Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

And perhaps Butler occupies the same situation as bio sex. She doesn't exist prior to the social constructions we read her through. And if it is mainly used to bolster a gender identity/transgenderism belief system damaging to women, then the power and social meaning of her book can only be understood in those terms.

Butler's writing didn't create the whole no such thing as a woman, gender is an identity group, even though it was written prior to it. The power of the gender is an identity group created the notion of Judith Butler.

But that is the purpose of the thread. LRD feels the need to read Judith Butler because so many people use her to talk about gender.

That is also my reason for doing so. Although I am in agreement with Beachcomber that the word gender should be replaced with the word frequently used before - sex role, as gender is now such a fuzzy term.

I assume the reason that Butler is being criticised and not some other philosophers is because it is becoming hard in some situations to talk about gender without somebody going, 'but Butler says...' The other philosophers are not mentioned really, so most feminists aren't going to bother commenting on them.

That's literally never happened to me. It's also not Judith Butler's fault or doing, same as it's not Dworkin' s fault or doing that her descriptions of piv sex under conditions of patriarchy has been described as "all men are rapists" and taken as evidence that all feminists are man haters.

She has rebutted those misappropriation, she routinely has done so at conferences, there is lengthy email exchange in here

I don't see how Butler's approach is somehow more involved with considering the implications of how feminism works than any other approach. I'm not suggesting it is more involved. Just that it is involved and that is valid. To my mind it is basic leftist procedure to critique the tools that do your work. That's what I perceive her as doing, in conjunction with her participation in organisations, groups and activities that oppose violence and discrimination.

I don't think Butler should be written off. She is raising some important points.

There are other feminists writers who have raised an issue and discussed it in depth, but don't have an answer to the problem they have raised - Ariel Levy in the Rise of Raunch Culture, for example.

I assume the reason that Butler is being criticised and not some other philosophers is because it is becoming hard in some situations to talk about gender without somebody going, 'but Butler says...' The other philosophers are not mentioned really, so most feminists aren't going to bother commenting on them.

I don't know if the same situation exists for other serious issues. If you are very involved in discussing war crimes, disability, poverty or similar, is there a philosopher who has written a book about the topic, without any concrete detail about the specific oppressions faced, and with no proposed perspective on the solution, which you have to have read to discuss war crimes or similar? is there a war crimes trouble?

I don't know.

It certainly isn't the case that the only kind of feminism is the one that sets up shelters. Radical feminism is a theory about how and why patriarchy happens and what it is. I don't see how Butler's approach is somehow more involved with considering the implications of how feminism works than any other approach.

I completely agree that Butler shouldn't be thrown out just because she has been misappropriated. But I do think she could do more to clearly state how she has been misappropriated. And other philosophers have done so - Latour had to be clear on climate change and how his critique of science had been misappropriated. Butler should do the same on women.

And why shouldn't Butler abstract endlessly and work through some really dense issues? Why shouldn't she engage with philosophy as an ontology of the subject? Why does she and not the rest of the continental tradition have to explain her decision to write extensively about the ontology of the subject?Why is the only valid feminism the kind that works through the legislature, or the kind that sets up a shelter? And why shouldn't we consider the implications of the ways that feminism works, even if they are uncomfortable?

Judith Butler is engaged with arguing against the oppression of women. She is in lots of contexts, working against violence. Her writing is exhaustively concerned with the critique of violence. She has been vocal and active in trying to end the violence of 'compulsory' hetrosexuality. She is vocal and active in critiquing the support of Israeli violence. She has argued against transnational violence, gender violence, and, in her objectionably written books, violence against the subject.

Granted, she has disagreed with specific aspects of the work of some brilliant feminists. And actually, in every iteration of this, I found myself in opposition to her. But I really don't think that this necessitates my writing her off. I don't see why finding myself in agreement with Mackinnon means I have to disavow the totality of Butler's work.

Her work, it's true, has been appropriated in anti-woman ways. But I have seen Dworkin misappropriated to prove the irrationality of the feminist argument; I have seen men misappropriate equality legislation in order to insist on access to female spaces; I have seen many people misappropriate the equality argument to disadvantage women; I have seen men working as Mackinnon does, inside of legislature, in order to enshrine their privilege. All of these are misappropriations of feminist work and thinking and yet we are not ready to disavow that work and thinking because it has been misappropriated.

Sorry you don't like my use of language. I didn't know how else to say what I said.

