Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

Well, I'm reading all this with interest but I'm still not clear on what Butler or Foucault have brought to the table to help women as a class free themselves from patriarchal society. I mean something that women in general or feminist theorists hadn't already worked out and described in much more accessible ways.

I think I get frustrated with this type of philosophy because it feels like a whole lot of musing and beating around the bush about things that are actually quite straightforward. The main thing that I can remember about my limited reading of Foucault is stuff about power being pervasive/insidious/not reliant on presence and or force. I get it but I feel like it is something that women have been saying and have known for a long time. As have Marxists when they analyse cultural hegemony. It's the concept of the status quo, it's exactly what feminists mean when they use the term patriarchy.

Thank you OutSelf for saying that you appreciate the clarity of my writing. Clarity really matters to me, which is possibly much of the reason why I don't get on with Butler and prefer the labrys like writings of Daly and Dworkin and the astounding logic of MacKinnon.

As a total aside, for those of you who know more about Foucault than I do, what do you make of him being a BDSMer? I know that for me as someone who supports radical feminist analysis, it means that I don't entirely trust him (I mean with regards to feminism).

Not everybody becomes an adult though. It isn't something where everyone passes through all stages. I don't think fusing of bones is neutral. For men, broadness of shoulders is very important (at least in the UK and US) to masculinity. Broadness of shoulders is related to age at which the clavicle fuses, which is highly variable. An older, more experienced twenty one year old can be perceived poorly socially based on what is simply a later fusing clavicle compared to another male who is eighteen but fused earlier.

I think the idea that we are capable of perceiving any kind of phenomena in an ideologically neutral way is contrary to what post modernism was even saying.

It goes back to Buffy's comments on people employing post modernism to actually promote modernism - arguing that there is some kind of correct, natural, neutral way of apprehending things and it is everyone else is being ideological.

I think it is actually more like romanticism - that there are some things we just underneath it all just know. Something that can be comprehended as real, people would just breast feed, eat, reproduce etc if we peeled away all this social construction. But we don't just know things. It is always bound up in a belief system of one sort or another.

Outself, it would be impossible to work out what kind of system would disadvantage people who got pregnant without looking at whether outcomes were worse or better for the people who got pregnant. To do that, you would have to make a distinction between the two groups to see if one had worse outcomes.

The same is true for every other kind of variation. You can't work out if something is disadvantaging tall people, asthmatic people, people who live inland unless you make a distinction between the groups.

I don't see anyone arguing for the neutrality of the others, more like the neutrality of the others points to a way that biological sec could.be as ideologically neutral and as.unconnected to overall social outcomes.as the.relative fusedness of.your humerus. And the fact remains that aging is a process we all experience and being an adult implies one has been a juvenile, whereas sex in no way functions.like that for us.

That isn't true.

Age in biology is not arbitrary. You either have an adult humerus (one where the three parts are fused) or you have a juvenile humerus; the same for many other bones. You have either developed a complete set of adult dentition or you have not and have juvenile dentition. From putting these factors together there are two categories for the whole body which are mutually exclusive. You are either an adult or a juvenile.

But some people no longer have teeth, or never had arms, or have a medical condition which disrupts part of their development. They don't 'fit.'

And in conjunction with that we socially construct, with some loose connection to the biological process of age, whether somebody is socially and legally considered juvenile or adult.

It is very similar to sex and gender.

The problem with all of these arguments with biological sex not existing is that they are all based on claiming some other materially real process does. And all the other processes or categories are just as prone to construction, young, old, impaired, pregnancy, nutrition, physical strength.

There can be no category as prone to construction and as contested as nutrition. Food taboos, what food even is, what food means, what is nutritional, what is and is acceptable processing, what 'food' makes you sick or well, what is ceremonial etc.

If we are going to object to the concept of biological sex, don't we have to hold all the things that are in the same category of materially real to the same standard? I don't see how we can object to biological sex on the basis of the supposed reality and neutrality of other things which have all the same issues.

Sorry, but juvenile and adult do not exist in a binary system based on body parts analogous to the binary of male and female. We recognise that legal categories for adult and juvenile are arbitrary decisions made in order to boundary what are actually quite fuzzy borders concerning things like the capacity of the individual to take legal responsibility for the consequence of actions, to be able to make sensible decisions about property and wealth. Moreover, they are categories which one would would normally expect to pass through as an individual during one's lifetime. Neither of those things apply to biological sex. And ageing may happen to everyone, and in that sense is a material reality, but being female doesn't happen to everyone, nor does having babies happen to every female, or menstruation etc. etc.

