Abstract This paper takes as its starting point a letter written by Virginia Woolf in 1940 which speculates about the possibility of ending war. ‘Can we change sex characteristics?’ Woolf asks. ‘How can we alter the crest and the spur of the fighting cock?’ In writing this letter, Woolf recalls a passage she read in 1932 from the biological textbook The Science of Life, co-written by Julian Huxley: a passage which, in Woolf’s terms, describes a ‘hen that became a cock or vice versa’. The paper demonstrates that Woolf’s writing of this period, particularly Three Guineas and Between the Acts, responds to Huxley’s works of popular biology, specifically their discussion of secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and the mutability of biological sex, in order to envision a way out of the repeating cycle of violent domination that she traces in contemporary society, and to conceive of a future society not built upon a binary model of sex or gender. It proposes a non-linear conception of feminist history in which Woolf’s texts—with their depiction of sex as plural and alterable through human agency—display a sympathy with our current understanding of sex: an aspect of her writing that has been overlooked by intermediate commentators.

中文翻译：

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“我们如何改变斗鸡的冠冕和刺？”：朱利安赫胥黎，流行生物学和弗吉尼亚伍尔夫的女权主义和平主义

摘要 本文以弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）1940 年写的一封信为出发点，信中推测结束战争的可能性。“我们可以改变性别特征吗？” 伍尔夫问道。“我们怎样才能改变斗鸡的波峰和马刺？” 在写这封信时，伍尔夫回忆起她在 1932 年从朱利安赫胥黎合着的生物教科书《生命科学》中读到的一段话：用伍尔夫的话来说，这段话描述了“母鸡变成了公鸡，反之亦然”。这篇论文表明，伍尔夫在这一时期的写作，特别是《三个几内亚》和《幕间》，回应了赫胥黎的流行生物学著作，特别是他们对第二性征、激素和生物性别可变性的讨论，为了设想出一条出路，摆脱她在当代社会所追踪的暴力统治的重复循环，并设想一个不建立在性别或性别二元模型之上的未来社会。它提出了一种关于女权主义历史的非线性概念，其中伍尔夫的文本——将性描述为复数且可通过人类代理改变——表现出对我们目前对性的理解的同情：她的写作中被中级评论员忽视的一个方面.