Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

Interpellated

Also, in legibility, in the way that writing has a sort if artificially, so do the languages of the body, which feel innate and given but are in fact technologies that have interpolated us into (in this case) the social.project of constructing a sex based hierarchical duality

Ha ha, so it's very late and I'm up very early for a conference so I'm just going to speak as quickly as possible.

The way you have written about cognition and writing and understanding sounds bodiless. In a strange way, so do the gestures you describe, as if they are discrete signs I make from time to time, which sometimes have a surface and hidden meaning. But Butler is a phenomenologist; everything is rooted in the sensate - writing, cognition, understanding all have a lived and felt dimension. This lived dimension is where everything feels real. So Butler is saying, my lived felt experience of being female as aside from being feminine is produced by the actions (including spoken worlds) and gestures that I make rather than the other way round. She sees no need to connect to the physical real world because that precisely is the dimension she sees herself working in

Hmm, spoken language is in one way a technology otherwise why is everyone not speaking English?

Which is an aside really - I think you could use a version of Foucault' s technology of the body to understand Butler's notion of the performance of gender.

outs again how does this help - so we can spot a woman dressed as a man?

Have more thoughts but unable to compose them at this time - back tomorrow

No, I know, the intellectual masturbation was Carol' s

I have a different idea of performativity and it is specifically that performative actions make reality. I do thing with a double meaning - to achieve my end (I want a cup of tea, say) and because it is socially meaningful (it is a gesture of welcoming, comforting, soothing). So we drink tea together but it's not really because you or I are thirsty

Legibility is about the precise process by which signs are interpreted. They are physical shapes in space, not "just" concepts which we process cognitively. She's a phenomenologist - she's trying to remind us that we are writing corporeal, there is a sensate, felt aspect to sex and gender concepts.

Also artists are not principally engaged with dreaming up other worlds but usually engaged with reflecting this one. Even Utopian thinking is in dialogue with the world as it is. But thinking about world in which what we commonly assume to be real or given is put into question is actually a fundamental part of social processes. So I wouldn't be so quick to write off highly theoretical work as "intellectual masturbation". The idea of performing one's gender, which is such a useful way to think about how we collaborate with gender roles, come from this branch of philosophy

outsself so?

X post, sorry. Well, if the world as it actually is constructs a hierarchical duality which need not exist then it might be worth arguing against.

Thank you wol1968! It's appreciated!

As you were.

The thing about legibility is that it is not just about it being understandable but that gender is performative. So I communicate by means of the actions of my body, they aren't simply understandable but understandable because I do things in physical space - the way I hold my cup, the way I walk etc. all perform my gender. Think Iris Marion Young who is both spot on and also I think a precursor to JB. And it is like an act of writing, of making signs in space. Just like a writer, when I make those signs legible to you, simultaneously they become legible to me. In performing my gender, I simultaneously sex my body as female in my mind and yours. This isn't so much in the big things like wearing a certain style of dress or making "female" choices but in the tiny details of the angle of my head when I listen to you or the position of my body in relation to the seat. In this way I produce my body not only as gendered and feminine socially but also in relation to my belief in its actual femaleness and conversant beliefs about it's strengths, shapes, vulnerabilities and agencies. Again, think Iris Marion Young - of course my body is relatively weaker when I have been doing a lifetime of relatively fragile movements in comparison to other bodies playing rugby etc.

I know that how I perform my gender does not produce the fact of my vagina or how I'm able to give birth. But there again, simply 'being' female doesn't guarantee me a vagina connected to a womb, the ability to give birth, etc etc. And it might not guarantee that I will be subject to oppression based on that except in the case that we have constructed it as innately meaningful, and created a social world in which my being cast as female or seeming as if I have got the ability to bear children has become socially meaningful

Not read JB (thankfully from what I am hearing), but you could dream up all sorts of worlds, and people do all the time, except they are artists, not academics.
Surely we have to tackle the world as is, and, debating the basis of gender and sex is only helpful if it leads to a solution, otherwise it is lazy intellectual masterbation in a nice college.

Right, I read Judith Butler as an angry 20yr old when All Feminists Were Good, so I read from the point of view that JB was out to liberate. And I haven't since. So this is how young, idealistic Outs read the JB stuff. I'm sort of going to do this backward.

The most important thing is that JB worries that there might not be a stable subject for.feminism i.e. woman, and woman is already conceived of.within a binary system which ipso facto will always lead to discrimination. So fighting for.the liberation of women in this particular sense might also be causing the intellectual conditions that equate to the long term oppression of people cast as women. This doesn't mean that those people shouldn't be fought for and liberated and aren't experiencing sex based discrimination. But the sex basis of that is not so stable and innate. Sure you've got your xx and your xy but the physical bodies that are.produced don't fall into a simple binary, it's more like a spectrum.

Just thinking that through in relation to the kinds of sex based discrimination named up thread and we could suppose that people we think currently of as.men could be raped and subject to reproductive control. Which I'm only saying because this way of thinking is more like a thought experiment than a description of reality, but in our reality we tend to believe that having a vagina is fundamental to those impressions but you could dream up a world where it isn't. The other stuff like having babies might only be possibilities for certain kinds of bodies but those possibilities aren't straightforwardly binary and also they need not form the basis or means of oppression. Again, in thought experiment world we could be living in a world where men's bollocks designate them as fundamentally, biologically and innately fragile and subject them to control based on this. JB did not write this, I'm just trying to make the argument work. The argument that biological sex isn't an innate, immutable fact but is instead mobilised as a discursive reality to produce gender

I want people to start suing, TBH.

Yes.

I think there is something brutal about the way the medical profession is happily experimenting on very vulnerable men who are desperately unhappy in their bodies.

An awful lot of medical knowledge must have been gathered from the willing guinea pigs for whom doctors have had too much contempt to actually help. After all, they're men who aren't performing masculinity and aren't happy with the way they're supposed to perform it, they're letting the side down, so the usual rules about medical ethics don't apply to them.

And the fact that this idea has any traction at all - the idea you can pretty easily just reconstruct a functioning penis or a reasonable facsimile of a vagina

Yes. I think trans people are being lied to, to be honest, and I think it is profoundly, unforgivably immoral to encourage someone who is already obviously suffering and vulnerable to have surgery that is so devastating and so irreversible, and also absolutely not guaranteed to give them a satisfactory result. I get the impression that creating a penis is regarded as far trickier than creating a vagina, because a penis has to do something, whereas everyone knows that a vagina is just a hole, right? Nothing more to it, right?

Have you read the comment thread on GT about reconstruction? It is incredibly distressing. I even find "top surgery" for T2M transgenders distressing to think about - and yes, I know, what the fuck's it got to do with me? They're not my breasts. But I see photos of 17, 18-year old girls standing with their arms around each others shoulders, bare chested, proudly showing off the scars where their breasts used to be and I just want to cry (I should stress that I feel exactly the same about all forms of cosmetic surgery, for men as well as women).

And I'm very sad but not surprised to read what Flora says about the functionality of neovaginas. What else could they be for, apart from penetration? No babies are ever going to come out of them, so they're only really for putting things into. That's the definition of a woman right there, I guess: if you can get something out of it or put something into it, it's a woman.