Would anyone like to talk about Judith Butler with me?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I'm currently trying to get to grips with her writing. I read most of 'Gender Trouble' a while ago, in a rather hurried and sceptical mood. More recently, I've had a look at Undoing Gender. And now I'm trying to re-read Gender Trouble properly (there's an edition out with a new introduction where she explains how she's moved on a bit in response to criticisms, which is useful).

I'm really struggling, to be honest. My gut feeling is it's a bit Emperor's New Clothes, and I'm not keen - but I really want to give it some proper thought.

An example of what bugs me in a knee-jerk way is this sort of passage (from near the start of Undoing Gender):

If a decade or two ago, gender discrimination applied tacitly to women, that no longer serves as the exclusive framework for understanding its contemporary usage. Discrimination against women continues – especially poor women and women of color, if we consider the differential levels of poverty and literacy not only in the United States, but globally – so this dimension of gender discrimination remains crucial to acknowledge. But gender now also means gender identity, a particularly salient issue in the politics and theory of transgenderism and transsexuality.

I just can't help feeling this is an incredibly, even insultingly, privileged point of view? I mean, of course gender discrimination continues! She says it as if it's just in its dying gasp, but isn't it a huge issue?

Would anyone like to help me understand as I read?

Btw, I will totally understand if this thread dies a death, so don't worry!

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I just wanted to come back to this and say thank you to everyone. As people posting obviously noticed, at some stage my brain just gave up, and I couldn't follow it all. But I have now come back and I sat down today going through the thread slowly, and I think I understand a little better now what the different arguments are. So, thank you very much! And particularly outs, buffy, beach and almond for taking so much time over it.

[DonkeySkin]

If the account of the injury of hate speech forecloses the possibility of a critical response to that injury, the account confirms the totalizing effects of such an injury.

WTF does this even mean? It seems like a very sly way of saying (yet again) that describing oppression is what produces oppression.

Look, I have to concede that I haven't read her extensively, but everything I have read of Butler is just straight-up anti-feminism, clothed in pseudo-feminist language.

It's very scary to me because it makes feminism into a position which asserts the systematic domination of women by men...

If you can't acknowledge that men do, in fact, systematically dominate women what bloody good is your feminism? What's the point of being a feminist at all if you deny this basic fact and you find women who point it out 'very scary'?

...distills both those categories into very fixed places of power, sees women as always in positions of relative powerlessness, as victims who then only get reclaim power through recourse to the state—a very frightening prospect.

And there she is again, implying (as Beach pointed out) that feminists who try to effect systemic change for women are the real oppressors. She is basically saying here that it is illegitimate for women to involve themselves in making laws and policy. Women are half the citizens of any state and we have every right to craft laws and policies that work in the interests of women. How dishonest and blatantly anti-feminist to imply that women using the mechanisms of law and politics to crowbar resources and justice for women out of the government and/or legal system is a 'frightening prospect' that makes them just like the overlords of an autocratic state. As if Dworkin and MacKinnon or any group of feminists have ever held that kind of power.

[Beachcomber]

And from this interview.


LK: MacKinnon was even on the cover of the Sunday Times Magazine.

JB: And she was ABC's person of the week. It's very scary to me because it makes feminism into a position which asserts the systematic domination of women by men, distills both those categories into very fixed places of power, sees women as always in positions of relative powerlessness, as victims who then only get reclaim power through recourse to the state—a very frightening prospect. The attack on the First Amendment is horrible for anyone who cares about the rise of censorship on the right, for anybody who cares about sodomy laws; it just strikes me as a very reactionary position. And this kind of procensorship feminism is implicitly based on a very anti-psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality and subjectivity as well.

LK: I'm curious how formative those early-'80s debates around pornography and sexual representation were in terms of your own work.

