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!

Also, ITA about women being held to a higher standard.

As far as I understand it, performance and performativity are not two different aspects of social construction, but two different incompatible theories. The first is a sociological theory about gender that started in the fifties. The second is Butler's theory.

The difference seems mostly to be that performance is created by an agent, while Butler's permorativity claims that the performance creates the self. But I think she uses performance and performativity as meaning the same thing in her work.

There is a paper here:

www.academia.edu/303106/Performativity_or_Performance_Clarifications_In_the_Sociology_of_Gender

I've read that article and I have to say I don't think it deals.with performativity at all. I also think it attributes a level of complexity to Goffman that I don't recognise. In the way that Goffman theorises about back stage etc. he does attribute a level of agency and calculation that is not in performance of gender as Butler sees it. The paper acknowledges that Butler doesn't see herself as inheriting Goffman but doesn't acknowledge that instead she does name Foucualt and iirc Bordieu and Merleau-Ponty. She really does place herself in Continental philosophy of the 80s in which context the insistence on Goffman is odd. And again not leveled at other thinkers in this discipline

OutsSelf - in what way do you think Foucault is useful to feminism?

I'm genuinely interested in this, and I have asked a couple of times on MN what he brings to helping women gain full citizenship and liberation from male violence and I have never had any concrete answers. What tools did he provide women with? As I say genuine question.

I agree that women are held to higher standards than men but I don't think that is why radical feminists don't agree with Butler on so many things. I think we just don't agree with her - just as she doesn't agree with us.

Butler's writing on gender is a response to second wave feminism, in particular a (critical) response to MacKinnon. And really in order to read Butler in context you need to have read Towards a Feminist Theory of The State.

I think people concentrate too much on 'peformativity' when they discuss Butler - I know it is put forward as being her totally genius idea but as I said upthread it wasn't her idea. It was an idea that many many feminists had written about before her - they just wrote about it in clear unobscure language that could be easily understood and they didn't need to reference lots of obscure men in order to do so. Peformativity is just a fancy and depoliticized word for sex roles.

So if you put Butler in her context of responding to radical feminism then you need to look at what she was responding to. And what she was responding to was brilliant, consciousness raising, lightbulb lighting, revolutionary clarity and righteous anger on the part of theorists such as MacKinnon, Dworkin, Daly, etc. And what Butler did in her response was to take what these women had brought out of the darkness and obscurity, of a normalization achieved via social conditioning, and - put it back into obscurity. MacKinnon et al shone a brilliant light on social and civil injustice and they took that injustice apart piece by piece in order to show it for what it was and to help women understand what was and is being done to them and how it is done and where there are mechanisms for change. So there it is all laid on the table for women to drink in and think about and get angry about and do something about.

And then along comes Butler who takes some of that analysis and adds her own thinking to it. Which is fine in the sense that ideas should develop and be added to and built on. Except what Butler brought to this radical brilliance and clarity is endless questioning and obfuscation and academic overanlaysing of ideas that are very simple and very concrete in real life.

So we have MacKinnon who develops a feminist theory towards the state - something that feminism and women, the world over, didn't have before MacKinnon dedicated herself to doing it. And what Butler does is criticize that and be all cynical and sneery about it and then she writes a book which picks apart concrete terms and ideas that are required for a class analysis such as MacKinnon's. And of course that book and its writer, Butler, are hugely popular with the academy, patriarchy and all those who contribute to or cheer on the backlash. That book and the ideas in it become very fashionable and what is also great about it is that it is a book that is really hard to read and understand and therefore a lot of people don't feel comfortable criticizing it because when they do they are told they don't understand it or they need to go and read a whole bunch of impenetrable books by white men in order to understand why this book is so important to feminism. But the ideas in the book are out there and they are used against women - particularly the idea that women don't exist, that there is no point challenging patriarchy (in the way that say MacKinnon does) other than by parodying sex roles and that biological sex is a social construction along the same lines as gender. Thanks Butler. Not.

And also, Butler criticizes MacKinnon (obscurely of course, with no actual direct reference to her or her books; you need to have read MacKinnon to pick up on it) but she doesn't offer an alternative strategy to that of MacKinnon's - other than subversive parody of sex roles by exaggerating them or queering them.

