Digesting Difference: Metabolism and the Question of Sexual Difference

Elizabeth Grosz’s research program offers a thoughtful and complex argument for sexual difference as ontology. Gathering together Grosz’s considerable writing, which she synthesizes in her most recent book, Becoming Undone, this essay explores Grosz’s engagement of sexual difference through evolutionary theory. This refraction invites challenging questions with which feminist theory might think through one of its defining issues. A close reading of Grosz’s work reveals contradictions, tensions, and problems in discussions of being versus becoming; duration versus the stasis of sexual difference; and neo-Darwinian humanism versus Darwinian inhumanism, and the former’s consequent normalizing of sexual difference. The essay concludes with a discussion of metabolism as sexual difference’s potential foil. Refracting metabolism – as a force – through evolutionary theory excites the significant contradictions that sexual difference as ontology sustains in Grosz’s analysis.