Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

Am coming back shortly. Not ignoring you!

I guess I'm asking because I, like, really love you guys and it feels very wrong that people who all believe in something so important are getting stuck on something that feels relatively minor point of perspective to me. Maybe that's the problem?

Agreed. I think we could all be sitting round a table in our women's action office, and have this disagreement, but find consensus on what social actions we'd want to take to forward the liberation of women.

We might disagree on how the press release framed the issue.

What I mean is that it would depend on the specifics of what was being worked on!

I don't think that can be answered. You can work with people you vehemently disagree with on particular issues. People do it all the time.

That is the tenet of Butlerism that has been taken up by queer theory, and it also explains her wide appeal, IMO. Talking about gender as a corrupt system of power in which men deliberately oppress women makes most people (including most feminists) extremely uncomfortable. They would rather talk about literally anything else and Butler's endless obscurities and sophistry gives them the excuse to do so. For men, it lets them off the hook completely, and for women, it is very appealing to imagine that we can eliminate sex-based oppression simply by thinking or talking about it differently.

I agree with this DonkeySkin and thanks for the link.

Which kind of answers, for me, Buffy's question about discussions like these. Butler bothers me because I think she is part of the backlash. This is feminism modified to misquote MacKinnon. Also I'm sick of coming across criticisms of MacKinnon by Butler - I think it is careerist of her and I think she is playing to patriarchy whilst getting to be adored for being all subversive and hip and superior. I think her work is elitist and often self-serving, she has a bit of a cheek to make digs about MacKinnon who actually helps women. Butler would piss me off a whole lot less if she didn't make comments like this;

Catharine MacKinnon's work sets up such a reductive causal relationship between sexuality and gender that she came to stand for an extreme version of feminism that had to be combatted. But it seems to me that to combat it through a queer theory that dissociates itself from feminism altogether is a massive mistake.

Catharine MacKinnon has become so powerful as the public spokesperson for feminism, internationally, that I think that feminism is going to have to start producing some powerful alternatives to what she's saying and doing - ones that can acknowledge her intellectual strength and not demonise her, because I do think there's an anti-feminist animus against her, which one should be careful not to encourage. Certainly, the paradigm of victimisation, the over-emphasis on pornography, the cultural insensitivity and the universalisation of "rights" - all of that has to be countered by strong feminist positions. What's needed is a dynamic and more diffuse conception of power, one which is committed to the difficulty of cultural translation as well as the need to rearticulate "universality" in non-imperialist directions. This is difficult work and it's no longer viable to seek recourse to simple and paralysing models of structural oppression.

From here.

Two pot shots at MacKinnon in an interview about Queer Theory in which the interviewer doesn't even mention MacKinnon.

Buffy, the stuff that you described earlier about thinking critically about data/studies/reports on male domestic violence - you say that it is using 'post structuralist frameworks'. Really? Did post-structuralism invent critical thinking and skepticism? Also with regards to the notion of 'The Truth' - I think it is fashionable at the moment to find the idea of the truth rather unsophisticated. And it is a fashion that I think is not helpful to social justice movements. Feminists in general agree on the idea of there being different perspectives and use concepts like the Overton Window, the female perspective, cultural hegemony, etc. And these things are intended to highlight the fact that what you are told is the truth is not always the truth. But that is not to say that the truth does not exist.

This is reminding me of what we discussed upthread about intersectionality/the existence of women as a class. The truth exists for the powerful - it is just the powerless who are denied it. Which is why IMO abstract academic books endlessly examining 'The Truth' of systems of oppression and hierarchy are not helpful to fighting that oppression and hierarchy. It suits the oppressors down to the ground for the oppressed to spend their time questioning their ability to detect the truth (about their lived experiences for crying out loud).

Outsself, I think my issue is the difference between saying there are particular bodies and these inevitably lead to oppresssion, and that it is only particular bodies that can be oppressed in particular ways.

