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!

x post Buffy.

I'm going to think about your analogy, it feels right on a first reading, I would really welcome almond, beach et al's response to that.

I note that in this formulation though I see more the value of being a non-academic feminist because of the way it leads to immediate and meaningful changes for women.

I am a non-science academic and I strongly suspect that my discipline is more interested in undermining reality as a given point that we can all agree on and discuss because its power is in what is negotiable about reality, its power is 'what is at play?' I find that a comfortable position though it leads to an indeterminacy that I feel frustrated by when I compare my position to beach's.

I'm not sure you can be anything definite in post-structuralism, Buffy, ha ha.

...and discontinuous, fragmentary, boundaryless and indeterminate. There might be a jouissance of recognition within specific social situations... but ultimately the subject would be divided against itself when making one's partner dinner... ha ha, I'm a post-structuralist dickhead, that we can all agree (boom boom)

Outsself, I made a statement about biological sex which Enzima then asked about. I responded to that.

If you are talking about biological sex as a binary then you are arguing against a point you would like me to be making rather than one I am. I never defined bio sex as a binary at all.

As for ageing and sexing, I was comparing their material existence, because whether something materially exists was the topic I was attempting to discuss. That is not the same thing as the social consequences of those things.

Post structuralist ideas haven't eclipsed the other forms of feminism. As far as I can see, all the aid agencies and women's rights organisations are still mainly using feminism 2.0.

There are a whole load of people on the Internet going on about Judith Butler, no such thing as a woman, discourse etc, and presumably some areas of academia.

If they actually take over women's organisations women are completely and utterly fucked.

Your post of 13:09 Buffy.

Personally, I would see it as follows:

1. Post structuralist ideas are essential. Discourse analysis can become a kind of check anyone, from any ideological background can do on their own thinking.
2. No problem can be resolved without looking at social constructs and the complexity of the social world.
3. Solving any problem will involve people with different areas of expertise.
4. There are many other ideas which are not post structuralist and which address social complexity and social constructs.
5. People who are in those other areas with a focus on social complexity are able to use language, knowledge and suggest solutions which can be coupled with knowledge and solutions from people whose main focus is the material not the social, building mutual respect and nuanced solutions.

If we live in a world that's both material and social, you have to work together providing the bits you understand. That includes accepting that some elements are not best explained by your perspective but by somebody else's. I think other approaches to social complexity get used more because they are aware of their own limitations and so leave a space for approaches to join up with them.

Sorry Buffy, my connection has become poor, and if I write a long post it will probably get eaten. But will return...

I'm reading and have stuff I want to say but don't have time right now. Will try to post later.

An example theory...

I am going to explain this poorly because I can't find the paper and will get all the terms wrong.

Someone was explaining individual responses to being told that they were collectively heading towards a dire situation which was socially complex and would require a collective response which would be difficult to create.

One common response was for individuals to create an internal world with less reference to the beliefs of others - an idiosyncratic one which would justify in various ways a denial that a bad thing was happening or was going to happen.

The second response was to believe that a bad thing was happening but to respond with a weakened identification with the group, and then increasing the level of individual behaviour that was causing the bad situation in the first place, so as to make the most personally from a situation you think there is little chance of collectively improving anyway.

The author was then advocating that any difficult situation should be revealed to people in conjunction with a response that was centred on collective identity and relationships, or the situation you wanted to resolve would neither be collectively believed or acted positively upon.

This theory has then been taken up by people in diverse fields, as it allows people to modify what they think should be done by adding an understanding of how people construct their beliefs when they feel the odds are against them. It is an entirely social explanation which can be combined both with a material understanding and other social understandings of what course of action should be taken.

OK. For me it is the difference between philosophy and analysis/theory. I'm going to continue to use the examples of MacKinnon and Butler that I have used so far on this thread.

I understand Buffy's explanation of Butler, etc doing thought experiments. I don't doubt that those thought experiments are interesting and that they can be useful. They will be useful to anyone who wants to make use of them - and this is not something that Butler can decide or control. For example we see Butler's ideas/writing being used by Queer theorists and we also see Butler's ideas being used by cross dressers, gender fetishists, transgenderist activists, etc. Butler's writing can be used both for women and against women. And it is my opinion that the bits that can be used for women have been said in better clearer ways by women writing before Butler. (And in ways that are not open to interpretation.)

