MNHQ transphobia guidelines part 2

[QueenStromba]

First thread here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/2120841-MNHQ-are-going-to-decide-what-constitutes-transphobia-on-MN-What-advice-guidelines-would-you-give-them?

Sitestuff thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/site_stuff/2117350-MNHQ-now-email-posters-with-how-to-get-around-the-talk-guidelines?

The thread that was about is here: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/2107862-Following-on-from-the-TERF-thread?

Hi Buffy, I don't want to derail (but it is relevant, I think!) It goes back to an Enlightenment discourse that sees political representation as an abstract mechanism: by virtue of a common humanity a rich white man can perfectly well act in the interests of a poor woman. He doesn't have to be of her group in order to represent her. He can imagine her interests and act in accordance with the universal similarities of common humanity. (Often used as a best justification for why you didn't need to actually give women or black people or poor people any real material or political power, like the vote: since they were just as similar to the rational man as they were to each other). But sometimes used as a progressive justification for why some groups should have the vote (eg. because black men were really just like white men underneath! - though funny that you didn't really get powerful white men deciding they were just like black men underneath...)

Whereas modern identity politics has tended to make more separatist claims that you must be of a group in order to represent it (eg. only women really understand what women as a group want/need, so they must be represented by themselves: no-one else can speak on their behalf. Their lived experience as a class is radically alien to those outside it.

The notion that I can speak as a woman because though I a not a woman I feel I am seems to me a peculiar co-opting of an Enlightenment rationality that insists that all human experience is easily comprehended by all other humans.

But I'm torn about this, because neither do I think that we should abandon universalism for separatism and a rejection of the idea that it's possible for one group to imagine themselves in to the position of the other. There must be something about feeling like the other that must be possible, surely, or how could we ever expect others to ever understand us?

And universalism was and is a powerful political tool for oppressed groups (I deserve equality and freedom from oppression because I might look different but I am just like you). Where it jars against women's interests is the perception that this manoeuvre is being co-opted by a powerful group to assert its commonality with an oppressed group, and that this is a way of taking back power by returning us to the notion that everyone is really exactly the same as everyone else.

Sorry if this isn't clear enough - I'm v tired (teething baby!) and it's very hot...

Thanks Beach - will have a look at that tomorrow. I haven't used the word hegemony since I was a student!

On the subject of loos, one of my friends is an electrician - she regularly works on sites where there are only men's toilets

A timely post one day after the celebration of American independence, which was actually the independence of one set of wealthy white men from another set of wealthy white men. The American wealthy white men managed to classify black men and women as not human but property for the purposes of the application of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, while white women were chattel.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

LOL.

It was only through the determined campaigns of abolitionists, suffragettes and civil rights movements that the word 'men' came eventually to be applied to women and black people and others who were not white.

I think it is abundantly clear that people only understand other people when they want to and that they make the effort because it is demonstrably in their own best interests to do so. I don't think there is necessarily altruism or empathy involved. I also think it is very often necessary to shout, march and demonstrate in order to make others hear and understand.

Further on the classification of white and black in the United States -- one drop of black blood (i.e. one single ancestor of sub Saharan African descent) meant classification as black. The reason for the 'one drop' rule was to reinforce white supremacy in the late 19th and early 20th century. Before then, arguments against the encoding of 'one drop' laws (and anti inter-racial marriage laws) focused on how appalling it would be for prominent families to have their pedigrees subjected to scrutiny, how shameful it would be to uncover that 'one drop'. Early marriage laws forbade the marriage of white women to non-white men, or sexual relationships between white women and non-white men. Segregation gathered momentum and the earlier scruples (such as they were) were cast aside in order to buttress the important general thrust of keeping black people in the role of second class citizens.

There is a long pattern of the privileged group assigning those who do not conform in every respect to the definition of that group to another group with lesser status. The pattern requires first and foremost the self definition of the privileged group, and the subsequent policing of that definition is extremely important. This pattern is obvious in privileged male treatment of gay men and of trans women. And the way to deal with it is not to open wide the doors marked 'women' and welcome all waifs and strays with tea and cake.

We are looking in the wrong direction a lot of the time as feminists. We do a heck of a lot of yakking amongst ourselves about exactly what is wrong and sometimes in all the millions of words we lose sight of who it is that needs to change. It's not us.