One of the core forms of the oppression of women is through acts of violence and control around conception, pregnancy and childbirth. It isn't inevitable that the female body leads to particular violent acts against it, but it is inevitable that such particular violentacts cannot be carried out against the male body.

Re: violence against the subject, see I don't think describing it as 'structural violence' does it justice, because it sort of suggests that women are whole and complete but sustain injury. When I'm saying violence against my subject position I'm trying to describe the way that I am acting from a place of damage at all times relative to male subjectivities. I haven't been allowed to be whole and complete, for example my adult body has been artificially weakened and my subject position is permanently damaged by this, in the way I can not take up agency in the way that a male subject feels himself entitled to without a second thought, or that when I speak, the very body producing my voice is interpreted as a way to frame that voice as irrational. So even if people stopped perpetrating structural violence, I would still be marked by the violence that has been done to my subject position. My whole subjectivity has been delimited by the deployment of gender against it.

I'm struck by the idea that it is obscene to do thought experiments on gender. I honestly think that utopia is a proper strategy of critique, I honestly see the value in thinking, what if these things weren't what we believed or how we organised our social relationships? This isn't because I'm having a fun intellectual game with people's lives but because I see those lives and feel convinced that they do not have to be that way, I feel convinced that there is some intellectual fault that allows us to produce actual lived violence against whole swathes of the population. How can we allow the world to be this way? Why do societies accept inequity as natural order? People must believe those rationales, why do they have such tenacity?

I was trying to think through the whole 'there's no such thing as women' thing which is really not the take home message of Butler as I read her. It seems to me that Butler has not claimed that women do not exist but instead said that we should regard 'women' as a discursive category rather than an objective basis for ordering society. Yes, we are discriminated against "because" of our biological sex, but that is not a fact of the body itself, it arises because our oppressors have taken our biology to be innately meaningful. No part of my anatomy is responsible for the subject position given to me, in the final analysis. None of what is objectively happening to my body necessitates my removal (or placement at the centre of) a subject position. All of those impacts and discriminations happen because we are acting as if we agreed on innate qualities of bodies and those qualities necessitate an inequitable distribution of power.

Judith Butler's suggestion is that we stop agreeing to that, not that we don't have bodies which are markedly different in biology. Or, that the oppressor's argument is, because of your biological sex... and we should not accept that basic argument. So for example, when we believe that it is actually our vaginas that make us targets for rape, rather than our system of belief about vaginas and male sexuality (and the corollary invisibility of female subjectivity), we are agreeing to the basic rationale of oppression that is used against us. I actually think it is liberating to think in this way because if I believe my vagina causes my oppression, then I foreclose the possibility of liberation because whatsoever I do about my gender role I can't get rid of my vagina. So, when Butler "criticised feminism", she did not criticise the project of intervening to end the oppression of women, she warned against accepting the oppressor's term and basis for what constitutes a woman, arguing that it is not women as a material reality that provides the rationale for oppression but women as a discursive category.

^And while discussing how different claims are believed or not believed due to power structures is important, it is actually only one small part of why people believe what they believe, as far as most people are concerned.

And the other parts of how we know things to be true are just as valuable and complex^

When you write this it sounds as if you perceive the argument for Butler to be an argument for Butler-style thinking or projects to be an argument only for Butler-style thinking or arguments. So I just want to be clear that for me, Butler-style thinking is only a part - but to my mind a valid part - of the feminist project. I do not think that there is only one way to bring about the end of women's oppression. I do not view taking up Mackinnon means there is no room for Butler or vice versa.

I think there is something kind of obscene about doing thought experiments about gender.

I agree Beach and I think this is the real sticking point between Butler and radical feminists. She simply doesn't see gender as brutal arrangement of power in the way she is clearly able to conceive of, say, colonialism as such. If she did, she wouldn't go on endlessly about 'playing' with it, etc. To anyone who understands that gender is about the actual ugly oppression of women (to paraphrase Sheila Jeffreys), there is something obscene about a person who sees it as primarily a site of playfulness and performance.

