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!

Outsself, I think my issue is the difference between saying there are particular bodies and these inevitably lead to oppresssion, and that it is only particular bodies that can be oppressed in particular ways.

One of the core forms of the oppression of women is through acts of violence and control around conception, pregnancy and childbirth. It isn't inevitable that the female body leads to particular violent acts against it, but it is inevitable that such particular violentacts cannot be carried out against the male body.

That is the tenet of Butlerism that has been taken up by queer theory, and it also explains her wide appeal, IMO. Talking about gender as a corrupt system of power in which men deliberately oppress women makes most people (including most feminists) extremely uncomfortable. They would rather talk about literally anything else and Butler's endless obscurities and sophistry gives them the excuse to do so. For men, it lets them off the hook completely, and for women, it is very appealing to imagine that we can eliminate sex-based oppression simply by thinking or talking about it differently.

I agree with this DonkeySkin and thanks for the link.

Which kind of answers, for me, Buffy's question about discussions like these. Butler bothers me because I think she is part of the backlash. This is feminism modified to misquote MacKinnon. Also I'm sick of coming across criticisms of MacKinnon by Butler - I think it is careerist of her and I think she is playing to patriarchy whilst getting to be adored for being all subversive and hip and superior. I think her work is elitist and often self-serving, she has a bit of a cheek to make digs about MacKinnon who actually helps women. Butler would piss me off a whole lot less if she didn't make comments like this;

Catharine MacKinnon's work sets up such a reductive causal relationship between sexuality and gender that she came to stand for an extreme version of feminism that had to be combatted. But it seems to me that to combat it through a queer theory that dissociates itself from feminism altogether is a massive mistake.

Catharine MacKinnon has become so powerful as the public spokesperson for feminism, internationally, that I think that feminism is going to have to start producing some powerful alternatives to what she's saying and doing - ones that can acknowledge her intellectual strength and not demonise her, because I do think there's an anti-feminist animus against her, which one should be careful not to encourage. Certainly, the paradigm of victimisation, the over-emphasis on pornography, the cultural insensitivity and the universalisation of "rights" - all of that has to be countered by strong feminist positions. What's needed is a dynamic and more diffuse conception of power, one which is committed to the difficulty of cultural translation as well as the need to rearticulate "universality" in non-imperialist directions. This is difficult work and it's no longer viable to seek recourse to simple and paralysing models of structural oppression.

From here.

Two pot shots at MacKinnon in an interview about Queer Theory in which the interviewer doesn't even mention MacKinnon.

Buffy, the stuff that you described earlier about thinking critically about data/studies/reports on male domestic violence - you say that it is using 'post structuralist frameworks'. Really? Did post-structuralism invent critical thinking and skepticism? Also with regards to the notion of 'The Truth' - I think it is fashionable at the moment to find the idea of the truth rather unsophisticated. And it is a fashion that I think is not helpful to social justice movements. Feminists in general agree on the idea of there being different perspectives and use concepts like the Overton Window, the female perspective, cultural hegemony, etc. And these things are intended to highlight the fact that what you are told is the truth is not always the truth. But that is not to say that the truth does not exist.

This is reminding me of what we discussed upthread about intersectionality/the existence of women as a class. The truth exists for the powerful - it is just the powerless who are denied it. Which is why IMO abstract academic books endlessly examining 'The Truth' of systems of oppression and hierarchy are not helpful to fighting that oppression and hierarchy. It suits the oppressors down to the ground for the oppressed to spend their time questioning their ability to detect the truth (about their lived experiences for crying out loud).

I don't think that can be answered. You can work with people you vehemently disagree with on particular issues. People do it all the time.

What I mean is that it would depend on the specifics of what was being worked on!

I guess I'm asking because I, like, really love you guys and it feels very wrong that people who all believe in something so important are getting stuck on something that feels relatively minor point of perspective to me. Maybe that's the problem?

Agreed. I think we could all be sitting round a table in our women's action office, and have this disagreement, but find consensus on what social actions we'd want to take to forward the liberation of women.

We might disagree on how the press release framed the issue.

Am coming back shortly. Not ignoring you!

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.

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.

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.

their ideas

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)

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.

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).

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?

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.

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, 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.