On neuroscience... I absolutely agree that the use (and abuse) of neuroscientific discourse in society is quite troubling. It's kind of an extension of the (ongoing) psychologisation of everyday life but neuroscience seems like a way to up those stakes with a 'harder' science. None of this fuzzy stuff about 'the mind'; now we can pretend it's all 'hard wired' into the brain.

The thing is, I don't think this is actually coming from neuroscience itself. Neuroscience is utterly full of caveats of the order 'well, we need to remember that this research is about cats/chickens/whatever and cats/chickens/whatever are not human'. But somehow this all gets filtered out as policy makers and activists and anyone else for whom it suits their purposes whiter on about how this is all indisputable fact because it is neuroscience.

It's very dangerous because it is simply drawing upon the supposed 'authority' of science so as to pretend that highly political and ethical issues are, in fact, utterly technical and, in so doing, to shut down debate. That is, of course, why it's so appealing to policy makers and activists who want to be able to say 'we're right so shut up and go away'.

we should be looking at how structures and institutions enable this rather than getting diverted by Judith Butler's prose style.

But Butler and her prose style are part of the structures and institutions. Butler is hugely influential in the academy (which is an institution). That is the point. And as generally happens, her influence has filtered down into people's everyday lives and thinking and become a factor in cultural hegemony (as described by Marx) - and cultural hegemony is a power structure.

IMO Butler depoliticizes feminism with her writing and she takes it away from everyday women because her writing style is elitist and male centric. One might say she defangs feminism. (And she is enamored with gender).

Butler’s work has been extraordinarily influential in feminist and queer theory, cultural studies, and philosophy.[34] Yet her contribution to a range of other disciplines — such as psychoanalysis, literary, film, and performance studies as well as visual arts — has also been significant.[3] Her theory of gender performativity as well as her conception of "critically queer" have not only transformed understandings of gender and queer identity in the academic world, but have shaped and mobilized various kinds of political activism, particularly queer activism, across the globe.[34][35][36][37] Butler's work has also entered into contemporary debates on the teaching of gender, gay parenting, and the depathologization of transgender people.[38] Indeed, so influential has Butler's challenge to traditional notions of sex and gender been that even Pope Benedict XVI engaged — critically — with it.[39] Many academics as well as political activists maintain that Butler’s radical departure from the sex/gender dichotomy and her non-essentialist conception of gender — along with her insistence that power helps form the subject — revolutionized feminist and queer praxis, thought, and studies.[40] Darin Barney of McGill University writes that: "Butler's work on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness, feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics has changed the way scholars all over the world think, talk and write about identity, subjectivity, power and politics. It has also changed the lives of countless people whose bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have made them subject to violence, exclusion and oppression."[

OddFood, Dines is using hegemony in the Marxist way and it makes so much sense to feminism.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony#cite_note-2

In Marxist philosophy, however, the term describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of the society — the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm; as the universally valid dominant ideology that justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

But Butler and her prose style are part of the structures and institutions. Butler is hugely influential in the academy (which is an institution). That is the point. And as generally happens, her influence has filtered down into people's everyday lives and thinking and become a factor in cultural hegemony (as described by Marx) - and cultural hegemony is a power structure.

You see, I just don't think that's true! I am in the academy, work in a department of over 80 people in a related subject and I can count three or four of them who I think have even read a word of Butler. Last year the person teaching our introductory and only course on critical theory just removed all the gender and feminism topics entirely because he said he "just wasn't interested in them". You can't get students to read any feminist writing or a single thing on gender because they all claim they are "postfeminist" or "don't hate men" (and most are female students). Whereas most of my colleagues are men. They think any sort if feminist theory is a curious relic. This in a subject that people like to think is awash with Pomo jargon. The reality is that Judith Butler is as far away from being influential on UK academia at the moment as she is from flying to the moon.

Her prose style is indefensible though.

As is Derrida's. Although in his translated works at least some of the result must also rest with the translators. Even if the French is horrible (and I'm assuming it is), they've done their best to ensure that comes through in the impenetrability of the English translation.