An example of a metaphorical violence against my subject position would be in the way that my subject position as woman means that the language that I have access to is already organised against me. Or in the way that my adult body has is the result of a childhood and adolescence which treated it as basically weak, in need of protection etc. and the body style in which I was disciplined encouraged this weakness in a number of ways. So while I wasn't exactly stitched into a corset my physical agency in relation to the men around me is damaged, has had violence done to it. I would describe these things as violence even though no one is physically doing it to me.

I know here you are responding to Beachcomber talking about Butler being philosophical rather than a theory, and her mention of Butler treating women's lives in the abstract.

'So what I'm trying to say that while I recognise philosophy can.feel abstract and because it is concerned with the production of subjectivity'

That isn't what Philosophy is concerned with. It is what certain specific forms of philosophy are concerned with.

'...it feels.like an abstracted discourse rather than something concrete I can name, define and boundary within statistical quantities or materially lived facts, it nevertheless feels real and immediate and pressing to me because the ontology of subjectivity is.precisely what I experience everything through...'

It isn't more abstracted than the understanding of materially lived facts. People's understanding of materially lived facts is based on them and /or someone else having previously abstracted them and explained that abstraction to them.

Some of what MacKinnon is saying is an abstraction of the concrete. The concept of sexual harassment in law is an abstraction that she is able to relate to a series of concrete situations women have been in, and she then uses that to advocate for change.

Mackinnnon is talking about oppression of the materially real - women's bodies through rape, forced impregnation and other atrocities, but she is also talking about oppression through social constructs - language used in sexual harassment in the workplace, verbal abuse in pornography.

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. It does in the sense that she claims people can use gender in subversive ways, but as she says we don't know what would constitute that subversion, it only ever remains an abstraction.

most especially the violence against the subject that regulating sex-based gender produces.

See this is exactly the sort of thing I'm taking about. I know you aren't quoting Butler but your language is typical of her school of writing.

And what is metaphorical violence?

Look I'm not trying to put anyone off reading Butler. I just hope that they also read radical feminist work and don't think that Butler is all they need to have a handle of the subjugation of women. Something that is very useful IMO about the works of people like Dworkin, Daly, Millett, etc is that they don't write in the masculine tradition. They talk about the limitations of having to express oneself with masculine language and they create new words and ways of expressing things in order to present the female perspective. I think it is dreadful that they are so little read.

Just as an aside, this discussion is really, really brilliant and I value the contributions everyone is making so much. I've never had a conversation which felt like sort of sustained challenge (in a good way) to the absolute core of how I think about this.

So what I'm trying to say that while I recognise philosophy can.feel abstract and because it is concerned with the production of subjectivity, it feels.like an abstracted discourse rather than something concrete I can name, define and boundary within statistical quantities or materially lived facts, it nevertheless feels real and immediate and pressing to me because the ontology of subjectivity is.precisely what I experience everything through, it is the way that I come to know everything and experience everything and interpret everything. So I suppose that I see it as a sort of lense which I am looking through and while I agree, and welcome the work of feminists focusing on the world we are looking at I do regard it as important and not a luxury to inspect the lense through which we examine it, too.

See, I read Butler as deeply concerned with violence, most especially the violence against the subject that regulating sex-based gender produces. I honestly read her and thought that she added a moral urgency to the liberation of women, whose oppression she sees as an ongoing violence metaphorically and whose regulation she recognises as being instituted and maintained through acts of violence. In her formulation, women aren't accidentally disadvantaged because they happen to give birth and it happens that our social.systems have been developed without reference to female.subjectivity. Rather, women are produced and.regulated as women strategically, in order to produce and maintain their disadvantage, in order to deny them the position of subject, in order to regulate the deployment of power, agency, wealth, etc. away from her.

And in answer to why post structuralist ideas have gained traction and eclipsed more radical feminist ideas - well I think it is because they are less stark. They are less dangerous to the status quo.

There is a reason why Butler is successful and Millett and Dworkin are not (in patriarchal terms). MacKinnon has worked her way in becaude she is a legal scholar and logic works in her favour in that context.

Really I could just have said that I think Butler is ambiguous and that is potentially extremely unhelpful in a situation of pervasive, systematic, Orwellian, ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, extreme violence against half the world's population.

OK. For me it is the difference between philosophy and analysis/theory. I'm going to continue to use the examples of MacKinnon and Butler that I have used so far on this thread.

I understand Buffy's explanation of Butler, etc doing thought experiments. I don't doubt that those thought experiments are interesting and that they can be useful. They will be useful to anyone who wants to make use of them - and this is not something that Butler can decide or control. For example we see Butler's ideas/writing being used by Queer theorists and we also see Butler's ideas being used by cross dressers, gender fetishists, transgenderist activists, etc. Butler's writing can be used both for women and against women. And it is my opinion that the bits that can be used for women have been said in better clearer ways by women writing before Butler. (And in ways that are not open to interpretation.)

