Performance All the Way Down Audiobook By Richard O. Prum cover art

Performance All the Way Down

Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference

Preview

Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Performance All the Way Down

By: Richard O. Prum
Narrated by: Graham Winton
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $21.49

Buy for $21.49

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

The idea that gender is a performance—a tenet of queer feminist theory since the 1990s—has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings gender performativity into conversation with genetics, development, and evolutionary biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our personal sexual essences or fates.

In accessible language, Prum shows that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which individuals regulate and achieve their own becoming. Human development is a performative continuum from a fertilized egg to a complex adult with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, gender, and sexual behavior. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of distinct genes, molecules, cells, and tissues.

Sure to inspire a conversation, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.

©2023 Richard O. Prum (P)2023 Recorded Books
Anatomy & Physiology Gender Studies Genetics Physiology
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about Performance All the Way Down

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Science! Fun, Alluring, Hardcore Science.

This book is from a scientist - it's informative, intriguing, engaging, and thought-provoking, leaving me wanting more.

I needed to learn more about this topic, not from a politician, an influencer, a journalist, or a social scientist, but from a natural scientist who studies this systematically with a skeptical mind specialized beyond the human-centric methodology. This book provides a highly satisfactory analysis beyond our 23 pairs of chromosomes but always ties back to how the findings relate to a human phenomenon.

Sex/gender is not polarized, but a spectrum - this book tells you why and how. Performance is the action to conform, confront, and challenge social and cultural expectations. The author contests the nature versus nurture argument in biological versus self-imposed sex/gender preference. He also interrogates the basic unit of selection - genotype vs phenotype. With rich, illustrative, and well-organized examples, coupled with eloquent and beautifully- argued theories, this book helps me understand.

I highly recommend it to anyone curious about this topic and willing to keep an open mind.

If you like this book, check out the author's previous book, "The Evolution of Beauty, How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us" (2017). If you want to read more about natural selection in the animal kingdom, try "Power in the Wild: The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Ways Animals Strive for Control over Others" by Lee Alan Dugatkin (2022); if you want more on biology for feminists, check out "Bitch: On the Female of the Species" by Lucy Cooke (2022).

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

A whole lot of random information without a lot of point

This book was a very strange mixture of hard core science and feminist theory/queer theory. The other point was that the individual is different and sex is not binary, which I agree with. Prum cited some interesting studies and I really enjoyed learning about those. He wanted to write a book for scientists and non scientists and he didn't accomplish that. He didn't define basic terms and made a lot of assumptions about what the reader already knew. As someone with a strong biological background I felt lost at times. The information was all over the place and I never really felt like he got to a point.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!