Beachcomber, I just want to say thank you again for your words, which are really helpful and illuminating for me. And also thank you for this talk by Gail Hines, who is absolutely blowing my mind.

I've never heard of any of these people apart from Judith Butler . And Marx, obviously!

maybe, but sometimes I do teach Butler, just because it's such a joy to see a seminar of privately educated men trying to get to grips with "The Lesbian Phallus"

On another level, I also have a bit of sympathy for the prose - it's true that, as Buffy said above in the thread, that a valorisation of the "common sense" / easy to understand / "plain speech" prose style can itself sometimes be a rhetorical way of dismissing anything that isn't immediately intuitive to the layperson. It's also a very Anglocentric and masculine tradition: the French and German academies have never been as hung up on the "plain speaking" prose ideal as we are - they see it as a strange Puritan obsession

I'm not saying that it has to all be written with a reading age of 12 or anything. Just that butler and Derrida (and spivak for that matter) are particularly bad. Deleuze isn't great either (and he's worse on his own than with guattari, but the issue is largely that his own style is often so unbelievably dry and dull). Other writers really aren't as bad. The writing can be complicated and the ideas can take some time to digest, but they don't make you want to throw the book across the room due to the never ending awful sentences (like most of derrida's stuff does).

Thank you Tanacot. I totally agreed with what you said earlier about the dreaded tumblr. I think social media are intrinsic to all this because anyone can write about themselves and be published in the public domain via the internet so whilst there is loads of really interesting stuff there are also loads of navel gazing blogs. which are thin on critical thinking and bursting with effing individualism.

Dines rocks. She uses Marxist analysis really well and she does it in simple language (as does Marx when you read him or when he is quoted). I hadn't heard of most of the post-modernists, apart from Butler, until I moved to France blanks out memory of trying to read Derrida and Foucault in French.

French culture and language are very different to those of English language speaking countries. The French language itself is very philosophical and long winded. It is very convoluted and questioning. And the French love philosophy and asking lots of questions but they aren't so big on answering those questions. English language and therefore thought process is much simpler, more pragmatic and direct.

I often do translation work and a text that started out as 10,000 words in French will usually end up at about 8000 words in English. The sentences will be much shorter and sometimes it is almost impossible to actually translate the exact way a concept is being described as 'we just wouldn't say that' in English.

The example I give to people, when I'm doing work for them, to illustrate this is how we sign off a formal letter in English with Yours Sincerely/Faithfully and in French you get this mouthful Veuillez agréer, Monsieur/Madame l'expression de mes sentiments distingués (which has thankfully been reduced to cordialement for use in email).

I guess the problem is the idea of having a layperson when talking about social movements. Like, I see that you're a professional feminist and I'm not, and I do respect the need for professional jargon, actually. I use jargon talking to other programmers. On the other hand, if I wanted to use a programming concept to communicate something to a non-programmer, I would try to describe the idea from first principles instead of just saying " a waterfall mentality is sabotaging alpha".

Like, if you can't understand what I'm saying, why would I be saying it to you? What is the purpose of my speech if it doesn't share ideas? In a general thread it might work better to say something more like: Sometimes the understandable desire to have everything fully planned out and every possible problem accounted for before you start work actually stops you from ever getting a working, if imperfect, project off the ground. It can also make it harder to change things when your ideas hit reality, because you've already invested so much time in your plan. (In programming we call this the waterfall model.)

I think it's hard to judge because you don't want to talk down to people or assume they don't know about waterfall vs agile, or post-modernism etc, but at the same time... oh, it's a tricky thing!

Sorry, that was to georgette.

georgettemagritte I don't know about German but in French I don't think the understanding of 'plain speaking' is exactly what we mean in English by that. It is actually very hard to speak plainly in French which is why there is such a subculture of slang.

Interestingly lots of everyday objects are referred to by the leading brand name as the French designation is so complicated and overly descriptive (in the way we talk about 'a hoover' for a vacuum cleaner').

Shall stop derail on the frustrations of the French language now don't get me started on grammar and the masculine overriding the feminine.

I totally agree that if you want to make theory more accessible, it's entirely possible. I think there is a strand of academia which believes that opacity makes the author look clever. I disagree.

My job is basically about 'translating' complex concepts and theory into language that a lay person can understand. And I do a lot of work for French and Belgian clients and have to make their English less laboured and pedantic!