That is the tenet of Butlerism that has been taken up by queer theory, and it also explains her wide appeal, IMO. Talking about gender as a corrupt system of power in which men deliberately oppress women makes most people (including most feminists) extremely uncomfortable. They would rather talk about literally anything else and Butler's endless obscurities and sophistry gives them the excuse to do so. For men, it lets them off the hook completely, and for women, it is very appealing to imagine that we can eliminate sex-based oppression simply by thinking or talking about it differently.

Lierre Keith outlines the difference between radical and postmodern/queer conceptions of gender very clearly in her talk 'Patriarchy versus Planet Earth':

It’s become popular in some activist circles to embrace notions from postmodernism, and that includes the idea that gender is somehow a binary. Gender is not a binary. It is a hierarchy. It is global in its reach, it is sadistic in its practice, and it is murderous in its completion. Just like race, and just like class. Gender demarcates the geopolitical boundaries of the patriarchy—which is to say, it divides us in half. That half is not horizontal—it is vertical. And in case you missed this part, men are always on top. Gender is not some cosmic yin/yang; it’s a fist, and the flesh that bruises. It is the mouth crushed shut, and the little girl who will never be the same. Gender is who gets to be human, and who gets hurt.

smashesthep.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/lierre-keith-speaks-on-patriarchy-and-gender-at-the-radfem-reboot-2012-conference/

I think the problem is Buffy that the vast majority of people in our society, while not particularly fond of the ideathat there is an objective truth, do believe that there is a reality that we can be nearer to or further away from understanding.

And while discussing how different claims are believed or not believed due to power structures is important, it is actually only one small part of why people believe what they believe, as far as most people are concerned.

And the other parts of how we know things to be true are just as valuable and complex.

Buffy, I'm really glad that have have downloaded some MacKinnon. I know you can find Towards a Feminist Theory of the State and Feminism Unmodified as PDFs. I don't think Are Women Human? and Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws are available online free though.

IMO it is important for feminists (who want to read books about feminism, not everybody does and nor should they have to) to read the backbone writers of feminist theory/analysis - of which MacKinnon is undoubtedly one of the most important.

So when you read a sentence three times and are still dissatisfied because you are not sure you have grasped her point, that's what she wants. - I'm kind of shocked by that, if it is true.

Manlyalmondcakes, you said this about Butler; It isn't abstracting that causes the problem with Butler's writing, as far as I can see. It is that it is almost solely an abstraction. It seems to give little concrete detail about how women are oppressed, and the abstraction never goes on to advocate for change.

I agree with this. It is what I mean when I say that I think there is something kind of obscene about doing thought experiments about gender. If they were to lay out a concrete plan of action or an avenue for improving the situation, or be useful for consciousness raising then that would make sense to me. Like I say, there is no reason why Butler should not do these thought experiments, I'm questioning the use of her writing and what it is for (in feminism). What it does to forward women's struggle for liberty.

OutsSelf, I'm sorry if I gave you impression that I don't like your language! It isn't that really, it's more that I find it odd (within the context of feminist discussion) - for example the sentence that I quoted of yours just didn't really speak to me, I'm still not entirely sure what you meant by it. (I'm guessing that you were talking about male violence against women...???)

Thanks for explaining what metaphorical violence means. It was the use of 'metaphorical' that made me feel uncomfortable because it makes it sound figurative and unreal. I see what you mean, it is what I would call structural violence.

I think Butler is so criticized because she is so high profile and influential and considered such an authority. Her writing is in the foundations of Queer Theory - I think it is fair enough that people have an opinion on that writing and the theory.

I just watched the last ever episode of West Wing and it showed a Foucault book being removed from the Oval Office shelf... I had a ponder.

And the non - evidenced based policy making?

I've tried really really hard, but this entire thread is still impenetrable to me.

That this line of thinking (that is only understood by a relative handful) is informing decision makers that affect me is, quite frankly, terrifying. It's not, is it?