Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

If all women stopped carrying out the performative act of breast feeding, most of the world's children would die. If women stopped performative acts with ear lobes they wouldn't.

If we deny people food they die. If we deny them guitars they don't.

What might be worth keeping from a moral perspective, sorry?

I agree that some aspects of the way we think about biological.sex may be useful. I think Butler really is only concerned with the violence it does against the subject

Okay, well, like I said, the spectrum was a way I suggested you might think of bodies in the absence of a binary because there was a question or point made that biological sex just is a binary. The point I made - not very clearly, obviously, - is that one need not see biology in these terms

No, there isn't any such thing, I agree. But it may be a part of the gender system that is worth keeping, with some modifications, from a moral perspective.

I don't think I understand your rice and guitars thing. Breasts are just an example and the whole world does not expect a particular practice of attendance to breasts because they are not sexually significant in all.cultures. Butler does say that not doing one's gender correctly is extremely dangerous

No, the spectrum is as socially constructed as the binary. Nothing exists prior to social construction.

So there is no absolute binary stable grounding system for the social construction of binary gender

Does that not rather place a rather unfair burden on most of the world's women, as what they do with their breasts is a matter of life and death, and yet their attendence to their breasts is not distinguished from performative acts carried out using ear lobes?

It seems rather like dealing with the issue of famine but not making a distinction between rice and guitars.

In the terms that we understand definitions of what is a women and definitions of what is a man- e.g. reproductive capacities or genitals - there is a spectrum though? 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 hav long, penislike clitoruses. There are significant overlaps.between thing like stamina, strength, and brain organisation. There is no stable defining identifier in social terms, which would describe us as male.or female.

Or, if we didn't think of breasts as sexually significant, and attend to them in concordant ways, they would still be there (or not on some women) but they would not be appropriated to an aesthetic regime. We would treat them as we treat ring fingers now - the fact that most women have shorter ring than index fingers and most men have longer ring than index finger has not produced an aesthetic or fetish of finger length and manliness/ femininity. It's just a slightly interesting, though not definitive correlation.

But there isn't a spectrum that exists either. So how does it suggest that no binary exists.

It would be like trying to show that unicorns don't exist because fire breathing dragons do.

Butler does not say that having breasts is performative. How one attends to having breasts is how one comes to perform and therefore perceive oneself as female, although in the performance the subject typically misattributes that identity as coming from the breasts. When instead it comes from how one interprets and attends to the breasts.

That's my bad wording, she's saying precisely as you say it, that bio sex is being perceived through the social construction of gender and suggesting that no absolute binary exists that produces it. The spectrum idea is a way to grasp what that entails rather than suggesting that a spectrum precedes the binary.

Outsself, I never disputed any of that or argued against it.

None of that changes that simply having breasts is not an act, and yet they are meaningful to many people in their sense of what gender they are.

Butler argues that our performance of gender creates our gender in ourselves, not simply other people's readings of an inaction.

Outsself, if Butler is saying that there is a spectrum of biological sex that exists before a binary she is contradicting herself.

Surely what she is saying (and this I do agree with) is that it is impossible for humans to comprehend anything except through social meanings, biological sex is only seen through gender. Biological sex cannot be seen except through the socially constructed lense of gender. So bio sex only comes into existence after the construction of a gender binary.

How then, can a spectrum of biological sex come before the binary?

Yes but not all cultures have designated breasts meaningful in this way. Other cultures, to name some obvious examples, have instead focused on small feet or long necks. It is not through having breasts that one performs one's gender, but the attendant practices through which one interacts with the body as a result of a specific aesthetic of gender. In our culture women habitually wear clothes that support and shape the breasts in a particular.way, women attend to their breasts in accordance with this aesthetic. Covering and/or supporting breast through clothing is not common across all cultures in all times so just the act of putting on a bra is a performance.of.gender, it is not necessitated by the fact we have breasts. And whether or not we participate in a particular practice.of this kind, our bodies are attended to by others with the assumption that we do. In this sense we are not able.to prevent our bodies being read and interpreted through these frameworks, we are not able to opt out of the aesthetic regime for ourselves (though we may choose to reject it as a means of.interacting with others).

Sorry.

While I agree that did not mean that performative acts are a choice, there is a huge difference between society placing restrictions on people based on their performative actions (as both these things can be changed by social changes) and placing restrictions on people based on socially ascribing meaning to an inaction. The first of these can be changed by society, the second can only be changed by increasing the number of performative acts to include making all pubescent females surgically remove their breasts.

