asking a question through the medical tester, real gender will
be revealed.
Gender exists the biological fact, independent living, one's ideas about gender.
A person's gender never changes and genitals are the essential to finding the nature of
gender.
If you don't have the right organ between your legs, it cannot be what you say you are.
So basically the idea that there's a mutually exclusive categories, male and female, every
person is one or the other.
If you just look hard enough, do enough tests, we'll figure it out.
If there's a case in which that doesn't work out, there's some kind of thinking we can
not take this seriously.
This is supposed to be basically a list of axioms or core beliefs that are held that
are indubable.
It's part of this common sense every day in the world.
That is in fact, according to these folks, socially constituted, Garfinkel's formulation
of it.
Because I think that Garfinkel brings this out more than we see in the Kelser and McKenna
is a really important idea for Garfinkel.
And that is that this attitude, even though it reports to be a metaphysical attitude,
in the sense that repositing sucks independently of routine everyday human interactions, essentially
the biological process of male and female out there.
This is also fundamentally a moral attitude for Garfinkel.
This comes up in several different ways.
He talks about it being a condition of self-respect.
If you're going to be able to respect yourself, being either male or female is necessary and
also necessary to possess and exercise a particular rights.
So there's an association almost of immorality or criminality or something suspect in terms
of value when you have people that are in any way in violation of this common sense attitude.
It brings down moral concern.
This is an interesting idea that comes up again with Kelser and McKenna.
This is the idea of the cultural genitals and physical genitals.
For Garfinkel, for Garfinkel this distinction is also very deeply connected with moral issues.
So for him, normally the way in which people determine male or female is based on actual
genitalia that you have.
Do you have a penis or a vagina?
But now we get these odd cases, like someone gets their genitals down and moved.
We have cases of sex individuals, we have cases of sex gene surgery, what not.
Now something else kicks in, which is this idea of the genitals to which one is morally entitled.
We see this with sort of agnes and agnes is taking up of the natural attitude with you
because she is female, she's entitled to this vagina legitimately hers.
So even if it's second rate because artificial or medical constructed, there's a moral entitlement to it.
I think a little bit with Kelser and McKenna, this moral flavor gets lost a little bit.
We do talk about cultural genitalia, but not in the same moral way.
So Garfinkel is looking at agnes in part why he was able to come up with a sort of
to characterize the natural attitude about sex because the idea is that when we look in these cases
where we're sort of like challenging, where we sort of destabilize the routine,
where we're sort of jolting it, some of the things that are going on become more transparent and visible.
So we see agnes, for example, attempting to claim the natural attitude about sex in various different ways.
You play yourself as a normal natural woman in the face of facts that are not that.
So the question is how exactly she accommodates that.
Page 68.
This is where Garfinkel introduces the notion of achievement.
It talks about two meanings of achievement.
This is the third paragraph down from achieving the described properties of natural normal women.
It talks about two meanings of achievement, or, speaking of agnes, is having achieved her status as female.
The second one is the important one for him.
It says, the second sense of achievement refers to the tasks of security and guaranteeing for herself
the ascribed rights and obligations of an adult female.
By the acquisition and use of skills and capacities, the efficacious display of female appearances and performances,
and the mobilizing of appropriate feelings and purposes,
as, in the normal case, the test of such management work occurred under the gaze of and presence of normal male and female others.
So what he thinks gets revealed in the case of agnes that is simply background and taken for granted in other cases,
is that what's actually happening are all these sort of techniques of negotiating sex,
of maintaining sex, of claiming sex, of instituting the natural attitude and treating it as if it were true.
But for Garfinkel, the idea is that this is something that is constantly going on.