JB: Very much so. I'm trying to think how to account for that. I think I took the feminist critique of pornography very seriously in the early '80s, but then became very fully persuaded that it was absolutely wrong. One of the aspects of it that alarmed me was the way in which psyches and fantasy life are described by people like Andrea Dworkin. She actually believes that pictures have the power to form psyches and desires, and to produce actions in an almost behavioristic way. It struck me that she wants to police not only representations but the ways people think, desire, and fantasize; she wants to obliterate the ethical distinctions between fantasy, representation, and action.

JB: Pornography replays relations of social power: but this replaying is phantasmatic and not mimetic. In some ways, pornography “represents” uninhabitable positions, hyperbolic ideals, and sometimes offers the occasion for a viewing that compensates for a lived sense of sexual failure.

[Beachcomber]

This post is going to be loooonnnngggg. Mainly because it contains some Butler quotes.

I don't think that Butler's position on pornography is that simple, OutsSelf. And even it it was, what does she propose that we actually do? I mean if she thinks that MacKinnon's analysis is wrong? What does Butler think we should be doing instead of challenging the First Amendment? Butler always seems keen to take down other women's (especially MacKinnon's) efforts to use the available tools to actually do something - so what is her great idea then?? Seems like Butler finds just about everything that women want to actually do about oppression to be a bad idea because doing anything about oppression inevitably makes that oppression worse. Gosh darn it. That rather puts a spanner in the works doesn't it? Thanks for the positive attitude Butler. Now what do you suggest that we actually do? Oh, yes, use that incredible tool against social injustice and violent systems of oppression; parody.

I don't think that Butler has anything like the problem with pornography that you suggest. Bizarrely, for one who gives so much consideration to 'performativity', Butler doesn't think that pornography is performative. She thinks it is phantasmatlc.

Some quotes from Excitable Speech by Butler.


Page 18. Significantly, MacKinnon's argument against pornography has moved from a conceptual reliance on a perlocutionary model to an illocutionary one. In the work of Mari. Matsuda, hate speech is understood not only to act upon its listener (a perlocutionary scene), but to contribute to the social constitution of the one addressed (and, hence, to become part of a process of social interpellation). The listener is understood to occupy a social position or to have become synonymous with that position, and social positions themselves are understood to be situated in a static and hierarchical relation to one another. By virtue of the social position he or she occupies, then, the listener is injured as a consequence of that utterance. The utterance also enjoins the subject to reoccupy a subordinate social position. According to this view, such speech reinvokes and reinscribes a structural relation of domination, and constitutes the linguistic occasion for the reconstitution of that structural domination. Although sometimes this view on hate speech enumerates a set of consequences that such speech produces (a perlocutionary view of the matter), there are other formulations of this position where the force of the performative is secured through conventional means (an illocutionary model). In Mari Matsuda's formulation, for instance, speech does not merely reflect a relation of social domination; speech enacts domination, becoming the vehicle through which that social structure is reinstated. According to this illocutionary model, hate speech constitutes its addressee at the moment of its utterance; it does not describe an injury or produce one as a consequence; it is, in the very speaking of such speech, the performance of the injury itself, where the injury is understood as social subordination.

What hate speech does, then, is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position. But what gives hate speech the power to constitute the subject with such efficacy? Is hate speech as felicitous as it appears in this account, or are there faultlines that make its constituting power less felicitous than the above description would imply?

I wish to question for the moment the presumption that hate speech always works, not to minimize the pain that is suffered as a consequence of hate speech, but to leave open the possibility that its failure is the condition of a critical response. If the account of the injury of hate speech forecloses the possibility of a critical response to that injury, the account confirms the totalizing effects of such an injury. Such arguments are often useful in legal contexts, but are counter-productive for the thinking of nonstate-centered forms of agency and resistance.

Even if hate speech works to constitute a subject through discursive means, is that constitution necessarily final and effective? Is there a possibility of disrupting and subverting the effects produced by such speech, a faultline exposed that leads to the undoing of this process of discursive constitution?What kind of power is attributed to speech such that speech is figured as having the power to constitute the subject with such success?

