Writers and gender theory

And as Sashkin says above, she's the opposite of a gender essentialist

OK. I get this. I've read Butler and got the scars to prove it and I have a PhD in feminist theory (too old to be useful these days) more scars to prove it, but my critique is that Butler seems to go too far the other way and lapse into choice feminism. She does not seem to have (to me) enough of an understanding of exactly how hard it is to break free from a performance that is (as earlier socialisation theorists and second ave rad fems as well as feminists such as de Beauvoir explained) drilled into us almost from the moment of birth. She also does not seem to have much of a comprehension of the debilitating nature of this or of the structural limitations of the female body (yes, I recognise that the lived experiences of these are shaped by the social) - such as the lived fear of rape, the reality of being an object of the male gaze, the reproductive reality that women suffer the consequences of birth, etc. Like so many queer theorists it is all about image, performance, desire and sex and not about some of the other lived realities of being born female.

I know the answer to my question was obvious but my brain was in knots.

Sorry, I wasn't meaning should be obvious to you, but should be obvious to your sister but she'll pretend she doesn't get it.

I think you are doing a brilliant job of thinking things through on this thread.

@Emmags0309

That sucks massively! You were brave to try though. As I said in an earlier comment, gender theory went very wrong a while ago and those proudly involved in teaching or studying it, cannot see that at all. Btw, what your sister did to you is what gender theory lecturers also do to their students. Judging from the accounts of gender theory students who decided to quit, gaslighting is a tool they use with relish.

But do you know, I can't discuss a certain subject with my in-laws whose politics have directly negatively affected me (they don't know and/or don't understand and/or refuse to believe it). DH has basically vetoed me ever bringing it up even though I really really want to.

But the reason I don't is that I'm unlikely to make them see sense and it wouldn't change much other than our feelings towards each other (and if the usual things come up from their side of the argument I could end up a lot more hurt than them). So I'm biting my tongue.

I have a strong feeling that theory is influencing law makers in a more direct way too. Am I right in thinking this?

Well, while we have career routes that involve bathing in queer and critical theory at university, then moving on to jobs in the mediating classes of politics, media, think tanks and policy research, I think that this link would be pretty obvious, even to your sister!

Emma - this one's on a slight tangent, but if you are reading around. The below is a paper called Mapping the Margins by Kimberle Crenshaw. It expands on her original concept of intersectionality by describing the services and institutions women - especially black women, but also working class women - carved out for themselves because society's laws and institutional structures did not protect them in these intersections of gender (by which she means sex), race and class.

The first thing you'll note is that Crenshaw writes with clarity. What she is saying is practical and rooted in material reality. It is not the impenetrable and pointless guff of the kind Butler writes. It actually applies to the day-to-day realities of women's lives.

The second thing you'll note is how warped this concept of intersectionality has become now it is in the hands of SJWs and transactivists. The way it is used by them on social media bears no relation to what Crenshaw is writing about.

Hope you read and enjoy it!

www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/mapping-margins.pdf

Emma This video (which someone else posted below as well) is brill. Takes the heavy lifting out of JB.
I know who I'm backing in the grudge match btw JB and coleslaw.
.
Back to watch the rest of the video.

Don't give up! I mean, give up on Butler if you hate it, but if you feel confused about the idea of gender, that's because it's confusing. Its meaning is contested and that's why there are all these debates.

But if you're looking for something to say to your sister, you could try: "I've read some Butler and I'm intrigued by her view that gender is performative, but I don't think feminism can do without the category of women." Then see if she joins your mother in the great coleslaw debate.

I like this section. This is Mumsnet.

Nevertheless, the reality of governance feminism
calls for a reinvention of strategies of engagement
that are able to expose the workings of power that
make us complicit with ways of working, thinking,
and reviewing development that are inappropriate
and harmful. The important thing is to remember
that projects of government are never complete. The
most well thought out programmes never actually
reach fruition and have unplanned unintended
consequences. Thus, governing does not have a
totalising effect and there are always insurrections
undoing the perfect governmental project. Taking this
cue, future feminist engagement has to be both about
the politics of refusal, and of knowledge production
that is subversive which ‘defies reinscription in the
mainstream’ (Mukhopadhyay 2014: 316).

I honestly think that people only believe they have a gender once they have been ‘sold’ the concept.