In one way of looking at it biological sex really is a specific and particular problem and its apparently binary nature is responsible for those discriminations you describe. If we weren't working with an idea that these facts defined those groups of people - never mind the violence that that does to those who don't fit those categories in those ways - we wouldn't be ordering social systems that excluded and marginalised the experiences of women because we'd be building social systems which assumed that people needed education to prevent maternal deaths; that people would need time out of their working lives to bring up young; that people may get pregnant and need further nutritional and health support, etc etc. I'm trying to say that we'd organise social systems based on a single subject position, and assumed that all subjects may or may not get pregnant (etc. etc.) If we built social systems which didn't busy themselves with identifying who it was that was likely to do this and instead assumed that all subjects had a range of potentialities which we agreed should not disadvantage us socially then we might be thinking like Judith Butler.

I'm not trying to disappear the category of women and I believe in class analysis. I'm just trying to think through why it might be useful to work outside of binary sex categories in social and legal systems.

Ezinma, I also think most of your post isn't related to your question.

The question - can I be sure bio sex is a thing. Yes, it exists as a material reality. We see that through events that materially happen - that is that they happen in conjunction with social relationships not just as a consequence of them - menstruation for example.

The consequences for people who don't fit into neat boxes is a product of how we socially construct out perspective on bio sex

Ezinma, biological sex exists as a material reality in the same way that ageing does. The categories of juvenile and adult exist as a binary based on body parts, and many individuals do not fit into the binary. They are then put into social categories with legal consequences. But you seem happy to talk about young and old as if such categories are real.

As for why somebody should be connected to a physical state they are not currently in, one reason would be that discrimination is cumulative over a lifetime. Chances of dying in childbirth are increased by denying seven year old girls education. Chances of disability among elderly women are increased by poor health care during pregnancy while younger. We improve lives by looking at events across the whole life cycle and at the links between generations of women, not at an individual in one moment. People's futures and pasts matter to who they are and what happens to them.

Right, I've just seen that post, ezinma, for some reason it didn't show on my tablet but has on my computer.

I think that the way that Butler is loosening, for want of a better word, the stability of bio sex when she describes it as "discontinuous" is not to deny the need for a collective consciousness amongst women as a political group but rather is underscoring the way in which the gender performance that is expected of us, and the regulatory practices that maintain it have no ethical, rational or natural basis on which you could argue for them. Which makes gender an especially violent distribution of power.

I'm having a problem seeing your post of 21.10 Ezinma - it's first line shows up on Threads I'm On but it just isn.t visible when I click on the thread? Are you able to copy and paste it?

I am still reading and thinking about everything. I am trying to read through your post, almond, and think carefully about it. And I really appreciate the clarity of your writing beachcomber, I do not feel able to inhabit such an unequivocal position on this. I'm still thinking about your Foucault question. I have the sort of mind which picks up concepts and frames of reference for use or to think through other concepts, it's my thinking style. I'm just trying to think carefully about how Foucualt might be useful outwith that kind of thinking style. My clearest sense is that Foucault makes direct the effects of ideology on the body. He takes up the idea that subjects are interpellated and materializes that effect on the body of the individual. This is really important to my feminism because it describes way in which ideology becomes a fact of embodiment, thereby feeling natural or real whereas I think you could read traditional leftist ideology critique and imagine that all people would have to do to be liberated from false ideology is think more correctly. I also personally am particularly interested in the embodiment of ideology in the way that it regulates agency - in the way that women are.socialised as weaker.and literally grow up to embody this, for.example - and the way that this has profound effects on the individual's sense of themselves as a way of cultivating or curtailing agency. Foucualt has been key to my thinking in this, really. But more generally, I always always think that stuff which has resonance for.me is useful even when it is not directly engaged with feminism, which is sometimes a really helpful position and sometimes it may just be an act of projecting consensus into all the stuff I feel I respond to, on the basis that I respond to it.

Not to mention those bodies that are too young, old, sick, etc, to meet the criteria.

almondcakes: Can we be sure that bio sex is a thing? Assuming it exists only materially — in and on our bodies — then what bits of anatomy, what bodily functions must we have in order to qualify as "biologically sexed"? What are we if we do not have them all, or if they do not work, or if we have no intention of making them work? Why should our sex be determined by parts of the body we once had, or by bodily functions that one day we'll be expected to have, rather than by our present "material reality"?

Butler says "'sex' imposes an artificial unity on an otherwise discontinuous set of attributes" (and practices?). Our bodies are real, but discourse turns them into a single unit, wholly and coherently sexed. And because there can be no such thing as an unsexed body, people whose bodies do not add up are ascribed a sex, then given a marginal or pathological position within it: disabled, trans, or, as someone once said of me, "a woman but lesbian".

Beachcomber, I think my last post may have been a load of rambling nonsense, so don't feel obliged to reply.

That's how I see it too DonkeySkin. Thanks for putting it into words so well.

I feel like intersectionality tells women that we are not a distinct oppressed class. It fragments us into anything other than women and takes the focus off the fact that men the world over benefit from women's low status.

