Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

Buffy, I haven't read Sylvia Walby so I'm going on what you say of her.

The argument that "women" do not exist is as old as the hills and IMO it is an anti woman argument.

By which I mean there have been many attempts to resist the idea of women as a class/group/caste. Radical Feminists, who do define women as a class/group/caste, do not do so for nefarious or masculine purposes of denying women their individuality, personal identity or sense of self. We do so because we observe that women, and girls, the world over, are considered and treated as lesser citizens than men. The ways and mechanisms via which girls and women are considered and treated as lesser, vary over time and over different cultural structures. But the general theme, of men as higher status and more in control of power than women, does not vary.

And also, Butler criticizes MacKinnon (obscurely of course, with no actual direct reference to her or her books; you need to have read MacKinnon to pick up on it) but she doesn't offer an alternative strategy to that of MacKinnon's - other than subversive parody of sex roles by exaggerating them or queering them.

Right.

So MacKinnon is aiming towards global/international analysis of women's position within global society and looking for state level and international level legal changes that need to be made in order to begin to right the wrongs of that global wide low status and badly treated position. MacKinnon picks the Overton Window clean up and shifts it to a place that no-one has even imagined before and she does it within the framework of demanding that women's rights as full citizens are enshrined in law now that she has done the work of shifting that window (and done it so well and with such brilliant legal clarity and precision that she is very very difficult to argue with or find fault with).

And Butler thinks all that is a misguided waste of time/imperialistic/essentialist/only serves to reinforce the patriarchal idea that women are women and proposes that we parody gender and have a jolly time poking fun at it in a world weary but self explorational fashion instead.

Writing that has just given be a lightbulb actually, I've just realized that Butler is a fun feminist.

OutsSelf - in what way do you think Foucault is useful to feminism?

I'm genuinely interested in this, and I have asked a couple of times on MN what he brings to helping women gain full citizenship and liberation from male violence and I have never had any concrete answers. What tools did he provide women with? As I say genuine question.

I agree that women are held to higher standards than men but I don't think that is why radical feminists don't agree with Butler on so many things. I think we just don't agree with her - just as she doesn't agree with us.

Butler's writing on gender is a response to second wave feminism, in particular a (critical) response to MacKinnon. And really in order to read Butler in context you need to have read Towards a Feminist Theory of The State.

I think people concentrate too much on 'peformativity' when they discuss Butler - I know it is put forward as being her totally genius idea but as I said upthread it wasn't her idea. It was an idea that many many feminists had written about before her - they just wrote about it in clear unobscure language that could be easily understood and they didn't need to reference lots of obscure men in order to do so. Peformativity is just a fancy and depoliticized word for sex roles.

So if you put Butler in her context of responding to radical feminism then you need to look at what she was responding to. And what she was responding to was brilliant, consciousness raising, lightbulb lighting, revolutionary clarity and righteous anger on the part of theorists such as MacKinnon, Dworkin, Daly, etc. And what Butler did in her response was to take what these women had brought out of the darkness and obscurity, of a normalization achieved via social conditioning, and - put it back into obscurity. MacKinnon et al shone a brilliant light on social and civil injustice and they took that injustice apart piece by piece in order to show it for what it was and to help women understand what was and is being done to them and how it is done and where there are mechanisms for change. So there it is all laid on the table for women to drink in and think about and get angry about and do something about.

And then along comes Butler who takes some of that analysis and adds her own thinking to it. Which is fine in the sense that ideas should develop and be added to and built on. Except what Butler brought to this radical brilliance and clarity is endless questioning and obfuscation and academic overanlaysing of ideas that are very simple and very concrete in real life.

So we have MacKinnon who develops a feminist theory towards the state - something that feminism and women, the world over, didn't have before MacKinnon dedicated herself to doing it. And what Butler does is criticize that and be all cynical and sneery about it and then she writes a book which picks apart concrete terms and ideas that are required for a class analysis such as MacKinnon's. And of course that book and its writer, Butler, are hugely popular with the academy, patriarchy and all those who contribute to or cheer on the backlash. That book and the ideas in it become very fashionable and what is also great about it is that it is a book that is really hard to read and understand and therefore a lot of people don't feel comfortable criticizing it because when they do they are told they don't understand it or they need to go and read a whole bunch of impenetrable books by white men in order to understand why this book is so important to feminism. But the ideas in the book are out there and they are used against women - particularly the idea that women don't exist, that there is no point challenging patriarchy (in the way that say MacKinnon does) other than by parodying sex roles and that biological sex is a social construction along the same lines as gender. Thanks Butler. Not.