Matsuda's argument presumes that a social structure is enunciated at the moment of the hateful utterance; hate speech reinvokes the position of dominance, and reconsolidates it at the moment of utterance. As the linguistic rearticulation of social domination, hate speech becomes, for Matsuda, the site for the mechanical and predictable reproduction of power. In some ways, the question of mechanical breakdown or "misfire" and of the unpredictability of speech is precisely what Austin repeatedly emphasizes when he focuses on the various ways in which a speech act can go wrong. More generally, however, there are reasons to question whether a static notion of "social structure" is reduplicated in hate speech, or whether such structures suffer destructuration through being reiterated, repeated, and rearticulated. Might the speech act of hate speech be understood as less efficacious, more prone to innovation and subversion, if we were to take into account the temporal life of the "structure" it is said to enunciate? If such a structure is dependent upon its enunciation for its continuation, then it is at the site of enunciation that the question of its continuity is to be posed. Can there be an enunciation that discontinues that structure, or one ,that subverts that structure through its repetition in speech? As an invocation, hate speech is an act that recalls prior acts, requiring a future repetition to endure. Is there a repetition that might disjoin the speech act from its supporting conventions such that its repetition confounds rather than consolidates its injurious efficacy?


Page 20 In MacKinnon's recent work, Only Words, pornography is construed as both speech and conduct, indeed, as "performative utterance;' and is understood not only to "act on" women in injurious ways (a perlocutionary claim), but to constitute, through representation, the class of women as an inferior class (an illocutionary claim). The burning cross is understood to be analogous to the pornographic utterance to the extent that both of them represent and enact an injury. But can the illocutionary claim be made about pornography as easily as it can about the burning cross? The theory of representation and, indeed, the theory of performativity at work differs in each of these cases. I will argue that, taken generically, the visual text of pornography cannot "threaten" or "demean" or "debase" in the same way that the burning cross can. To suggest that both examples instantiate the same kind of verbal conduct is not only a mistake in judgment, but the exploitation of the sign of racial violence for the purposes of enhancing, through a metonymical slippage, the putatively injurious power of pornography.


Page 22 Similarly, MacKinnon's appeal to the state to construe pornography as performative speech and, hence, as the injurious conduct of representation, does not settle the theoretical question of the relation between representation and conduct, but collapses the distinction in order to enhance the power of state intervention over graphic sexual representation. In many ways, this very extension of state power, however, comes to represent one of the greatest threats to the discursive operation of lesbian and gay politics. Central to such politics are a number of "speech acts" that can be, and have been, construed as offensive and, indeed, injurious conduct: graphic self-representation, as in Mapplethorpe's photography; explicit self-declaration, such as that which takes place in the practice of coming out; and explicit sexual education, as in AIDS education.

[OutsSelf]

Ugh, eroticised, not criticised images of female.sexual abuse

[OutsSelf]

God, so much to process. Just want to clear up something simple that I am sure of though - Butler's argument against censorship is not an issue of free.speech, it is that the effect of censorship.is to proliferate the thing you are trying to censor. It's not that she doesn't want the end of.images of female.sexual abuse, it's that she thinks describing it as pornography and banning it will produce a desire.for.it and is.part of how.it comes to eroticise sexual discrimination. In other words, it produces the sexuality it wishes to ban. This is not to say that criticised images of.female.sexual abuse should be tolerated but that there needs to be a means of.combating them which doesn't add to the social and erotic power.

[Beachcomber]

that is the gaslighting

[Beachcomber]

What DonkeySkin says about postmodernism and Aboriginal people really resonates with me and I think we can draw parallels with women/feminism.

1. Women as victims of male violence/domination. Butler criticizes MacKinnon for assigning victim status to women and creating a "paradigm of victimisation". So women pointing out that male violence exists, and that women and children are often on the end of it, and are therefore victims of male violence, is to be countered. Because it is oppressive. Although what it is to be countered with, I don't quite know. I'm guessing liberalism's old favorite; 'agency'. I guess the perpetrators of the violence stop being called perpetrators and get called 'agents' or 'subjects'.
   