This is an interesting paper about what happened to "gender"
213ou636sh0ptphd141fqei1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/gender/wp-content/uploads/publications/55cc9d92cdc0e_Gender%20mainstreaming%20critiques.pdf

A quote:
For example, at a KIT conference organised to
critically review the achievements of gender training
it was emphasised that the terminology of ‘gender’
quickly became separated from its feminist roots and
emptied of its social transformatory content. Gender
knowledge in the mainstreaming processes became
disconnected from its change implications, obscuring
thereby the political nature of the change sought by
feminists. Gender work became disconnected from
any personal commitment to feminism and has been
allowed to become a ‘performance’ (KIT 2007).

Because I am a high school drop out rather than an academic I am not entitled to have an opinion on Butler, but I am entitled to laugh at her prolixity in an attempt to distract from a flawed premise.

Cross posted with bewilderness

Yes she can be pretty oblique and overly wordy too！

Judith Butler is a funny one because of the trans thing.
I loved much of Gender Trouble and found her idea of gender as performance really appealing.
Basically she describes the process of 'girling' beginning with the words 'it's a girl' and gender being to do with the actions we take and how when these are repeatedly performed they come to feel natural.
This I'm down with. What I do not understand is how this now fits with the TRAs who also seem to love her.
It's an interesting bit of confirmation bias, how two people with opposing views can feel those opinions affirmed by reading the same thing.

She talks about the parody of drag / cross dressing being a performance of a performance.

I'd recommend it I found it fascinating.

The Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest
Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Ime gender is performed on as well as through the individual and by the whole of society and all its institutions. So where does choice come into it?

The trouble with gender theory at university is that it started as a progressive discipline aimed at creating for want of a better word the basis on which one could build a more effective fight for women's rights. In the sense of needing to know how exactly does this oppression of women work and what can we do about it. I was at uni in Germany at the time (not in America, they did this years earlier) and thought this very interesting and worthy. If I hadn't been at the back end of my degree, I may well have chosen that as a minor.

However it happened, the discipline went very wrong though. I can't think of any other academic subject right now where this has happened so entirely, but women's rights and equality do not seem to be of interest anymore. Instead we have all this intersectionality/no-platforming/triggering/safe spaces nonsense and the idiocy of "we can't criticise Islam for how it treats women coz that is Western centric Islamophobia" etc etc

Some people working within the discipline are very aware of this of course. In March '17 a book was published in Germany with a collection of essays written by gender studies academics and others which in its very detailed critique effectively eviscerated the discipline for having nothing to show for more than a quarter century of academic research and discourse - no invention, groundbreaking knowledge or any other useful result has come out of the discipline. Instead they attack each other relentlessly for being whatever ~phobic, in the wrong place on the privilege pyramid and not woke enough and so on.

Publisher and contributors got the usual abuse, doxxing, death threats, their events had to be cancelled but despite the fact that critics, especially other gender studies academics, tried very hard, they couldn't refute the points made in the book (coz they are true).

I'm not aware of any such book written by insiders in English, but the discipline has very vocal critics who work within it by now, despite the vast numbers of unquestioning adherents who truly think they are progressives when they spout their nonsense.

I don't know exactly what your sister is even getting at in discounting your opinion coz you haven't read Butler when what she said is clearly contradicted by Butler's writings on gender (ie it's not wearing a skirt and makeup that makes you a woman - that's just performance of femininity as others have pointed out).

If you're not tired of reading yet, I'd recommend Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics War On Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights (That's a link to the book on Amazon). It's an essay collection exploring the effects that gender studies and the resulting gender identity ideology has had on women and their rights. Quite an eye opener.

I personally experience gender as either a performance (the bits I control) or a masive PITA (the bits others control).

Gender is performative, in my view.

Sex is a blunt fact that has been around since before language and is understood by all mammals even the ones with brains the size of a pea.

www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/680642?section=pre-2008&keywords=academics-defend-pedophilia&year=2004&month=09&date=23&id=680642&aliaspath=%2FManage%2FArticles%2FTemplate-Main

Apologies, OP. I pasted my previous copy! I was trying to quote you saying:

She is definitely not thick but I don’t think she has encountered gender critical ideas before.

Nice bit of sanctimonious emotional blackmail included, I see (because her feminism is all about the female socialisation).

She could have a brilliant brain but I'm afraid pomo and queer theory addles even the best of them. The whole thing is pointless onanism leading to brain rot. Absolutely no use or helpful application to anyone's day-to-day life outside of university navel-gazing.