Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

Right, well, my understanding of disability discourses is that bodies aren't disabled except in a social world that refuses to accommodate them, and describes that process as arising from the fact of the disabled body rather than as arising from the fact that there is a dominant norm which labels bodies outside of it disabled and refuses to accommodate them. I think that is entirely political.

I actually think I'm not helping here at all, and that I need to say again that I read Butler as a newly awakened undergrad and that I accepted her position as basically on the side of the righteous so worked through how that means her position and mine relate. Which is a tendency of mine anyway.

I'm feeling very doubtful right now! Because everyone here is someone that I really respect, and with whom I've agreed about almost everything but who are all saying there is a massive problem with something that I have actually accepted, which is that Butler is fundamentally and ethically concerned with the oppression of women (though she might say that she objects to the oppression of people on the basis of their womanhood). Might go and dig out some old notes etc. I especially think I am not being helpful in discussing the example objections because with each aspect of the discussion we seem to get further away from actually discussing Butler

OutsSelf I don't agree that's a form of violence, any more than any recognition of disability would be a form of violence. The disability may be irrelevant and may also be aggravated by society being arranged for the norm. However I think that is too apolitical and focusses too much on the individual. I agree with Beach that Butler takes out the politics. I can only see feminism on a class level for it to have any meaning and I can't see the class analysis in Butler's writing.

I also think that it is hard to discuss Butler without injecting concrete examples of what she actually means and how her thoughts actually translate into reality.

IMO, when you pin Butler down to something concrete that is where it becomes obvious that her brand of philosophy is not female centric and isn't actually feminism. It isn't feminism because it isn't political and because it ignores gender as an act of male violence by men as a group/class/caste against women as a group/class/caste.

For example the practice of drag - which Butler sees as an act of subversion and a challenge to what she calls the "rigid regulatory frame". She talks about this as though the "rigid regulatory frame" has an equal value to masculinity and femininity (terms I'm using as they are understood in second wave feminism). And so she takes the political power struggle and male dominance/privilege/violence out of the picture whilst disappearing the female subjugation/females as the recipients of male violence that is compulsory for that male privilege to exist.

Same goes for what Butler says about transgenderism.

She sucks the politics out of the concept of gender. And I think that is anti feminist. I think it is dangerous to feminism and therefore women. I think it is hindering the feminist cause not furthering it.

Agreed Flora. But I do think leaving sex as if it were an originary and discursive fact is a form of violence against those whom we are then forced to describe as disordered. From a subject position, the subject can always be complete and functioning within the bounds of its own project. The so called disabled body actually enables.a complete subject position which is only deviant insofar as we are committed to a norm?

It's not that we think female experience is central. It's that we object to the ways it has been marginalised and the ways this marginalisation results in a fake representation of history (and one that is very useful for perpetuating women's oppression

I'd like to borrow that as a way of expressing how Butler intervenes into the ontology of the subject. I read Butler and thought, well there it is you bastards (of continental philosophy) You can't read this and continue your discussion of the construction of the subject as if that discussion were not an issue of gender, and as if your genderless description isn't a form of oppression of women. It felt like a demand to engage with gender as a primary enquiry of philosophy or participate in the oppression of women by silence.

A small but significant amount of the population are intersex, for example. Not all women can have children. Some men have penises which are tiny and some women have long, penislike clitoruses.

This is massive overstatement of the significance of intersex and the "spectrum" of biological sex. No women have a "penislike" clitoris. It may be elongated but it does not have a urethra and is not attached to gonads. A man with a small penis is still a man, his small penis is not attached to a uterus. Sexual dimporphism is not a spectrum. There are females and males with a tiny number of people who have some developmental disorder. It's like saying because there are some people born with one leg or no legs that human beings are on a spectrum of bipedal to non-pedal. This is not correct. The human race can be classified as a bipedal and sexually dimorphic species. The existence of anomalies does not change that fact.

I have a problem with any theorising that denies this because I think it starts from a flawed basis. I think this is what Butler means by the "prediscursive domain" but my reading of her is that she thinks this is objectionable and should not be prediscursive (?) whereas I think it belongs in the prediscursive domain because it is a foundational set of facts on which societal values, gender, performativity etc are built and it should be recognised but not denied.