1. 'Narratives' (always plural!). One person's narrative is another person's propaganda/lie/tool of oppression/normalizing of oppressive acts and structures/invisibleizing of the oppressed (who generally don't get to dominate 'narratives'). It is oppressive for the oppressed to not listen to and take into consideration their oppressor's narratives.
   

1. The idea that describing oppressive society and how it functions is an oppressive thing to do. This one is very cunning. It turns those who speak out about oppression into the baddies, the oppressors.
   

1. Imperialism. The idea that it is imperialist and therefore oppressive for any woman to say anything about women as a collective ever. (Bit like number 3 really.)
   

1. Censorship. Censorship is always bad (because narratives!). This means that women who think that pornography should not be protected as free speech under legislation such as the First Amendment are anti freedom (and oppressive! and guilty of denying subjects! their agency! and coercively assigning victim! status to other women).
   

1. The individual. We are all only individuals. With some of being more individuals than others (notably the oppressed). The idea of class is reductive and essentialist (and oppressive!). And it isn't very fun, subversive and hip.
   

1. The Truth. Doesn't exist because narratives/agency/individuals/relativism/etc. It is true however that the oppressed are; oppressive, imperialist, anti freedom, anti choice, anti agency, anti liberty, anti free speech, and pro a big oppressive state.
   

This list is not exhaustive. But for me there is a running theme; that it the gaslighting of the oppressed by telling them that they are the oppressors. A bit like what happens in abusive relationships really.

[manlyalmondcakes]

But that is to bring back two social theories that surely have been debunked and are no longer believed in by any of the people on this thread - functionalism and social evolution.

Not everything serves a purpose that makes society work or learn more, and we are not on some march into the future where each generation knows more than the one before and is somehow closer to working stuff out.

Lots of societies simply got it wrong and ceased to exist. Lots of knowledge has been lost and we may never be able to recreate it. We are all now in a historically unique situation of living in a globalised connected world, in some sense for the first time there is one society, but that just makes the stakes higher. We now have the capacity, if we get it wrong, to destroy a society that is the whole world.

And even if that were not the case, or if we look at societies that are distinct from each other, it just isn't good enough to say it's complex so we can't make sense of it. We have to make sense of it now to the best of our ability now, to deliver as much justice as we can to the current population, and to create as much justice as we can for those yet to come as our actions have a huge impact on them.

If you are a Mandaean, sitting in Iraq now, with 2000 years of cultural continuity behind you, knowing that a year from now your entire population may have been wiped off the face of the earth by genocide, there is, if that genocide happens, no future point where your culture develops some fuller knowledge.

If it was us. If it was Britain this was happening to, or our daughters that were being forced into brothels, forcibly impregnated, if it was us who were going to be eradicated, I don't think we'd think working it out later was okay. I'm sure that none of us think we can do nothing, so if we're doing something now, the issue of paying attention to the real (or the truth) can't be deferred.

[manlyalmondcakes]

Donkeyskin, I think the consequences of that kind of research are that you need discourseanalysis but you need it to be carried out by people who recognise perspectives are closer or further away from the real.

Land keeps people alive. Restricting access can kill. That is part of the violence. And the ecology of that is complex. The strength of the argument of the colonised generally rests on it more closely apprehending the real. The argument of the coloniser generally denies the real or sets out to mystify it as part of the colonisation process.

To apply discourse analysis with no recognition of the existence of a truth is to ignore the actual mechanisms that the violence is carried out through.

[DonkeySkin]

That's because members of the dominant group in a hierarchy have every reason to distort the truth and lie about what is actually happening in order to maintain their position. Gah. It's 3am here.

