Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

I don't think it could be.

But I don't think that's even the root problem - the root problem is, women are already accustomed to their actions being analysed as if the person who defines them is their audience, not themselves. Why add to it, if you want to be a feminist?

Sure, it might be accurate to say that rape is performative for society as a whole, and the idea of it does keep sending out the message that women are the sex slave class. But why not focus instead on how women who've been raped could think about things? It feels the wrong way around.

I really dislike the idea of rape as performative.

I am aware of course that she doesn't intend that to be a triggering or upsetting concept, but it is.

And this is where I struggle. The rhetoric she's using is so out of touch with how people actually feel. It's the same as when she acknowledges discrimination against women does exist, but writes it as if she can move on from that point without expending time and energy being furious about it.

But communication requires an audience too, surely?

outs, I hope your conference is going well and I really appreciate you taking the time on this!

Does no one do psychology?

I dunno if this is relevant, but a friend of mine who studied philosophy said that he'd read medics talking about the way that you can (apparently?) identify neurons firing in the brain before someone consciously makes a decision to do something, and claiming this was philosophically important because it disproved free will. And my friend's philosophy teacher thought this was a load of bull, because if you make the 'self' so small everything is defined as being external to it (like here, where the implication is that the conscious self is smaller than the brain firing its neurons), then of course you're going to find more and more of the stuff we think is fundamental to identity, is 'outside' the self.

I think that might be relevant here, though I need a psychologist to explain. I think this is some of the issue I have with Butler, that you can keep splitting hairs about what we're doing because we're conditioned to do it, and what we're doing because it's part of who we are as people. But ultimately, you end up reducing 'identity' down to something very, very, very tiny - or you end up going the other way and saying everything has to do with identity.

I don't know a lot of psychology at all.

But I'm really uncomfortable with that too.

Well, I bloody feel stupid! But thank you.

I think I am struggling with the same thing, though I am sure there are words I've picked up as jargon that I do the same thing with.

I think I agree with you about binaries, though I wouldn't have put it like that, because I associate binaries with the patriarchy making us feel we fit in one of two boxes, which is also damaging. But, what you're saying is, I think, what I'm getting at with my feeling there is no place in her theory to say 'such-and-such is wrong'.

And I do think this is very much dominant ideology, because I read Rhiannon Cosslett (who is not one of this life's intellectual giants and fair enough for her) insisting that people who called her out for victim blaming lacked 'nuance'. And she wrote as if this was self-evidently a bad thing. I think that's part of the same attitude Butler has. And it seems to be really widely accepted.

Now, nuance can be great. But it isn't great in and of itself. And there is a time for saying no, sorry, there is no 'nuance' to be had here: rape is wrong.

Oh, sorry - I didn't mean that as criticism, just weighing in to hope outs will explain. I don't think it is body language, from what Butler says, but I don't understand either.

I agree with you about culture. I only use technology because Butler seems to be in the process of arguing about what culture is, so I need another word. I'm really only using technology to show I get that Butler thinks all of this is constructed. I wouldn't feel the need to do that on FWR generally because most of us already accept culture is constructed.

I have to say, I feel incredibly stupid on this thread, so I hope I'm not making people feel impatient. It's just, it's helpful to be able to say the stupid things and work forwards. I know I could just ignore it all and say I think she's talking cobblers, but I'd like to get to understand it on her terms first.

I didn't think that was it.

I thought performativity was much wider than that.

What I mean by technology is something learned and artificial (and yes, I'd been thinking of writing with tools).

I accept outs point, though, that obviously spoken language isn't something that just happened one day, through the innate brilliance of our minds. Language is constructed, and so are gestures (I guess there, your arm or hand are 'tools' and it's true that different cultures interpret gestures differently, so we do have to learn them).

Ok, I get the basic point (or I think I do). What ever sign we use to make meaning (a written word, a spoken sound, a v sign with my fingers), it doesn't ever completely map onto the exact meaning. There's always a bit of room for confusion.

Fine.

This is even true of very concrete physical things, I'm sure.

My issue with using 'legible' and 'illegible' the way Butler does, is it acts as if all of these ways of communicating are fundamentally the same, and all located at the 'very very artificial' end of the spectrum.

There are loads of people who don't habitually use 'reading' as a metaphor for understanding. It's not universal or automatic. I feel slightly suspicious that, in using that metaphor, she's sort of taken all the social and education privileged of people like her, and assumed it comes naturally. And then she's applied that to everything (speaking and gesturing and physical actions), in order to call attention to how much they're only understood through the matrix of language.

But in all of that, where's the place to say, as a feminist, rape is wrong. Violence is wrong. Or to say, yes, gender is a cultural construct but the situation is actually worse for women than men.

That's the step I'm not getting. For a theory to be valid, surely it has to offer some kind of 'and here's the solution ...' bit?

I think part of my difficulty is you're talking as if technologies are entirely interchangeable - I say writing is a technology (in that it's not innate and we learn to do it) and you say yes, but so is gesture. It is, but not in the same way. The one is much more rooted in the body than the other.

I'm uncomfortable with 'legibility' as a metaphor for every kind of understanding as it seems to me to fail to acknowledge that we're not theoretical constructs of human beings who process information in the exact same way no matter what we're doing.

That's strange - I mean the exact opposite.

I think that Butler doesn't pay enough attention to physicality.

Obviously, languages of the body aren't completely innate (and surely for feminists they feel very non-innate as we're very conscious of being forced to act in certain ways). But that does not mean that they're effectively 'written'.

If sex is ultimately a construct we understand through signs - what about rape? It is a physical reality. What can we do about that?

I don't see her answering that question, which is what makes me uneasy. And her whole framework doesn't seem to me to provide a position from which to say 'this is absolutely true - rape is wrong' because she is interested in the ways perception and language shape everything. Ok, fine - but feminists need to be able to say 'this is absolutely wrong'.