Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

petula - yes, that's what it means (I think). She likes 'prediscursive'. I think it means existing before you've sorted out language, so something that just is, no matter how you talk about it.

I feel incredibly stupid too, but at some point the tide might turn and I'll start nodding along and using bizarre sentence structure.

YY, I think she means it does produce perceptions, and she means that the way we perceive sex can't ever be completely unbiased and unconditioned.

I mean, fine - fair enough. But does that really matter? Because it's exactly the same situation with every single other tangible thing in the world, isn't it?

Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that "one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one." 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. Is gender as variable and volitional as Beauvoir's account seems to suggest? Can "construction" in such a case be reduced to a form of choice? Beauvoir is clear that one "becomes" a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And clearly, the compulsion does not come from "sex". Thereis nothing in her account that guarantees that the "one" who becomes a woman is necessarily female.

(Here I thought, WTF?)

If "the body is a situation," as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.

No, she's definitely not saying that having two sexes is innate.

She says even the body is a 'construction' really.

I get that there is post-structuralist obsession with language and I can very happily accept that the ways we understand things like sex, or 'the female body' are shaped by the fact we're using language, and language is a form of cultural conditioning.

I'm quite happy to accept that I, personally, will always understand a word like 'woman' or 'vagina' or 'penis' in the context of all my cultural and linguistic hang-ups.

But I'm lost as to why that should change how I act as a feminist, and how I relate to things like rape, which is a reality whether or not I use language to describe it.

YY, she does say we can construct sex different ways from a binary. I think she's going to get into intersex conditions in a minute.

I think she thinks sex is recognised as a separate category from gender, but that it shouldn't be, because if it's produced by gender, we could really see them as being the same thing.

I am not at all sure about this TBH.

I can't imagine what discrimination against trans can tell us that discrimination against women can't, when it comes to gender.*

I did wonder, cos there was a good article I saw recently about people who'd transitioned saying how they got really different responses before and after, even though obviously they were precisely as aggressive or professional or loud-mouthed as before.

But then, it strikes me that seeing that as telling us something new is really saying 'I never believed women when they said they were discriminated against'. Which I'm not wild about.

Maybe Butler means something else, though.

My brain is also in knots. I am going to keep posting unless people reach through the keyboard and bash me over the head with some Dworkin, because it is helping me feel a bit more sane while I'm reading.

Well, all of my questions are stupid, so ...

But no, I've no idea and I agree with you, that doesn't make sense. Or rather, I'd be fine if she would spit out why it matters so much to say sex might be partly 'produced' rather than innate.

I think gender comes about because of the way human reproduction works, and that has to do with our bodies. She seems to talk only about how we conceptualise sex and bodies, not about how we actually use them - because the question of whether or not sex is culturally constructed surely can't change the actual experiences of giving birth, or being raped?

Cross post.

I think she means, the concept of gender makes 'sex' into something we can understand. She reckons we don't realize this - we think sex is 'just natural' and we can't imagine a world where we wouldn't always have said 'right, it's simple, we're all one or other of two sexes'.

But (and I do think this is pretty obvious), she reckons this is a bit naive. We could have had a world where we just didn't give a shit who had a penis and who didn't, and in that world, we would not have thought that sex is a 'natural' category at all.

So, gender makes sex into a category we think about. It 'produces' it as a concept rather than just describing it.

No, I don't think she think its helpful, simply that it's the case.

I hope this thread isn't a daft way to go through the book - I just find that when I'm reading on my own, I get really confused because some things she spends a lot of time establishing seem to me to be just obvious, or kind of irrelevant.

Of course, that might be because she wrote this a fair while ago and maybe we've absorbed some of her concepts into the mainstream so much I'm not giving her credit.

She is pointing out that we can no longer use "gender" as the universally understood shorthand for "women" in the way that we used to because whereas "gender" was previously almost perfectly synonymous with "sex" (inasmuch as it was a cultural phenomenon based on a biological reality), "gender" has now been untethered from "biological sex" and is essentially meaningless and undefinable.

Ah, thank you, that makes much better sense. Though I don't think, from reading more, that she thinks it's a bad thing if gender is undefinable.

Reading more from Gender Trouble, she seems to be saying that, if you believe gender isn't innate (men aren't innately 'masculine' and women aren't innately 'feminine'), then you have to be able to explain why we still use gender as a binary. She reckons part of what the concept of 'gender' does is to make us believe that it's entirely natural and obvious that there are two sexes.

I don't quite get why this is such a big deal? Or if I'm missing something?

Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex .... gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselve are established....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 can sort of see this. I can believe that, if we didn't have gender, we wouldn't really give a shit that some people have penises and some don't, and we might never have started categorising people according to what bits they had.

But, well, so what?