Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

men rape women not because of innate or pre-existing sexual appetite, but as a means of becoming men, because sex, and overpowering, coercive sex, are signifiers of manliness. They rape women to realise their identity as male in the eyes of themselves and other men. They rape women to realise and inscribe the hierarchy of social order in their own identity (thereby reifying it for others)

I do wonder where this takes women, apart from either surrender or violence.

That ear lobe/ breast thing is a brilliant explanation, Ezinma. I think that the suggestion Butler makes is that there is not a sex binary which predated the gender binary but a spectrum which is before the binary. To see how this could work I also think it's helpful to remember that second wave feminism describe the binary as operating not as dividing between men as a positive identity and women as a positive identity, but more 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. Women are not a social class because they have the positive qualities of the category women, but rather because they lack the positive qualities of the category men. Therefore a spectrum becomes two simple social classes.

WRT to that reading of Butler you found, Donkeyskin, I'd also say that Butler directly inherits de Beauvoir' s fundamental assertion that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. Butler is more or less outlining the extent to which this could be the case. In Butler's formation, men rape women not because of innate or pre-existing sexual appetite, but as a means of becoming men, because sex, and overpowering, coercive sex, are signifiers of manliness. They rape women to realise their identity as male in the eyes of themselves and other men. They rape women to realise and inscribe the hierarchy of social order in their own identity (thereby reifying it for others).

Performativity does not take away, compete with or deny the horrors of being raped but instead describes the means by which that horrible is amplified as a tool of oppression.

I was talking to a colleague today (who teaches performativity) and he said the basic thing was to think of the way that a transaction between two parties (or more) has a dimension to which it becomes meaningful to a the wider community in which it takes place in, and plays a part in forming the social order for everyone not just those involved.

Another thing that occurred to me about writing, legibility and inscription as a way of talking about social actions and transactions is that in theatre and performance there are play texts, which are indeed just written instructions and dialogues - only made of words in the narrow sense - but there is also the performance text which is made up of the totality of signifiers which make up a performance event and these can include words but are also costumes, acting, scenographies, and even the wider aspects of the location and cultural location of the performance itself. All of these are understood to be 'read' by an audience who use them to make meaning from their experience of the performance. This process of reading a performance text of an event is understood to take place in any interaction with a cultural product like art, performance, film and is part of how things become and are interpreted as specific kinds of cultural products. So reading, writing and inscription and legibility in Butler's work draw on this sense that the symbolic order of gender is not arising from an innate, originate body but through a process of interpreting, ascribing and inscribing bodies as identities inside a particular regime of meaning.

Well, I'd dispute that reading of choice because Butler is in no way that asserting agency in the distribution of social roles. I'd therefore counter that as a misreading that arises because of neolib assumptions about social role and agency, you can only read it in that way if you believe in the neolib conception of choice based identity. JB is writing out of a continental tradition which would refute that view of the subject.

Butler's attempt to cast gender as something men and women perform is inherently neoliberal. It removes the coercive context of gender for women, denies De Beauvoir's insight that femininity is created in women by psychically breaking them throughout girlhood, and and posits instead that it's something we choose to perform.

This blog provides a good breakdown of the flaws in Butler's theory of gender:

Butler has framed Gender not in terms of a cultural system into which we are conditioned, but as a thing that we do. Moreover, as a thing that we can electively do in the same way as making a bet. By treating Gender in the same way as performative verbs, the stifling norms of Gender simultaneously (and confusingly) become “a domain of freedom and agency”. This treatment elides the reality that Gender is in fact a set of cultural products we internalise through our social learning from birth. Gender socialisation shapes and constrains who we are in a very real way, whether we like it or not.

rootveg.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/i-say-it-therefore-it-is-so/

And this blog points out the obscene and cruel implications that the performative theory of gender has for women:

Take this premise – You are a woman because of your behavior or your feelings - and combine it with the far less controversial (I hope) premise Men rape women because women are women. These two interrelated concepts posit a cause for sexual violence and a criteria for womanhood. On queer theory, men rape women because women are women (the cause), and women are women because of women’s behavior or women’s feelings (the criteria). A because B, B because C. Drop the middle, and what do you have? Men rape women because of women’s behavior or women’s feelings. Uh oh.

genderdetective.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/gender-performativity-is-victim-blaming/

This is a great thread. OutsSelf, to my mind you are doing a better job of explaining Butler than Butler herself.

almondcakes, I don't know if this is going to be helpful, but I'll give it a try. Having breasts is indeed not an act; neither is having earlobes. But culturally speaking, not/having breasts is meaningful, whereas not/having earlobes is not. Why do we choose to ascribe significance to some anatomical differences — and label them as 'biological sexes' — but not to others? (And that's without getting into the question of how to 'sex' a woman post-mastectomy, etc.)

Butler traces this ascription of significance to the heterosexual matrix and compulsory heterosexuality. But she left me wondering how those discourses acquired the power that they did — the power to shape all human sexual activity and, indeed, the power to produce gender as we know it. If the heterosexual binary was able to reproduce itself as the 'biological' sex binary, it must have been very potent. At some point in time, the idea emerged that procreative sex in monogamous couples, consisting of one person with a penis and one with a vulva, was the only legitimate form of sexual activity. Butler talks about the role of christianity in this, but I don't think she explains how "compulsory heterosexuality" could have preceded "compulsory sexing according to genitals" as a concept. It seems to me that one requires the other.