Post-processual archaeology is basically postmodern literary theory applied to archaeology. It's largely ignored by swathes of researchers, but has been enthusiastically taken up by those working in post-colonial settings. I don't think that's a coincidence.

It is important to note though that I've concentrated my reading almost exclusively on contemporary social research.

I'm not familiar with this field at all, so perhaps we are talking at cross-purposes.

I will not be at all offended if people do the online equivalent of a polite smile and turn away to talk about other things.

LMAO. I just derailed even further. I hope LRD doesn't mind.

[DonkeySkin]

And continuing the theme of 'who benefits?', and because I'm not done ranting yet, I'm going to go off on a tangent here to give a concrete example of how postmodernism is used against oppressed groups - skip if you like! It concerns discourse in the history and archaeology of colonial Australia, which I encountered during my thesis.

Postmodern perspectives dominated Australian historical archaeology at that time, contending that it was simplistic and unfair to Aboriginal people to describe them as victims of European oppression. Instead, the trend was to identify acts of 'resistance' in the historical/archaeological record, to record a 'multitude of narratives', and instead of describing an oppressor–oppressed relationship, to conceive of black–white relations as a dialogue, a meeting of cultures, in which Aboriginal people transformed an oppressive situation by interacting with it and resisting in a multitude of ways, etc.

Now, there is nothing wrong with identifying acts of resistance to colonialism. But the whole narrative this produced, the effect of it, was to obscure what Europeans actually did. They were oppressors. It is no slight on Aboriginal people to describe them as victims of a brutal and genocidal regime. It is what actually happened. And here postmodernism blends with neoliberalism's victim-hatred. It's not shameful to be a victim, and nor does it mean you can't be an active subject - all it means is that you've been harmed by someone else. It's very telling that postmodernists, on the whole, hate 'victim' narratives (ostensibly because they denigrate women, PoC, etc, and 'deny them agency'). Who does this denial of victimhood really protect? As Kasja Ekis Ekman points out, if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators.

And the knowledge this postmodernist discourse was producing was, in effect, obscuring the racism and brutality of Australia's past. The most prominent book on the area I was studying (the western NSW pastoral frontier) was called 'Shared Landscapes' - it described 'the multitude of voices' from Aboriginal people and pastoralists, their memories and attachments to the land. I found this disquieting at the time and now I find it positively cynical (especially since the study the book was based on was funded by the NSW government). It depicted all stories and histories as equally worthy of consideration, all ties to the land as equally valuable. There was no vertical power relationship here: just various conflicts (and, sometimes, friendships) between two groups of people who had been sharing the landscape for a long time. The NSW pastoral frontier was one of the bloodiest places on earth in the early to mid 19th century, and the violence was overwhelmingly one-sided: it involved mass killings of Aborigines and seizure of their land by both the military and civilians; incredible brutality, both casual and strategic, on the part of the pastoralists (I read their diaries) YET, the narrative that white Australian postmodernist historians produced talked of 'shared landscapes' and denigrated (to use Butlerian phrasing) 'simple and paralysing models of structural oppression' - all the while pretending to take an anti-racist and pro-Indigenous view by by 'foregrounding alternative narratives'. Again I ask, who does this serve?

Can't resist quoting from that book, because it eerily echoes the obscurantist BS that Butler disseminates about gender:

In shifting the reader’s gaze to begin to see pastoral history as shared between black and white Australians, the pastoral frontier becomes a ‘contact zone’. Mary-Louise Pratt uses this term (1992: 6) ? in opposition to ‘frontier’, which historically has been grounded within a Euro-American imperial expansionist perspective...

Right, see: we have to euphemistically rename a violent expanding imperialist frontier as a 'contact zone' - lest we risk reproducing the 'Euro-American imperial expansionist perspective' by, um, naming the real-world consequences of that perspective.

In the same way, as OutsSelf noted, Butler contends that the discursive category of 'woman' produces women's oppression. A neat trick that turns feminists into the reproducers of women's oppression, because there is no way to do feminist analysis without referring to women as a discursive category.