(Am thinking about what you said almondcakes and will reply when I have more time.)

Having read some of the writing of black and disabled women about mainstream feminism, I think we do need to look to ourselves as well as analysing our oppression. As white, educated women (speaking about myself here) we are very privileged compared to some other women and we need to acknowledge the complexity this brings to the project of liberation. Acknowledging this is not denying commonality.

I agree Buffy, and I did not mean to imply that some women are not privileged over others, or that real, power-based differences between women do not exist.

The deep divides between women along racial and class lines, as well as other axes like disability, often makes the project of building feminist solidarity seem impossible. I can fully understand if black women do not trust white women to be their political allies; and the cynicism that poor women might have towards rich women whose primary political interest is in maintaining their class power rather than advancing the cause of women at large.

But the problem this presents to feminists is one of political solidarity; it does not mean that the basic feminist tenet that women are oppressed as women is untrue; it does not erase female commonalities or the universality of male oppression. The question is whether women can form an effective political movement around those commonalities, a movement that would by necessity represent the interests of the mass of women (who are predominantly neither white nor rich).

I don't think bio sex is a social construct. She doesn't say that in that article either, I don't think. If bio sex is a social construct, then so is everything else, and we can stop referring to anything as a social construct and just refer to things as things.

I think that social construct should only refer to things that have no existence outside of the meaning put on them by people (money), or the mechanism by which we understand things (we understand bio sex, not a social construct, through the mechanism of a social construct, gender).

So when people say that bio sex is a binary, or a spectrum, or anything else, what they mean by those things and how they perceive those things is socially constructed, but bio sex remains a material reality.

In that quote, Butler says that there can be a sense of sex used for assignment. and another sense used to reject that assignment. She is saying that in the context of trans issues, but the same can also be said for females. Our ideas about the female body may be somewhat different to those intended by the system of assignment or by what is known by science.

Science, within my lifetime, has found out new information about what the clitoris does, due to new technological developments (or at least the new use of them). But the clitoris was doing the same thing before science proclaimed it to be happening.

Feminism has its own perspective on the female body, a second sense, just as Butler is saying. The transgenderist approach also does. But for some reason, many transgenderists attack feminists as if they are the medical/legal establishment and the thing that is being resisted, when we are simply a different form of resistance (just one that is incompatible with theirs).

There has to be a distinction made between resisting the way knowledge about the reality of bio sex is constructed so that we can make the world better for females (safe childbirth, infertility treatments etc), and challenging why social constructs of gender that have no connection to material reality exist at all (gendered clothes, hobbies etc).

But to do that you have to accept that

a. Knowledge about bio sex is constructed but bio sex is not.
b. Knowledge about gender is constructed and gender is wholly constructed.
c. The way we have to challenge issues around bio sex is different to how we challenge things that are solely about gender.

I also think this is complicated by the difference between the radical feminist use of gender and the WHO use of gender. The WHO use of gender could include things about how females teach each other useful knowledge of breastfeeding. That is gendered behaviour, but it isn't oppressive behaviour neccesarily. Under the radical feminist definition of gender as a oppressive system, that behaviour presumably isn't considered gendered. So what is it? Maybe it is like the difference between racism and ethnicity. I don't know.

But it suggests that the ways in which having babies produces disadvantage and oppression are socially rather than biologically produced.

Perhaps. I agree that it can be read like that. And I think that is something most of us can agree with - it is one of the basic tenets of feminism.

I don't mean that though when I take issue with Butler saying that sex is a social construct. I agree with her that sex as a category is a social construct. But when I read something like the following, I understand that she is saying that sex as in male or female is a social construct and therefore something one can reject or choose.

www.transadvocate.com/gender-performance-the-transadvocate-interviews-judith-butler_n_13652.htm

CW: Do you think “sex” is a social construct?

JB: I think that there are a variety of ways of understanding what a social construct is, and we have to be patient with terms like these. We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be “assigned” from both and another sense of sex can lead us to resist and reject that sex assignment. How do we understand that second sense of sex? It is not the same as the first – it is not an assignment that others give us. But maybe it is an assignment we give ourselves? If so, do we not need a world of others, linguistic practices, social institutions, and political imaginaries in order to move forward to claim precisely those categories we require, and to reject those that work against us?

Buffy I agree that we need to be mindful of the lives and experiences of others. I call that empathy and sisterhood. I see it a lot in Dworkin's writing and MacKinnon's work. I don't think that is what intersectionality actual translates to be in the real world though.

I remember Gail Dines talking about this and applying Marxist analysis - the oppressors are a class with a class identity and their class identity and privilege depends on the existence of subjugated class. The subjugated class, however, are only allowed to think of themselves as individuals.

This just brings us straight back to why we needed the concept of the personal is the political. The point of which is for women to identify their issues as class issues not personal/individual issues.

What DonkeySkin said.