That's OK. I really shouldn't have stuck my oar in. I remember struggling with Mary Daly, but had the luxury of being able to put the book away and read things that made sense to me. Best of luck with Butler.

LRD, I apologise for butting in to your thread. I do understand that you have to engage with this stuff, and how frustrating it is to have to deal with what looks like deliberate obscurantism. When someone intelligent, as you clearly are, has to struggle so hard, I don't think the problem lies with you. Surely the first duty of any academic writer is to communicate clearly? I'll go away now!

Thanks so much for your posts, OutsSelf, I actually understand them!! Though I have yet to graduate to the point of being able to express an opinion on their intellectual content.

Why can't JB express herself clearly like that, though? Then we (or rather, people on this board who are cleverer than me) would be able to discuss her ideas properly rather than having to spend ages puzzling out what she means.

I think a lot of post modern writers end up declaring they have been misunderstood.

Having googled butler made easy, I did find a download which gave quotes from her about bad readings of her work.

She was talking about how we don't know what a subversion of gender would be, and it doesn't mean trying on different genders like a commodity.

Not anyone's fault it is not great for me!

I think if I am to take Butler's ideas on board, I will say the great subervsion of gender in the UK is the massive decrease in the likelihood of pregnancy killing women.

I think that I don't actually understand what you are saying, Outsself.

It isn't a great conversation for me because I don't understand it, or understand how this answers my questions.

Maybe if I ask the opposite. Which social acts are not performative? How does Butler explain the role of bio sex which is largely not an act?

Having breasts is not an action. Being pregnant is not an action. They can have acts connected to them butthey are not of themselves acts.

Ha ha, you're kind. And tres smart.

I should ask a colleague for performativity

Agreed we are not arguing. It's actually a great discussion and one I massively welcome Just a bit fucked from my mad RL is all

I think I need a day off this thread

And regarding the performative, the audience is not really necessarily there. It's not my definition, it's how performativity is understood in my discipline (the arts). So a rape is performative even if unwitnessed and unspoken of because the people involved orientate their further behaviour around their beliefs about how the rest of society will view (i.e. form an audience to) the event. So women who do not speak of their experiences might be too ashamed and horrified by the experience, for example, but being ashamed to speak about it is about positing a social audience. Who already have a set of aesthetics about rape. Aesthetics in the sense that these are the conditions that they assume need to be in place for rape to take place. And lots of the time that aesthetic is very limited and anti-woman. Rape myths are the aesthetics of rape, in this formulation, but people like us try to contest and negotitate that aesthetic in order to have the violences against other women recognised.

Well, Butler is talking about performative acts. Performativity is not a regime of thought that was neatly defined then Butler came and fucked it up. Performativity is discussed as part of the aesthetic regime which is in turn understood (think Ranciere) as the political. Performativity is precisely the register in which one man's act of violence against one woman comes to participate in wider structures of oppression; and one woman striking one man does not act oppressively against all men because it lacks performative power. Because a woman striking a man has no corollary in the aesthetic regime of how we have constructed male-female relationships, it has no performative power. It does not perform that aesthetic. However, when a man strikes a woman it performs an aesthetic which is recognised and has a conceptual position which Ranciere describes as sensible (and clearly political).

The way to think about performance and gender is to remember that JB is writing after de Certau, Bourdieu and Foucault. In this formulation, we are consituted by our performance of social roles both to ourselves and to others. This isn't something that we do in certain situations but an ongoing accummulation of a social body which is marked or inscribed (hence the notion of legibility) by culture. Right now in this instant in the way that you sit in relation to the screen and the way you regard and hold your devices and the arrangement of your musculature (formed culturally) and even the very organic basis of the patterns of your thought are learned constructs which you reproduce. In this sense you are performing. Not in the sense that you are showing off for other people, but in the sense that you carry out all tasks from a framework of learned and socially constructed experience.

And the thing about the physical world is to remember that in phenomenology, writing is an extension of the body into the world. Writing is not separate from the body and the physical realm, in fact it is lived, physical experience which is the condition of writing. It is achieved, understood, and processed specifically through your organic body. If this is your fundamental assumption, then writing does not need to address the physical because writing arises only and specifically through the physical, it is physical. Think Heidegger and the way that the object world is not separate to human bodies but an extension of them.

I think I really believe that (a) Judith Butler demands emancipation for the oppressed (b) she believes that women are oppressed because of a false dichotomy of sex binary which is used to ground the notion of gender roles. This is not to say that the oppressions that women face like rape and reproductive oppressions aren't real. It is to say that the condition of your body does should not entail your oppression; it is that these oppressions need not necessarily follow from your biological status.

Performative statements were already precisely defined prior to Butler. Her describing gender as performative is contrary to the definition that includes marriage, hiring, finding guilty etc.

Much of bio sex is inaction, not action, so how can it be a performative act?

Okay I am not doing well at this.

Communication can just happen between two people but performativuty is talking about how that interaction plays to non involved participants. It does not imply that rape is only meaningful if it is witnessed but iinstead its oppressive power is multiplied through the performative dimension. It does not deny that rape is really used against real women to opress them.

The classic performative action is the wedding ceremony. where the ritual words and actions between two participants change the social world of those around them even if they aren't there directly to witness. People who don't witness are still an audience to this act because they now reorganise the social world around the married couple