I've read that article and I have to say I don't think it deals.with performativity at all. I also think it attributes a level of complexity to Goffman that I don't recognise. In the way that Goffman theorises about back stage etc. he does attribute a level of agency and calculation that is not in performance of gender as Butler sees it. The paper acknowledges that Butler doesn't see herself as inheriting Goffman but doesn't acknowledge that instead she does name Foucualt and iirc Bordieu and Merleau-Ponty. She really does place herself in Continental philosophy of the 80s in which context the insistence on Goffman is odd. And again not leveled at other thinkers in this discipline

There is a paper here:

www.academia.edu/303106/Performativity_or_Performance_Clarifications_In_the_Sociology_of_Gender

As far as I understand it, performance and performativity are not two different aspects of social construction, but two different incompatible theories. The first is a sociological theory about gender that started in the fifties. The second is Butler's theory.

The difference seems mostly to be that performance is created by an agent, while Butler's permorativity claims that the performance creates the self. But I think she uses performance and performativity as meaning the same thing in her work.

Also, ITA about women being held to a higher standard.

Outself I'm really interested in your perspective because I agree with what you say elsewhere. I think I don't understand where Butler draws the line between the "facts" (e.g. sex class, impairment) and social construction (e.g. gender, disability). I think my beef with her is around that area.

No, I don't think she does because they aren't really her terms. I have children to manage right now but later will dig out my undergrad notes because I'm sure one of the readers I have does a neat precis of Butler's position. Which I feel I am spectacularly mangling here

Does Butler give a definition of the difference between the two?

Can.I.just say that the performance.of.gender is one.concept and.performativity is.another? They are similar sounding but name.different aspects of.social.construction.

Gender aesthetic and aesthetic regime is a postButler description of Butler, it's just that it's easier to think of if you think using Ranciere, of what and where performativity happens. This is a non helpful thing I've done here, sorry

Pain disables a particular kind of life, agreed. But it enables another kind of life life and that subject position is whole and complete. It is only disabling when you think your life is not complete without realising the things the pain prevents you from. Which isn't to say, hurray, you can't kiss your children, isn't it marvellous how fantastically complete your subjectivity is? It is to say, your subjectivity is bound to this desire that and it absolutely contributes to our understanding of values and ethics, of the political and the organic. It is not a deviation from the project of understanding the construction of the subject but a key part of it. And if you want your pain to end so do I, I don't welcome the pain but I do welcome your subject position.

There is a video near the beginning of the thread where Butler talks about disability with a disability rights campaigner. They define disability there. An impairment is what you have, the disability is what society gives you.

Outsself, I think part of our discussion falls down because I'm trying to work out what Butler means (for similar reasons to LRD) by what is and is not action, an inaction, a performative action, subversion and gender.

I'm interested in knowing that in relation to the differing perspectives on gender given by - people who follow the WHO definition, the radical feminist definition, the Marxist feminist one, or the as yet unnamed gender definition of the mass of people who say things like problematic/check your privilege/die in a fire/cis/gender identity on the Internet.

Because those are the sets of ideas I come into contact with regularly in a research setting or on here. Judith Butler, as far as I can tell, doesn't define performativity as part of a gender aesthetic or an aesthetic regime. She doesn't seem to use those phrases at all. I have never heard those phrases before, and trying to come to terms with Butler is difficult enough without trying to combine her with learning about Ranciere. If a whole load of people start talking about Ranciere and roaming around discussions talking about aesthetic regimes, I will be obliged to learn about him. But at the moment, I am struggling enough with understanding Butler without making it even more complicated.

Don't get me started on Freud. Many performance and acting practitioners can happily discuss th intervening history of thought that over and over again positions him as part of the right wing neolib project but then walk into a studio and basically get everyone working as if Freud were the most contemporary understanding we have of people and their actions

Yes, but your pain is disabling if you think that your subjectivity is prevented from being realised because of your pain. Whereas you could say that the subject.position that the pain produces, even in the way it produces a.desire.to be free.of.pain, is a complete subject position which is only possible in the presence.of that pain, rather than otherwise one thing but then ruined by the pain.

I agree that she is not woman centric and not feminist. But neither is Foucault and his work is useful to the project of feminism and he is not rejected in the same way as Butler is despite this lack. It honestly looks to me like she's being held to a standard that is not applied to other thinkers in her discipline.

I just think she got drag etc wrong, I'm not certain but think she has agreed to this. I think she was using it to point to the way that bio sex is considered stable where gender sex is not, but that she thinks that clear and simple division is not straightforward. As PP have said this means she has a discussion of drag which does not consider the violence that drag acts have done against women's subject position and from a feminist point of view that is objectionable. However it doesn't mean that the way that drag articulates the layering and relationship between bio sex and gender in thought is not a useful model of.thinking for feminists. I also think she fails to make a distinction between the ongoing violence that women are subject to in order to produce their subjectivity and the violence that men experience when they step outside of it. But as her core argument is that gender regulation is a form of violence against the subject, and her central questions would be to consider the ways that subject is regulated and confined, I think she sets the ground for rather, and invites an urgent consideration of the many violence that women are subject to in order to produce the category women. Which Foucualt etc. totally failed to do.