And while it is not Butler's fault, those that have interpreted Butler to mean that breaking gender norms is more subversive than retaining them, there is now the view that those who remove breasts they just happen to have are the ones carrying out a progressive political act through their gender performance (or who did not grow them and have implants), while those who do not have them removed are oppressors because they are inactive and do nothing to remove their socially meaningful breasts.

And I think it is that last perspective that radical feminists take issue with. The radical feminist perspective doesn't need people to make a distinction between bio sex and socially constructed gender. It could just point out that having breasts and being pregnant are not actions. They are the lack of acting by cutting off breasts, having an abortion or inducing a birth. And as such, they cannot be a performative act because they are not an act.

Ezinma, I agree that having breasts is highly meaningful to how we view biological sex. I am not disputing it. My point is that having breasts, if they grew on you, is not an act. You did not carry out any action for that to happen, so it is not any kind of act. If it is not an act it cannot be a performative act.

If a person's gender is created through their performative acts, then it cannot be the case that having breasts is meaningful to gender, but we just agreed they were socially meaningful in terms of gender.

So gender cannot be entirely performative. Whether any of your argument after that is valid or not in terms of the enforcement of heterosexuality doesn't change the basic failure of the idea that the meaningfulness of gender rests on performative acts.

And while I agree that Butler did not mean that performative acts are a choice, there is a huge difference between

If a person's gender is

This order of relations is not a natural or inevitable consequence of having penises/ vaginas

Right. But is it random - I mean, did it turn out this way by fluke, or did it evolve to serve a specific purpose? If it was directed, then what does the way patriarchy looks tell us about the interests of the people that patriarchy serves?

Sorry, typos, I'm ont bus with my fucking phone

Well, I see what you're saying and to an extent I agree. I think if you come from the point of view of feminism, Butler's project is not so very radical and also has been massively and problematically (mis)appropriated.

But if you come from the point of view of philosophy it's actually an massively important intervention into an ongoing discourse which can no longer resist the problem of gender. She took the language and structures of post structuralist thought and insisted that gender is a massive and ethical problem at the heart of cultural processes already established in continental philosophy. In this way, gender can no longer be regarded as a marginal problem for philosophy but is actually anfundental structuring structure of social systems across the globe and that this represents an ideological project. While feminists engage the problem of living as a women inside a given system, and O would agree that this project is more urgent and more pressing and more relevant to women living in their lifextent, thends, to male an intervention like that into philosophy is extraordinary and radical and necessary. It's not so much that what she is saying is the radical thing but that she places it into a discourse which has otherwise remained untroubled by feminism, choosing to regard women's inequity as a problem arising out of imperfect Sicilia lb systems rather than a foundational structure of them. JB has insisted on that and been recognised inside of that discourse as irrefutable in the terms established by key thinkers of that discourse, - Foucault and so on.

To an extent then, if you are looking to her for feminist insight or action plans, you're looking in the wrong place. 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

Mary Daly described and analysed what Butler calls 'performativity' years before Butler wrote Gender Trouble. Daly wrote about it in Gyn/Ecology. And she wrote about it in a much better and clearer way than Butler. And it takes her about three sentences to do it.

I don't get on with Butler for a variety of reasons but the main one is that I don't find many of her ideas very original. She takes the work of others and deradicalizes it. She depoliticizes political ideas. The way I always think of Butler is as a masculine philosopher who takes the 'Woman' and the 'Movement' out of The Women's Movement. Quite an achievement - and not in a good way.

I like that idea of pissing rather than sexing boys or girls. I really like how it points to the way we fetishize the sexual function

I do wonder where this takes women

Well, this is, after all, an account of patriarchy. This order of relations is not a natural or inevitable consequence of having penises/ vaginas. In patriarchy, women are accessories to the masculine project. If the masculine project does not exist neither does the need to realise masculinity in these particular ways.

second wave feminism describes the binary … on a basis of men as a positive identity and everyone else, the not-men are defined in relation to this under the term women

To me, that still begs the question: how did 'man' as an identity emerge? Why use penises as a group identifier rather than earlobes or baldness? I agree (with Butler?) that it's a dead-end to go looking for 'sources' of sexual signification. Still, I can't imagine that the notion of 'the male' originated in anything but the human body.

The further back we go in time, the likelier it seems that powerful "discourses" emerged more from material things than from language. A penis that swelled and became erect, and could emit different liquids, would surely have been attributed with some kind of significance, and inspired some discourses, even outside of the heterosexual matrix. To concentrate on the link between sexuality and genitals is, I think, to understate the role that toilet training plays in a child's discovery of their own body and its sensations. Rather than talk about children's bodies being 'sexed' as either girls or boys, perhaps it would be more logical if we said that they are 'pissed'.