Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

YY gin. As a mostly celibate woman I find myself quite baffled by the continual social obsession with sexual relationships. These days, in my liberal social circle, it is much more transgressive to be happily and deliberately celibate than to be gay. People are genuinely shocked by it.

I've always meant to read Judith Butler and am very grateful to this thread for saving me the hassle talking through her ideas.

if we accept that sexuality is constructed, and that humans are cultural animals

I'm going off at a massive tangent here, but... a few months ago I read a lot around the idea of "conscription into compulsory heterosexuality" and it was REALLY interesting stuff.
We (well, I, anyway) just take it absolutely for granted that sexuality is a massive part of who we are, truly fundamental to our identity as individuals; and something that is inherent and unchangeable ("born this way" etc). The stuff I was reading made me reconsider all of that, but especially the huge, relentless emphasis on the sheer importance of sex, sexual activity, sexuality, in our lives. I wonder how important sex and sexuality actually are as opposed to how important we're constantly told they are.

So much of the oppression of women is related to fucking women and I wonder how interested men would be in fucking women if they weren't constantly told that fucking women was the absolute essence of male identity.

I wonder about the importance of sex and sexuality in other cultures and other eras, and how it affected the roles of women in those societies.

Petula, I am not disagreeing about the need to recognise similarities, but as somebody who is coming to the end of being of reproductive age, I nolonger feel that the burden of the bulk of discrimation is aimed at me.

andie I don't see why someone of the opposite sex needs to complete the role.

But if gender and sex are cultural constructs, then anyone could become the woman

I think you've cracked it here. If it was a choice - if it's always been a choice - then why have there not always been equal numbers of male and female women? It's because it's a fucking shit role, being a woman is a mug's game and no one would opt for it given all the relevant information and a free choice.

almond i do think that there is a need for groups who have similar experiences to be able to identify themselves and each other in some way, for support, awareness-raising, activism if necessary etc

if we accept that sexuality is constructed, and that humans are cultural animals, then isn't it essentially a set of prescribed roles that not only polarise physical sex (making mates more obvious), but create needs or personal shortcomings that someone of the opposite sex is able to fulfil. i realise this is problematic, in that it assumes that whole guff about someone making them 'complete'.

apologies for any lack of education, triteness, obviousness, and just plain 'yeah, you really don't get it' contained within.

"But queer theory seems keen to not take apart the two sexes, but just add more groups." I think that's the crux. It seems to be that instead of getting to the root of the problem and deconstruct they want to tinker on the top of the problem and me find a 'workaround'.

And thanks almondcakes for the much clearer than Butler explanation .

I definitely think we need to be all together to fight back, but we can still recognise difference. I can see that I need to prioritise the issues faced by those of reproductive age.

i don't want to have assumptions made about my preferences or skills based on my appearance or biological sex, any more than someone who identifies as one of the genderqueer groups (my sincere apologies if i haven't used the right terminology - please do correct)

andie do you mean in terms of being able to identify who an individual can reproduce with given the sex organs they have? possibly, but much of that is society's construct because we cover our genitals most of the time, and (while i have no evidence to hand to support this beyond my knowledge of art history and what has been considered attractive in different centuries/cultures all over the world) that which is considered to be most desirable in terms of appearance in the opposite sex also often has a cultural/learned aspect to it

One of the main ways we discriminate against people is by not recognising their differences and thus fail to meet their needs, either individually or in the way we construct society.

But if gender and sex are cultural constructs, then anyone could become the woman.
If we follow this through, the only thing that links 'women' is that they have 'chosen' to be so.
Society decides that ownership of a vagina pushes you to 'choose' woman.

Leading on from this, if you add enough groups then it becomes harder to split and discriminate between them, particularly if the differences are not easily obvious.

This lessens discrimination as you do not know who to discriminate against.

i'm wary of attributing an evolutionary advantage to everything, but i do think gender is helpful in terms of increasing reproduction. or if not helpful - an inevitable consequence of reproduction.

For Beauvoir, gender is "constructed," but implied in her formulation is an agent, a 'cogito', who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender... There is nothing in her account that guarantees that the "one" who becomes a woman is necessarily female.

How's this for bold: I've never read Beauvoir but I reckon Butler's misinterepreted her.

There IS an "agent" in Beauvoir's formulation but it's not the female person, it's (?) patriarchy; and women do not "take on" gender actively, they are saddled with it whether they like it or not.

Scallops, many people categorise bio sex as a binary. Examples on this thread - people who have penises, people who don't, people who bear children and people who don't.

The queer theory response seems to me to mention intersex people and argue bio sex shouldn't be used as a social category at all. But not changing something and saying it doesn't matter does not make the construction of it go away.

We could construct it differently. It isinnate that there are people who can impregnate, people who can become pregnant and people who can do neither. As someone who can do neither, I could be socially constructed into a third group (and would be in some societies). But queer theory seems keen to not take apart the two sexes, but just add more groups.

it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain. This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender.

I (now) think she is saying that the cultural creation of gender makes us think dividing by sex is innate. This enables the man/woman divide to remain in place.

She says even the body is a 'construction' really

I don't really see how she could mean this literally. Even if we had no consciousness, and lived out our days without experiencing anything, like automatons, female bodies would still do what female bodies do. Biology is not contingent upon observation.

this rather reminds me of an article i read by friend about "the paradox of opera". admittedly i knew even less about that subject, but the way the language was used was just completely beyond my intellectual reach!