[DonkeySkin]

you might say (and I might come to agree with you) that the female truth is actually THE truth and the male truth is false.

I would actually say this. I don't think it's sufficient to merely state that they are looking at it from different vantage points. That's because members of the dominant group in a hierarchy has every reason to distort the truth and lie about what is actually happening in order to maintain their position.

I am thinking (for example) who gets to construct the identity of a woman selling sex (is she a victim, empowered, something else) and, most importantly, what are the consequences of the most powerful construction of her identity for that woman and others like her?

I think this could be really important feminist work. It's a question always worth asking in the construction of any knowledge: what are the real-world consequences of this narrative or idea? Who benefits when we perceive things in this way?

[DonkeySkin]

Buffy, postmodernism is now right through anthropology, history and archaeology too, although, admittedly, my knowledge of those fields is very piecemeal. It's just based on general impressions from the readings I did for a short thesis, so I am keen to go back and re-read and to read more widely, because I think the early post-structuralist anthropologists were trying to do something radical and valuable, in terms of interrogating the way knowledge is produced in Western society.

I am very suspicious of postmodernism** itself, just because of what I've read and how I've seen it used.

The examples you give, of foregrounding women's perspectives and voices, sounds to me like standpoint theory rather than post-structuralism, although I suppose it's true that the former grew out of the latter to a significant degree.

I realise I'm making a distinction between post-structuralism and postmodernism that most people might not recognise. I guess this is because I associate the former with anthropologists from the 60s-70s like Pierre Bourdieu* and postmodernists with the mainly literary theorists who came later. This may be a false distinction and one I've largely made up in my head . Butler and Foucault are considered post-structuralists and postmodernists, after all.

*Now there's a male theorist who produced work that is actually useful for women's liberation! Extremely rarefied company, that.

After feeling that my understanding of post-structuralism was vague and just based on a narrow set of readings I did as an undergrad, I googled a bit and found this elucidation of the differences between it and postmodernism:

an interesting, alternative way to distinguish Post Modernism, Post Structuralism, and Structuralism is to view Structuralism as an attempt to create unifying principles out of social phenomena (objective truth), Post Modernism as the abandonment of the attempt at unifying principles (subjective truth), and Post Structuralism as some kind of (vague) middle ground between the two (objective and subjective truth).

[DonkeySkin]

I disagree however that it isn't important to think very carefully about how our knowledge about gender is produced. I'm not going to say that it is the only think we should be thinking critically about, nor even the most important. But it is part of the overall picture.

So without making this about me, what is it that you'd like me/us to change about the way I think about how we produce knowledge? I really want to understand this.

I agree Buffy that it is valuable to think about the way we produce knowledge and it isn't an abstract or useless concern - the opposite, actually, since knowledge is what we base our reasoning about the world on.

I've been thinking about this more lately because I'm considering doing a graduate degree in women's history and prehistory and a huge part of that will be grappling with what, if anything, we can say about the past and how we reach our conclusions, especially given that the evidence is so scanty. The past is reproduced in the present to serve particular political and psychological ends and feminists are as vulnerable to producing historical fallacies as anyone.

This is a roundabout way of saying I will be likely at some point return to the post-structuralist anthropologists I read for my honours thesis: though it was a while ago, I remember finding many of the things they had to say very useful about the way knowledge is constructed re: 'foreign' cultures, whether they be contemporary non-Western ones or past societies. I also read a lot of postmodern literary theorists and historians/prehistorians who had been influenced by postmodern literary theory. And they bothered me, although at the time I was not equipped to pinpoint why. But encountering radical feminist theory, particularly this essay, has clarified a lot of the half-formed concerns I had back then:

offourbacks.net/index.php/featured-articles-1/85-let-them-eat-text-the-real-politics-of-postmodernism

As Mantilla says, the crucial point is not what postmodernists say about postmodernism, but how it actually functions in the world. And most often, that is as a defence of the status quo and existing power structures.