Additionally these thought experiments, interesting though they may be, take us further and further away from the actual situation in hand. This is partly what I mean when I say that Butler depoliticizes feminist ideas/theory. Plus these thought experiments are carried out in a way that takes the focus off the extremely violent nature of the subject in hand, and in a way that disappears the very obviously gendered nature of that violence and its victims, and this depoliticizes things yet further and muddies the class analysis which Butler responds to with her interpretation of gender. To be honest, I find the idea of doing thought experiments on the subject of gender an obscene thing to do. Gender is a violent and forceful system of othering and a hierarchy which is the backbone of a global regime of sexualised oppression, exploitation and abuse. It is very simple and straightforward and horrifying and inhumane and it is everywhere. Of course Butler is free to philosophize about it if she wants but IMO work such as hers turns women's real lived lives and fear and suffering and pain into something abstract. Something to muse on, something to ponder on. Butler distracts and she also allows people to think that they have done their bit on the subject of gender/sex based oppression because they have read some philosophy on the subject (and IMO defeatist philosophy at that). Box ticked on the wimminz now let's move on to the next subject.

(I know that lots of people call what Butler does on gender 'theory' but to my mind it is philosophy.)

Then we have MacKinnon - MacKinnon has a game plan. She has objectives. Her writing is not open to interpretation, she analyses and lays her analysis out extremely clearly. She names things. She brings clarity and understanding to concepts that can be hard to grasp, hard to see, hard to challenge, hard to process, hard to get one's head around because it involves a whole new way of thinking to think that they can be challenged. And I don't mean a different angle of thinking about things, I mean an entirely different way (Dworkin does this too). She uses her writing and analyses to demand change, to challenge power structures, to defend women, to find new avenues of defense for women and new avenues for prosecuting perpetrators of male violence. The origins of the Swedish model against prostitution lie with MacKinnon and Dworkin - something that has the potential not only to protect women but also to change mind sets with regards to what women are and what we should have in terms of social and civil rights. This is revolutionary, as is the work she has done to have rape during war recognized as genocidal and as a weapon of war. Her work on consent has the potential to change how we see and prosecute rape and that has potential WRT male violence and power structures in general.

To my mind work like this and that of other radical women changes the way we think in much more powerful ways than thought experiments done in the masculine tradition do. It opens our minds. It allows us to think a bit more freely.

I'm not saying that there is not a place for both but one feels like a necessity and the other like a luxury and a luxury that may bear fruit but which equally may be used against women.

An example theory...

I am going to explain this poorly because I can't find the paper and will get all the terms wrong.

Someone was explaining individual responses to being told that they were collectively heading towards a dire situation which was socially complex and would require a collective response which would be difficult to create.

One common response was for individuals to create an internal world with less reference to the beliefs of others - an idiosyncratic one which would justify in various ways a denial that a bad thing was happening or was going to happen.

The second response was to believe that a bad thing was happening but to respond with a weakened identification with the group, and then increasing the level of individual behaviour that was causing the bad situation in the first place, so as to make the most personally from a situation you think there is little chance of collectively improving anyway.

The author was then advocating that any difficult situation should be revealed to people in conjunction with a response that was centred on collective identity and relationships, or the situation you wanted to resolve would neither be collectively believed or acted positively upon.

This theory has then been taken up by people in diverse fields, as it allows people to modify what they think should be done by adding an understanding of how people construct their beliefs when they feel the odds are against them. It is an entirely social explanation which can be combined both with a material understanding and other social understandings of what course of action should be taken.

I'm reading and have stuff I want to say but don't have time right now. Will try to post later.

Sorry Buffy, my connection has become poor, and if I write a long post it will probably get eaten. But will return...

Your post of 13:09 Buffy.

Personally, I would see it as follows:

1. Post structuralist ideas are essential. Discourse analysis can become a kind of check anyone, from any ideological background can do on their own thinking.
2. No problem can be resolved without looking at social constructs and the complexity of the social world.
3. Solving any problem will involve people with different areas of expertise.
4. There are many other ideas which are not post structuralist and which address social complexity and social constructs.
5. People who are in those other areas with a focus on social complexity are able to use language, knowledge and suggest solutions which can be coupled with knowledge and solutions from people whose main focus is the material not the social, building mutual respect and nuanced solutions.

If we live in a world that's both material and social, you have to work together providing the bits you understand. That includes accepting that some elements are not best explained by your perspective but by somebody else's. I think other approaches to social complexity get used more because they are aware of their own limitations and so leave a space for approaches to join up with them.