Right.

So MacKinnon is aiming towards global/international analysis of women's position within global society and looking for state level and international level legal changes that need to be made in order to begin to right the wrongs of that global wide low status and badly treated position. MacKinnon picks the Overton Window clean up and shifts it to a place that no-one has even imagined before and she does it within the framework of demanding that women's rights as full citizens are enshrined in law now that she has done the work of shifting that window (and done it so well and with such brilliant legal clarity and precision that she is very very difficult to argue with or find fault with).

And Butler thinks all that is a misguided waste of time/imperialistic/essentialist/only serves to reinforce the patriarchal idea that women are women and proposes that we parody gender and have a jolly time poking fun at it in a world weary but self explorational fashion instead.

Writing that has just given be a lightbulb actually, I've just realized that Butler is a fun feminist.

Buffy, I haven't read Sylvia Walby so I'm going on what you say of her.

The argument that "women" do not exist is as old as the hills and IMO it is an anti woman argument.

By which I mean there have been many attempts to resist the idea of women as a class/group/caste. Radical Feminists, who do define women as a class/group/caste, do not do so for nefarious or masculine purposes of denying women their individuality, personal identity or sense of self. We do so because we observe that women, and girls, the world over, are considered and treated as lesser citizens than men. The ways and mechanisms via which girls and women are considered and treated as lesser, vary over time and over different cultural structures. But the general theme, of men as higher status and more in control of power than women, does not vary.

I'm still thinking about all this and have just got in touch with a woman I know who is both a brilliant scholar and a feminist and who really works with Butler's ideas in her own scholarship. I'm hoping she'll be able to give me some useful things to put into here.

I have to say that I actually read Butler's description of how women come into existence discursively without thinking that that denied the existence of women as a class. I read that as meaning that women as a product of discourse authors and directs the experience of people identified as women by discourse. I don't think that means that women don't exist as a social, lived or discursive category. And I understand this as adding urgency to political intervention into the social and political oppressions of women because it removes a rational basis for those oppressions. It's even more outrageous because woman the discursive category is a production of the discursive field and her oppressions are deployed in order to produce her/oppression. That doesn't in any way deny that women have babies but men cannot. But it suggests that the ways in which having babies produces disadvantage and oppression are socially rather than biologically produced. None of this is particularly new or specific to Butler? Butler's criticism of feminism is that it comes to participate in the production of the discursive category of women. Which isn't to say that a feminism isn't necessary but that it inevitably comes to be part of the discursive construction of women

Anyway I'll try and get my more brilliant colleague to speak to us about her perspective because I totally trust both her scholarship and her politics. And I may just be giving you all a very twisted by idealism reading. And I do recognise the counter arguments here. I'm very much welcoming the discussion and I want it to go on but might be a bit slow (and realise I've dodged some direct questions, sorry, let me think a bit and be careful when I come back to this).

She writes in the chapter I read of how the single and unified categories of 'woman' and 'patriarchy' have limits when you try to add in the complexities brought by ethnicity and culture, socio-economic class and how things have evolved over time.

It's clearly the case that women's experiences differ vastly depending on where they are positioned on other social hierarchies such as race and class, and obviously they differ across time and culture.

But the question is whether these differences erase the basis for any commonality between women/females. IMO, there remain many commonalities to the female condition which are worthy of structural analysis and could form the basis of a collective political movement. The first and most obvious is that all women and girls are subject to male domination. And that domination takes and has taken specific, similar forms across cultures and throughout history: control of, and hatred of, female biology; the construction of ideologies that justify our inferiority; control via physical violence, especially rape and mutilation of the female body; exploitation of female reproductive and domestic labour.

It's also interesting that one rarely sees leftists insist that, for instance, one cannot really talk about 'racism' as such because the experiences of racially oppressed people differ significantly depending on whether they are male or female. Or that one cannot talk coherently about capitalist exploitation because women are often economically exploited in different ways to men. It's only when feminists want to talk about the very real power that men wield over women that 'woman' suddenly becomes an incoherent and fragmented category, and it's hopelessly misguided and unsubtle to speak of the existence of a hierarchy or to try to draw any general conclusions from patterns of dominance and subordination.