I don't think intersectionality is an entirely useless concept but I only ever see it used to tell women that they are not a meaningful collective. Really it is used to tell white women that they are racist and women of colour that they are other. It's a lefty liberal way of telling women to STFU already - no woman can speak or analyse for "women" because she would be being imperialistic/speaking in another's place/making assumptions/acting privileged. There's nowhere to go with intersectionality, it's a total derailer/subject closer.

Of course women the world over are individuals and are differently disadvantaged. But, as DonkeySkin said, we are recognised as women/other for the purposes of oppression and exploitation. To then say that we cannot be recognised as the same for the purpose of naming and fighting that oppression and exploitation is outrageous.

She writes in the chapter I read of how the single and unified categories of 'woman' and 'patriarchy' have limits when you try to add in the complexities brought by ethnicity and culture, socio-economic class and how things have evolved over time.

It's clearly the case that women's experiences differ vastly depending on where they are positioned on other social hierarchies such as race and class, and obviously they differ across time and culture.

But the question is whether these differences erase the basis for any commonality between women/females. IMO, there remain many commonalities to the female condition which are worthy of structural analysis and could form the basis of a collective political movement. The first and most obvious is that all women and girls are subject to male domination. And that domination takes and has taken specific, similar forms across cultures and throughout history: control of, and hatred of, female biology; the construction of ideologies that justify our inferiority; control via physical violence, especially rape and mutilation of the female body; exploitation of female reproductive and domestic labour.

It's also interesting that one rarely sees leftists insist that, for instance, one cannot really talk about 'racism' as such because the experiences of racially oppressed people differ significantly depending on whether they are male or female. Or that one cannot talk coherently about capitalist exploitation because women are often economically exploited in different ways to men. It's only when feminists want to talk about the very real power that men wield over women that 'woman' suddenly becomes an incoherent and fragmented category, and it's hopelessly misguided and unsubtle to speak of the existence of a hierarchy or to try to draw any general conclusions from patterns of dominance and subordination.

This also reminds me of Marx's observation that while the capitalist class is invested in ensuring workers never develop class consciousness, they themselves are highly class conscious. They act as a unified group to defend their own interests; while pretending those they exploit have nothing in common with one another, and that all collective action is anathema to a free society.

In the same way, while feminists can debate all they like about whether 'woman' is a meaningful political and social category, men are in no doubt about who 'women' are, and will continue to act on that basis. They clearly identify a social category of people who are 'women': when they disseminate religious, scientific and pornographic ideologies which declare the inherent inferiority of such people; when they refuse to promote them, pay them fairly, or credit their ideas; when they rape women and girls; when they sell them as brides and sex slaves; when they abrogate their rights; when they target their bodies for mutilation and denigration; when they invent words like bitch, whore, slag and cunt. Men the world over have no trouble at all making concrete distinctions about who is male and who is female, and of ordering the material, social and ideological structures of society accordingly, in the overwhelming interests of the former. They do this by acting collectively - and often across race, class and cultural lines - as people who understand themselves to be men. Men who bitterly oppose one another on everything else more often than not agree on what women are and, crucially, what women are for.

It is also interesting indeed that, as Beach noted, when brilliant feminist thinkers started to formulate an analysis of how this collective male power works and has worked across time and space, suddenly, along comes a theorist who declares that the class of people who have been subject to this oppression don't actually exist as a meaningful social - or biological! - category. How convenient for patriarchy.

I'm still thinking about all this and have just got in touch with a woman I know who is both a brilliant scholar and a feminist and who really works with Butler's ideas in her own scholarship. I'm hoping she'll be able to give me some useful things to put into here.

I have to say that I actually read Butler's description of how women come into existence discursively without thinking that that denied the existence of women as a class. I read that as meaning that women as a product of discourse authors and directs the experience of people identified as women by discourse. I don't think that means that women don't exist as a social, lived or discursive category. And I understand this as adding urgency to political intervention into the social and political oppressions of women because it removes a rational basis for those oppressions. It's even more outrageous because woman the discursive category is a production of the discursive field and her oppressions are deployed in order to produce her/oppression. That doesn't in any way deny that women have babies but men cannot. But it suggests that the ways in which having babies produces disadvantage and oppression are socially rather than biologically produced. None of this is particularly new or specific to Butler? Butler's criticism of feminism is that it comes to participate in the production of the discursive category of women. Which isn't to say that a feminism isn't necessary but that it inevitably comes to be part of the discursive construction of women

Anyway I'll try and get my more brilliant colleague to speak to us about her perspective because I totally trust both her scholarship and her politics. And I may just be giving you all a very twisted by idealism reading. And I do recognise the counter arguments here. I'm very much welcoming the discussion and I want it to go on but might be a bit slow (and realise I've dodged some direct questions, sorry, let me think a bit and be careful when I come back to this).