Additionally these thought experiments, interesting though they may be, take us further and further away from the actual situation in hand. This is partly what I mean when I say that Butler depoliticizes feminist ideas/theory. Plus these thought experiments are carried out in a way that takes the focus off the extremely violent nature of the subject in hand, and in a way that disappears the very obviously gendered nature of that violence and its victims, and this depoliticizes things yet further and muddies the class analysis which Butler responds to with her interpretation of gender. To be honest, I find the idea of doing thought experiments on the subject of gender an obscene thing to do. Gender is a violent and forceful system of othering and a hierarchy which is the backbone of a global regime of sexualised oppression, exploitation and abuse. It is very simple and straightforward and horrifying and inhumane and it is everywhere. Of course Butler is free to philosophize about it if she wants but IMO work such as hers turns women's real lived lives and fear and suffering and pain into something abstract. Something to muse on, something to ponder on. Butler distracts and she also allows people to think that they have done their bit on the subject of gender/sex based oppression because they have read some philosophy on the subject (and IMO defeatist philosophy at that). Box ticked on the wimminz now let's move on to the next subject.

(I know that lots of people call what Butler does on gender 'theory' but to my mind it is philosophy.)

Then we have MacKinnon - MacKinnon has a game plan. She has objectives. Her writing is not open to interpretation, she analyses and lays her analysis out extremely clearly. She names things. She brings clarity and understanding to concepts that can be hard to grasp, hard to see, hard to challenge, hard to process, hard to get one's head around because it involves a whole new way of thinking to think that they can be challenged. And I don't mean a different angle of thinking about things, I mean an entirely different way (Dworkin does this too). She uses her writing and analyses to demand change, to challenge power structures, to defend women, to find new avenues of defense for women and new avenues for prosecuting perpetrators of male violence. The origins of the Swedish model against prostitution lie with MacKinnon and Dworkin - something that has the potential not only to protect women but also to change mind sets with regards to what women are and what we should have in terms of social and civil rights. This is revolutionary, as is the work she has done to have rape during war recognized as genocidal and as a weapon of war. Her work on consent has the potential to change how we see and prosecute rape and that has potential WRT male violence and power structures in general.

To my mind work like this and that of other radical women changes the way we think in much more powerful ways than thought experiments done in the masculine tradition do. It opens our minds. It allows us to think a bit more freely.

I'm not saying that there is not a place for both but one feels like a necessity and the other like a luxury and a luxury that may bear fruit but which equally may be used against women.

Really I could just have said that I think Butler is ambiguous and that is potentially extremely unhelpful in a situation of pervasive, systematic, Orwellian, ubiquitous to the point of invisibility, extreme violence against half the world's population.

And in answer to why post structuralist ideas have gained traction and eclipsed more radical feminist ideas - well I think it is because they are less stark. They are less dangerous to the status quo.

There is a reason why Butler is successful and Millett and Dworkin are not (in patriarchal terms). MacKinnon has worked her way in becaude she is a legal scholar and logic works in her favour in that context.

See, I read Butler as deeply concerned with violence, most especially the violence against the subject that regulating sex-based gender produces. I honestly read her and thought that she added a moral urgency to the liberation of women, whose oppression she sees as an ongoing violence metaphorically and whose regulation she recognises as being instituted and maintained through acts of violence. In her formulation, women aren't accidentally disadvantaged because they happen to give birth and it happens that our social.systems have been developed without reference to female.subjectivity. Rather, women are produced and.regulated as women strategically, in order to produce and maintain their disadvantage, in order to deny them the position of subject, in order to regulate the deployment of power, agency, wealth, etc. away from her.

So what I'm trying to say that while I recognise philosophy can.feel abstract and because it is concerned with the production of subjectivity, it feels.like an abstracted discourse rather than something concrete I can name, define and boundary within statistical quantities or materially lived facts, it nevertheless feels real and immediate and pressing to me because the ontology of subjectivity is.precisely what I experience everything through, it is the way that I come to know everything and experience everything and interpret everything. So I suppose that I see it as a sort of lense which I am looking through and while I agree, and welcome the work of feminists focusing on the world we are looking at I do regard it as important and not a luxury to inspect the lense through which we examine it, too.

Just as an aside, this discussion is really, really brilliant and I value the contributions everyone is making so much. I've never had a conversation which felt like sort of sustained challenge (in a good way) to the absolute core of how I think about this.