This also reminds me of Marx's observation that while the capitalist class is invested in ensuring workers never develop class consciousness, they themselves are highly class conscious. They act as a unified group to defend their own interests; while pretending those they exploit have nothing in common with one another, and that all collective action is anathema to a free society.

In the same way, while feminists can debate all they like about whether 'woman' is a meaningful political and social category, men are in no doubt about who 'women' are, and will continue to act on that basis. They clearly identify a social category of people who are 'women': when they disseminate religious, scientific and pornographic ideologies which declare the inherent inferiority of such people; when they refuse to promote them, pay them fairly, or credit their ideas; when they rape women and girls; when they sell them as brides and sex slaves; when they abrogate their rights; when they target their bodies for mutilation and denigration; when they invent words like bitch, whore, slag and cunt. Men the world over have no trouble at all making concrete distinctions about who is male and who is female, and of ordering the material, social and ideological structures of society accordingly, in the overwhelming interests of the former. They do this by acting collectively - and often across race, class and cultural lines - as people who understand themselves to be men. Men who bitterly oppose one another on everything else more often than not agree on what women are and, crucially, what women are for.

It is also interesting indeed that, as Beach noted, when brilliant feminist thinkers started to formulate an analysis of how this collective male power works and has worked across time and space, suddenly, along comes a theorist who declares that the class of people who have been subject to this oppression don't actually exist as a meaningful social - or biological! - category. How convenient for patriarchy.

What DonkeySkin said.

I don't think intersectionality is an entirely useless concept but I only ever see it used to tell women that they are not a meaningful collective. Really it is used to tell white women that they are racist and women of colour that they are other. It's a lefty liberal way of telling women to STFU already - no woman can speak or analyse for "women" because she would be being imperialistic/speaking in another's place/making assumptions/acting privileged. There's nowhere to go with intersectionality, it's a total derailer/subject closer.

Of course women the world over are individuals and are differently disadvantaged. But, as DonkeySkin said, we are recognised as women/other for the purposes of oppression and exploitation. To then say that we cannot be recognised as the same for the purpose of naming and fighting that oppression and exploitation is outrageous.

I remember Gail Dines talking about this and applying Marxist analysis - the oppressors are a class with a class identity and their class identity and privilege depends on the existence of subjugated class. The subjugated class, however, are only allowed to think of themselves as individuals.

This just brings us straight back to why we needed the concept of the personal is the political. The point of which is for women to identify their issues as class issues not personal/individual issues.

Buffy I agree that we need to be mindful of the lives and experiences of others. I call that empathy and sisterhood. I see it a lot in Dworkin's writing and MacKinnon's work. I don't think that is what intersectionality actual translates to be in the real world though.

But it suggests that the ways in which having babies produces disadvantage and oppression are socially rather than biologically produced.

Perhaps. I agree that it can be read like that. And I think that is something most of us can agree with - it is one of the basic tenets of feminism.

I don't mean that though when I take issue with Butler saying that sex is a social construct. I agree with her that sex as a category is a social construct. But when I read something like the following, I understand that she is saying that sex as in male or female is a social construct and therefore something one can reject or choose.

www.transadvocate.com/gender-performance-the-transadvocate-interviews-judith-butler_n_13652.htm

CW: Do you think “sex” is a social construct?

JB: I think that there are a variety of ways of understanding what a social construct is, and we have to be patient with terms like these. We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be “assigned” from both and another sense of sex can lead us to resist and reject that sex assignment. How do we understand that second sense of sex? It is not the same as the first – it is not an assignment that others give us. But maybe it is an assignment we give ourselves? If so, do we not need a world of others, linguistic practices, social institutions, and political imaginaries in order to move forward to claim precisely those categories we require, and to reject those that work against us?

I don't think bio sex is a social construct. She doesn't say that in that article either, I don't think. If bio sex is a social construct, then so is everything else, and we can stop referring to anything as a social construct and just refer to things as things.

