Who Owns 'Human Nature'?

Marjorie Garber is one of the world’s leading professors of Shakespeare studies and one of America’s foremost cultural critics. Her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (Routledge 1992), was a groundbreaking theoretical work that the Lambda Book Report called "a political and emotional gold mine--beautifully illustrated, and written with wit, style, and with obvious love for the subject. Could you ask for more?"

Her other works include Academic Instincts (Princeton, 2001), Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses (Pantheon, 2000), Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (Simon & Schuster 1995).

In this lecture, Garber discusses her works-in-progress, Quotation Marks, and explores how "human nature" is praised, or blamed, for the good behavior of Samaritans and the bad behavior of politicians. Few phrases are used so confidently and promiscuously, by parents and children, religious figures and laity, optimists and pessimists, humanists and scientists. And few phrases have been responsible for so much disinformation, or so much attitudinizing. It is a suggestive fact about human nature that it was once the intellectual property of poets, philosophers, and political theorists and is now largely the domain of scientists. "Human nature" is an artifact of culture and language, of fantasy and projection. 

Image: Bruce Cratsley