quote of the week - on sex and gender

The post-Romantic claim that the great artist does not write consciously as a member of either sex but as a representative of humanity is actually insidious and absurd...it cannot be true that the poet's sexuality does not become subject-matter for him until it becomes threatened, by mechanized civilization, by raucous women or harrowing male competition; his sexuality colours everything he writes, even the very act of writing itself. To deny this is to deny to the sex that is acutely conscious of its otherness all right to artistic expression. A man does not write/sculpt/paint as a man, goes the lie, therefore a woman may not write/sculpt/paint as a woman...to transcend one's sex is not only impossible but undesirable. Gender is another matter. Only by the full disclosure of sex potentiality can the miserable fraud that is gender be seen for what it is.

-Germaine Greer (Slip-Shod Sibyls, p. 101)