Calamitous - totally agree that the jargon and structure has been appropriated to prop up weak ideas. There's more than a touch of emperor's new clothes about it all.

georgettemagritte are you really claiming that Butler isn't influential?

You can't get students to read any feminist writing or a single thing on gender because they all claim they are "postfeminist" or "don't hate men" (and most are female students).

Dines addresses this in her talk. Although she says that due to influence of the third wave and sex positivism, young women, in US colleges, don't want to be feminists because they think it means being open to fucking anyone and everyone.

totally agree that the jargon and structure has been appropriated to prop up weak ideas. There's more than a touch of emperor's new clothes about it all.

That's Butler in a nutshell for me.

Agree with you Beach on the French language - but there has been an explicit valorisation of the "plain style" in Anglo-American traditions in philosophy, eg Analytic philosophy, criticism, theology and so on, precisely because of its "masculinity" and "rigour" (a lot of Puritan writings were explicitly about the suspicious womanishness and Catholicism of rhetorical style ). To the point of it being a fetish that is used to dismiss "femininised" forms of thought. I think pretty much all of my colleagues would agree with you on Butler: but they don't really think that Butler has given feminism a bad name, they don't want to be impinged upon by any feminism and this is a great excuse.

In my department, I'd say the real problem starts with a university senior appointments committee made up entirely of men (but we can't do anything about that of course, because there are no female professors in the department); which always happens to appoint a man; and if you so much as point this out it is considered appallingly gauche and the most frightful bad manners. Or the fact that one (childless) member of that committee has said to me that he thinks the problem is that women don't write they books on maternity leave (it's just a little holiday of course); or that even male colleagues with children immediately treat you, on returning from maternity leave, as if your brain had fallen out of your ears; or any number of other things I could mention.

I just don't think that third wave feminism is why students don't want to be feminists. By and large they don't know anything about it. There are far more insidious social forces that direct them. More than once, for example, when proposing a week on feminism to a mixed-sex class, the men have demanded that they will only do a week on feminism if I will also teach a week on "masculinism". It takes a whole seminar just to convince them that we have " "masculinism" already. By and large, the women go along with that, because the social pressure to believe that men are suddenly now an oppressed minority group is quite real. But I don't think it comes from feminist theory: it comes from the students' social environment, school, the media (especially the Mail type media which surprising numbers of them read).

I agree Tanacot - and these are threads where there is clearly a specialised audience of academics talking to each other as well as people who aren't, so it's difficult to judge how to pitch it (as Buffy said)...

If asked I would say this was probably initially meant to be a general Chat thread and the jargon would maybe work better in FWR, which is for professional feminists and not women in general. But then I would think that, because I don't understand basically anything you or Buffy say. Other opinions are available!

(Very obviously, I did not go to university.)

if you can't understand what I'm saying, why would I be saying it to you? What is the purpose of my speech if it doesn't share ideas?

Yeah, I agree with this Tanacot. I think it is pretty straightforward to speak simply but without patronizing people (who may or may not know as much as you about the subject). This is what I term plain speaking (when I use that expression I'm using it in the plain speaking every day sense that makes sense to most people, not how 'plain speaking' is considered in academia and whether it is currently in or out of vogue with male dominated institutions).

I think Dines does this for example. She is often speaking to groups of highly educated women but she breaks things down in a way that not only means a layperson can grasp but it also means that you can own the knowledge she shares. By that I mean it becomes part of your bank of knowledge in a way that is independent of the person who brought it to you. You can then go on to share it with other people and develop on it.

There is nothing patronizing about it - it is just good communication skills and shows that you really know your subject. It is only patronizing if you do it in a way where you are coming from a position that you are superior because of all your book learning. It is also very generous and noncompetitive; the point is to communicate with as many people as possible and to share.

Just de-lurking to point out how much I am genuinely enjoying all the detours into theory and other subjects. I have learned a lot reading through these threads, although I can never quite keep up by the time I have watched the videos or googled some of the references I wasn't familiar with, but as someone who studied and works in the field of one of the traditional 'hard' sciences and had little to no exposure to contemporary philosophy, politics, gender studies etc. it is absolutely fascinating. Thank you.