Ugh, I just typed.a.massive reply which I lost.

I'm not going to type.it all out again right now. The headlines were I meant village as in it takes a village to raise a child, not because I'm certainly assuming that some painted people in Africa are all breastfeeding happily in the absence of a gender regime. I'm really stung by that accusation actually, and the assertion that I've.just made up some new intellectual colonial picture of my very own because I'm not even talking about Butler anyway.

We got into that discussion of breastfeeding because you seemed to think almond that breastfeeding = something women do = the gender performative. I see a problem with each part of that equation and in any case it's not really how the regime of the performative works. Women in this country often are troubled by the performative of breasts to the extent that they don't feel able to continue with it and our culture colludes with this. So the performative realm isn't straightforwardly following a women do x, therefore x performs womanhood. Further it's not just that gender binaries trouble what would be a straightforward act of bio sex because bio female doesn't mean you can bf, being a birthing mother doesn't even mean you can.

I think I need to go away and rethink how I'm talking here. I am actually quite upset by the assertion I'm in the business of othering people who don't practice breastfeeding in the way that we do in this country and can't think of how to point to the fact that the performative is somewhat more complex than I do x and become y, it's more like, I believe z so when I come to do x I simultaneously form a relationship with y as a concept. I was trying to use breastfeeding as an example of that but only by pointing to the way it is ordered and practiced through our understanding of it, and doesn't arperfoperform either bio sex or gender in a straightforward way. The examples were from LLL discussions on bf as a cultural practice.and also a publication called the Womanly Art of BF I think published by WHO or.at least through WHO researchers. And also of course the many hours I spent online reading about bf given that I was finding it really hard due in no small part to th politics of it.

Basically, I just don't recognise your reading of what I have said and again, I think we think of performativity quite differently. I'm thinking that Ranciere is describing the field or structure of the performative, when he describes the aesthetic, and he's describing the way that performativity operates when he talks about the distribution of the sensible, if that is any help.

But if you instead imagine her to be doing for philosophy what feminist historians are doing for history - I.e. insisting that female experience is central to the project of philosophy then her work is important and radical and furthering the feminist cause.

OutsSelf. I'm very sceptical that this is what Butler or her work does though. Firstly I don't think she does insist that the female experience is central to philosophy. Or rather I don't see how she can because I don't think the female experience is central to her thinking, writing or philosophy. I think her perception of gender is central to much of her work and she may well insist that gender is central to "the project of philosophy" but I don't see how this furthers the feminist cause as (as I said before) Butler depoliticizes radical feminist ideas and the feminist cause is a revolutionary one. It is a struggle for liberation.

Butler may well be radical in philosophical circles but in radical feminist circles AFAIA she is considered to be establishment. And her ideas on gender queering and transgenderism are considered deeply conservative and anti woman.

I suspect that discussions about Butler and interpretations of her elitist and clear as mud writing would be a lot more straightforward if we used "sex role" in the place of "gender". And if we talked about gender as being a hierarchy rather than a spectrum. Gender as analysed by radical feminists is a power structure, a hierarchy, a system of control, a tool of oppression. It is a caste system that only contains two castes. The notion of gender parody as somehow subversive feels deeply degrading to a lot of radical feminists.

There is an issue in general, not particular to either you or Butler (and I actually think you are arguing in opposition to her), where people from one discipline borrow ideas from another and rename them. This has to be done to get new ideas into a field, but in the process of doing so you can end up simply repeating the earlier mistakes that the previous discipline pointed out.

What you appear to be doing is attempting to argue without using binaries. In the process of doing so, you are actually recreating the binaries that exist in other fields, but because you are not mentioning them or renaming them, all the stereotypes and assumptions are still there but without any critical awareness of them. The biggest issues are the binaries you are using between our culture and the people you have othered, and between biological sex and socially constructed gender.

Part of Butler's argument is that gender produces biological sex. There isn't, as far as I can see, any argument against this. Unless somebody is claiming a superhuman power to view phenomena through anything other than the lense of socialisation, what they perceive biological sex to be is a product of socialisation, which is gendered. One of the main examples she gives of a highly gendered performative act is breast feeding.