I think that social construct should only refer to things that have no existence outside of the meaning put on them by people (money), or the mechanism by which we understand things (we understand bio sex, not a social construct, through the mechanism of a social construct, gender).

So when people say that bio sex is a binary, or a spectrum, or anything else, what they mean by those things and how they perceive those things is socially constructed, but bio sex remains a material reality.

In that quote, Butler says that there can be a sense of sex used for assignment. and another sense used to reject that assignment. She is saying that in the context of trans issues, but the same can also be said for females. Our ideas about the female body may be somewhat different to those intended by the system of assignment or by what is known by science.

Science, within my lifetime, has found out new information about what the clitoris does, due to new technological developments (or at least the new use of them). But the clitoris was doing the same thing before science proclaimed it to be happening.

Feminism has its own perspective on the female body, a second sense, just as Butler is saying. The transgenderist approach also does. But for some reason, many transgenderists attack feminists as if they are the medical/legal establishment and the thing that is being resisted, when we are simply a different form of resistance (just one that is incompatible with theirs).

There has to be a distinction made between resisting the way knowledge about the reality of bio sex is constructed so that we can make the world better for females (safe childbirth, infertility treatments etc), and challenging why social constructs of gender that have no connection to material reality exist at all (gendered clothes, hobbies etc).

But to do that you have to accept that

a. Knowledge about bio sex is constructed but bio sex is not.
b. Knowledge about gender is constructed and gender is wholly constructed.
c. The way we have to challenge issues around bio sex is different to how we challenge things that are solely about gender.

I also think this is complicated by the difference between the radical feminist use of gender and the WHO use of gender. The WHO use of gender could include things about how females teach each other useful knowledge of breastfeeding. That is gendered behaviour, but it isn't oppressive behaviour neccesarily. Under the radical feminist definition of gender as a oppressive system, that behaviour presumably isn't considered gendered. So what is it? Maybe it is like the difference between racism and ethnicity. I don't know.

Having read some of the writing of black and disabled women about mainstream feminism, I think we do need to look to ourselves as well as analysing our oppression. As white, educated women (speaking about myself here) we are very privileged compared to some other women and we need to acknowledge the complexity this brings to the project of liberation. Acknowledging this is not denying commonality.

I agree Buffy, and I did not mean to imply that some women are not privileged over others, or that real, power-based differences between women do not exist.

The deep divides between women along racial and class lines, as well as other axes like disability, often makes the project of building feminist solidarity seem impossible. I can fully understand if black women do not trust white women to be their political allies; and the cynicism that poor women might have towards rich women whose primary political interest is in maintaining their class power rather than advancing the cause of women at large.

But the problem this presents to feminists is one of political solidarity; it does not mean that the basic feminist tenet that women are oppressed as women is untrue; it does not erase female commonalities or the universality of male oppression. The question is whether women can form an effective political movement around those commonalities, a movement that would by necessity represent the interests of the mass of women (who are predominantly neither white nor rich).

That's how I see it too DonkeySkin. Thanks for putting it into words so well.

I feel like intersectionality tells women that we are not a distinct oppressed class. It fragments us into anything other than women and takes the focus off the fact that men the world over benefit from women's low status.

(Am thinking about what you said almondcakes and will reply when I have more time.)

Beachcomber, I think my last post may have been a load of rambling nonsense, so don't feel obliged to reply.

almondcakes: Can we be sure that bio sex is a thing? Assuming it exists only materially — in and on our bodies — then what bits of anatomy, what bodily functions must we have in order to qualify as "biologically sexed"? What are we if we do not have them all, or if they do not work, or if we have no intention of making them work? Why should our sex be determined by parts of the body we once had, or by bodily functions that one day we'll be expected to have, rather than by our present "material reality"?

Butler says "'sex' imposes an artificial unity on an otherwise discontinuous set of attributes" (and practices?). Our bodies are real, but discourse turns them into a single unit, wholly and coherently sexed. And because there can be no such thing as an unsexed body, people whose bodies do not add up are ascribed a sex, then given a marginal or pathological position within it: disabled, trans, or, as someone once said of me, "a woman but lesbian".