I suppose this is not surprising in a way: hegemonic power structures are by their nature, well, hegemonic. They are capable of absorbing all challenges to them and turning them to their advantage. Witness the totalising nature of capitalism (actually a far younger and less well established power structure than patriarchy): how it easily it turns rebellion into pseudo-rebellion and sells it back to people; how despite the fact that it is laying waste to the planet we live on and everyone knows it, no cohesive challenge to it has been able to be mounted.

And the difference between postmodernists and radicals is that postmodernists deny the nature of these structures: in fact, they consider the very act of describing them to be 'totalising', 'lacking in nuance', and 'oppressive'.

And that's what I'd like you and everyone to consider: the way postmodernism's relativism works against oppressed groups, and for the oppressors, who are the only ones to benefit from the claim that there is no reality or truth to describe.

[Beachcomber]

Yet more stuff where Butler takes pot shots at MacKinnon.

Why does she do this? It isn't sisterly (not just towards MacKinnon, I mean in general). MacKinnon is one of the women who poses the most challenge to patriarchy. Why does Butler feel the need to constantly take pot shots at her?

I don't like it.

www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/against-proper-objects/

And this is why I always hope people who read Butler actually read MacKinnon in order to put Butler into her context (which is post MacKinnon)

[Beachcomber]

their ideas

[Beachcomber]

only particular bodies that can be oppressed in particular ways.

This is how I see it. Women are oppressed because we have the reproductive apparatus to carry and birth babies. And much of how we are oppressed is via that apparatus. We are oppressed because of our biology and our biology is used to oppress us.

Buffy, yes my belief about truth is that we can actually reach it. I believe a lot of truths are as a plain as the nose on one's face. It's our vision that is the problem - or what we dare to look at.

When you ask if we could all sit around a table and agree/work together, I don't doubt that we could. For me this discussion isn't really about that.

I think a lot of this for me is that I think it is a real shame that so many people I talk to about feminism nowadays have read Butler but not much else (this might be because I live in France, the country of post modernism/structuralism).

Which always makes me think of the first time I read Dworkin's Right-Wing Women. It was a book that blew my mind. I didn't know that you were allowed to write books like that. I couldn't believe that it actually got published - it felt like what was being said in it was utterly rebellious and saying the unsayable with regards to male domination and what it is and how it works. If felt so daring and brave and dangerous. I think the women's movements needs books like that and women like MacKinnon and Jeffries and Daly and Millett and so many others. I'm not saying we don't need Butler but I think she is quite far down on the list and doesn't give enough credit to women who went before her and how much ideas she criticizes or does thought experiments on have contributed to her success and contributed to women's consciousness raising.

[manlyalmondcakes]

Just to clarify, I'm not arguing for the superiority of analogical reasoning. I'm just using it as an example of a common way of thinking that crosses boundaries of perspective, making it possible to understand and judge other people's arguments.

[manlyalmondcakes]

Firstly, I am going to apologise to LRD for participating in turning her Butler thread into something else.

To quote Sheldon Cooper, I am not saying, "You are very good at what you do. It is just that what you do isn't worth doing." I am saying that as I don't understand what you are doing, I can't make a judgement on whether you are doing it well.

If something is presented to me entirely in a way I don't think in, that's kind of the end of my involvement in it.

So any working together is based on a common understanding. Donkeyskin (unless I'm getting her confused with another poster) has a different perspective to me, but her analogical reasoning is so nuanced and strong (such as the societal syndromes stuff) that I have to accept it, and if I wanted to explain something to her, I'd use analogical reasoning so she could evaluate it even if it was outside of her experience.

So I think what I'm saying is that if you come from a particular stance (which we all do), it isn't that stance you get judged on, but on the bits you hold in common.

Unless the stance is evo psych. I'm not sitting at any table with that nonsense going on.