She also argues that it is impossible to resist the dominant ideology of gender by acting outside of performative gender. Any act that attempts to resist or subvert gender is itself performative and must simultaneously imitate and resist the dominant gender ideals. She also argues that every performative act creates our sense of (gendered) self, often through repetition. I disagree with all of this, but as what you have written entirely contradicts Butler's view on this anyway, it seems a bit irrelevant to rehash why I disagree with her.

Your argument seems to include the following:

1. Western cultural imperialism. You have given a lot of information (none of which I disagree with) about how breasts and breastfeeding are viewed in our society. This is what is often referred to as socially constructed cultural norms, but somewhere in the process of borrowing are now a combination of performativity and gender aesthetics. You then refer interchangeably to various 'other cultures' and how they breastfeed, which have no names and no explanation of what they believe about their cultural norms around breast feeding, or any differentiation between how they sometimes do the same thing as each other (shared breastfeeding for example) and attribute entirely different gendered meanings to the same act. This then allows you to claim that these things, when done by these others, are non performative and don't have a gendered aesthetic. Which of course they don't, in your Western perspective, because you have given no contextual cultural information about what they think.

1. Noble savage myth. You rename things (periods, breast feeding, having children) that fell into the old bio sex, nature part of the bio sex vs. gender, nature vs. culture binary as 'non performative' or not part of a 'gendered aesthetic' except when we do them. You recreate the idea that there is some group of people sitting about in a tribe or village somewhere behaving in a natural way without all of these loaded meanings. They are now stripped of their own, different cultural meanings. Thus you create the idea that there are cultured people (us) having meaningful gendered relationships and natural people who essentially just do breastfeeding with no gendered meaning, as if they were animals. But by naming this as a 'gendered aesthetic' based on push up bras or whatever, derived from our own culture, you can claim to define everyone else as lacking this cultural behaviour.

1. Cultural appropriation. Having set up the idea that such people exist somewhere, operating outside of this gendered aesthetic of breast feeding (which you just give as a list of Western cultural norms) you then imagine a world we could live in if we adopted this gendered aesthetic free life ourselves, having already stripped it of the complex gendered meanings it had for them.

And this whole mess of racism is exactly the kind of thing post structuralism was supposed to address. Of course every other culture in the world holds sets of beliefs about biological sex which they view through the lense of socially constructed gender, I believe (according to Buffy), these are called competing truth claims by post structuralism. While I disagree with Butler, she isn't claiming what you are claiming. You have essentially just used a whole load of 19th century colonialism and renamed it, but every time you start to define those things by categorising, it is obvious there is nothing post structuralist about it.

And this is what feminists say about the way post modernist thought is filtered down into the popular imagination. It is the same old arguments and stereotypes about women's bodies, while claiming our mentioning that sexism is about us having particular bodies is oppressive.

WRT the thing about feminists saying the same sort of stuff, well I agree. Butler's relevance is not that she has a whole new world for.feminists to create or imagine, etc, feminists already do that in better and more practical terms than anything Butler does. Her importance is that she asserts the gender problem as central.to any ontology of the subject, and she does it using the arguments and terms of phenomenology and post structuralism in such a way that that discourse must either accept the problem of gender or disavow continental philosophy from the 1970s onwards. Which is a neat manoeuvre.

I don't think you and I have the same understanding of performativity. Performativity to me is not just about an action associated with a certain gender but also about its relationship to gender aesthetics. Breastfeeding, I would say in our culture is not part of the performative of gender, in fact you could argue that it more likely performs a resistance to gender aesthetics. Clearly women in our culture do not all stop breastfeeding because of the ambivalence of that action in relation to gender aesthetics, but there is certainly a lot of discomfort about how breastfeeding relates to the cultural fetishisation of breasts, many women feel very uncomfortable about people seeing their breasts and many people express discomfort at witnessing an infant breastfeeding. Any discussion of full term breastfeeding throws up some shuddering and weasly comment about a child being traumatised by a memory of sucking their mother's breasts. So breastfeeding, in our culture where gender identities do hinge on breasts, nevertheless does not register performatively as being associated with sex and gender; performativity is not straightforwardly a question of lots of women do this ergo it is a performance of sex.or.gender.

With the exception of standing up to pee (which is a gendered rule - half of my household is male and nobody stands up to pee) - having babies, breast feeding and periods are what everybody else refers to as part of biological sex. Saying 'such activities as' and then listening what everyone else considers to be part of biological sex is a way of reinforcing a binary biological sex but simply not using the words 'biological sex,' then putting those activities into the category of 'not per formative.'

That is reducing Butler's use of per formative to a binary between the materially real and the socially constructed, but replacing constructed with performative.

The rest of the argument about the consequences and possible futures is shared by most feminists, including all those who disagree with Butler. Mentioning them doesn't make Butler more convincing. You are arguing as if her ideas are a premise required for not discriminating against people on the basis of them breastfeeding and giving birth (aka biological sex to most people), which is not the case.

But Butler has said that a binary is created (and by her argument any form of making distinctions between people of different biological sexes as a result of gender).

If in every culture (or almost every culture) in the world, women make up the vast majority of people who attempt to breastfeed and men make up a tiny minority, then the attempt is gendered and sexed.

Breast feeding is an action. Being pregnant is not. Breast feeding is a per formative act.

By Butler's argument an action carried out mostly by one gender produces their idea of gender and biological sex. It produces biological sex. If most of the people breastfeeding are those with visible breast tissue, the act is socially producing biological sex.

It is not clear if you are using sexual to refer to sexual dimorphism or sexuality, but in Butler's argument the former is culturally produced as a way of enforcing cultural ideas about the latter.

Any act which is culturally performed by one gender and not the other produces a biological sex binary which enforces a gender binary and sexuality.

All the rest about how breastfeeding and child birth not having to be used to oppress women remains the case regardless of Butler's argument about per formative acts. Lots of people who believe biological sex isn't culturally produced (WHO etc) still believe that.

And it is hard to see how if you do not make a cultural (gender) distinction between people who may get pregnant and people who do not (a binary), you can differentiate between them to meet their different physiological needs or even be able to recognise whether or not you are unintentionally setting up institutions that disadvantage the people who do those things.

And people throughout the developed world would be trying to think of ways that the community could enable and support childhood rather than leaving it in the hands of mainly the birthing mother.

I think I'm wandering off on another thread here. But also, there wouldn't be a single an quite unsuccessful model of human sexual or parenting relationships that whose basic failure did not in any way prevent millions of people feeling like they were at fault when they couldn't make it work for them

And things like having periods or giving birth would be thought of as a part of human experience, rather than unimportant deviance from the idealised subject.

And such activities as breastfeeding or say standing to pee, would not be used as the measure of gender worth and used as violence against individual subjects who for whatever reason did not conform to the general pattern that the average person of their particular set of physical attributes modelled.

I disagree about that because men are not known to try and breastfeed in cultures where breasts are not treated as sexual signifiers. I have heard that men have mammary glands and could breastfeed if routinely stimulated and even remember reading someone theorizing that they would take part in the village feeding practices that some cultures already regard as normal (where any lactating person can be part of childcare provision for even the very young) but I don't remember it being entirely clear and I don't even think you need men to breastfeed in order for gender taxonomy to stop being so violent.

The performative dimension - where something comes to mean something - is infinitely plastic. It is the performative of acts which is the site of contest, not necessarily the acts in and of themselves except where those acts are only made to have a performative outcome. In this way, if you address the aesthetic regime of gender you might expect things like clothing to change (we might wear fewer uncomfortable underwired shelf bras) and you might expect prohibitions against women doing certain kinds of activities to dissolve (so women were not socialised to take up less space and develop fewer muscles) but you wouldn't expect women to stop breastfeeding or having babies. You would expect that those activities would not be mobilised to oppress them, however.

If breastfeeding was not cross culturally associated with some constructed concept of gender and biological sex, males would be as likely to attempt to breast feed as females.

No, breastfeeding is only a performative act when we attribute breasts with the power of generating femininity. Women in cultures who do not have this grounding idea still breastfeed.

Butler isn't really suggesting we stop doing things so much as asking us to rethink what we imagine those acts mean

The binary is worth keeping, with modifications.