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!

[PetulaGordino]

i don't want to have assumptions made about my preferences or skills based on my appearance or biological sex, any more than someone who identifies as one of the genderqueer groups (my sincere apologies if i haven't used the right terminology - please do correct)

[almondcakes]

I definitely think we need to be all together to fight back, but we can still recognise difference. I can see that I need to prioritise the issues faced by those of reproductive age.

[scallopsrgreat]

"But queer theory seems keen to not take apart the two sexes, but just add more groups." I think that's the crux. It seems to be that instead of getting to the root of the problem and deconstruct they want to tinker on the top of the problem and me find a 'workaround'.

And thanks almondcakes for the much clearer than Butler explanation .

[andiewithanie]

if we accept that sexuality is constructed, and that humans are cultural animals, then isn't it essentially a set of prescribed roles that not only polarise physical sex (making mates more obvious), but create needs or personal shortcomings that someone of the opposite sex is able to fulfil. i realise this is problematic, in that it assumes that whole guff about someone making them 'complete'.

apologies for any lack of education, triteness, obviousness, and just plain 'yeah, you really don't get it' contained within.

[PetulaGordino]

almond i do think that there is a need for groups who have similar experiences to be able to identify themselves and each other in some way, for support, awareness-raising, activism if necessary etc

[gincamparidryvermouth]

But if gender and sex are cultural constructs, then anyone could become the woman

I think you've cracked it here. If it was a choice - if it's always been a choice - then why have there not always been equal numbers of male and female women? It's because it's a fucking shit role, being a woman is a mug's game and no one would opt for it given all the relevant information and a free choice.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I dunno, andie, I just can't see that humans really need mates to be made obvious?

I don't know, maybe there are animals that struggle to identify mates, and maybe at some distant point we did too, but I reckon gender in the complex way it works now must post-date that by a long way.

[caroldecker]

andie I don't see why someone of the opposite sex needs to complete the role.

[almondcakes]

Petula, I am not disagreeing about the need to recognise similarities, but as somebody who is coming to the end of being of reproductive age, I nolonger feel that the burden of the bulk of discrimation is aimed at me.

[gincamparidryvermouth]

if we accept that sexuality is constructed, and that humans are cultural animals

I'm going off at a massive tangent here, but... a few months ago I read a lot around the idea of "conscription into compulsory heterosexuality" and it was REALLY interesting stuff.
We (well, I, anyway) just take it absolutely for granted that sexuality is a massive part of who we are, truly fundamental to our identity as individuals; and something that is inherent and unchangeable ("born this way" etc). The stuff I was reading made me reconsider all of that, but especially the huge, relentless emphasis on the sheer importance of sex, sexual activity, sexuality, in our lives. I wonder how important sex and sexuality actually are as opposed to how important we're constantly told they are.

So much of the oppression of women is related to fucking women and I wonder how interested men would be in fucking women if they weren't constantly told that fucking women was the absolute essence of male identity.

I wonder about the importance of sex and sexuality in other cultures and other eras, and how it affected the roles of women in those societies.

[IrenetheQuaint]

YY gin. As a mostly celibate woman I find myself quite baffled by the continual social obsession with sexual relationships. These days, in my liberal social circle, it is much more transgressive to be happily and deliberately celibate than to be gay. People are genuinely shocked by it.

I've always meant to read Judith Butler and am very grateful to this thread for saving me the hassle talking through her ideas.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

That's really interesting, gin.

I know lots of cultures include plenty of provision for people to be celibate. In medieval England, you could not just be a monk or a nun - it was also possible to be married, have your kids, and then make a mutual vow of celibacy and just live together. It's interesting that it is very socially sanctioned really. But, I'm not sure how it relates to how much freedom women had.

I am unsure that sexuality is or should be unimportant, though (I know that's not exactly what either you or irene is saying). I'm just coming out of a largely sexless marriage and I am fairly conscious that sex is quite important to me. That could of course be conditioning, but I don't think that explains all of it.

I really struggle to follow how sexuality and gender relate - especially for those people who feel their gender is a real, innate thing.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Btw, irene, I am guessing someone will come along sooner or later and be shocked at how awful this thread is to those who understand Butler, so, erm ... sorry if it's lead you up the garden path!

[gincamparidryvermouth]

I'm not sure how it relates to how much freedom women had

Yes, this is a good point - I guess there was still very little economic freedom.

I see what you're saying about your own feelings surrounding the importance of sexuality. I've also been in a sexless relationship and it affected me very badly (the relationship was classically abusive in a number of other ways though, which obviously played a part).
I think that since I started getting into radical feminism, I've very slowly started to see sexual relationships in a different light. My own perspective now is that we conflate sex and intimacy and I think that that is often a really big mistake which has serious consequences when things go wrong. Because we are conditioned (and the conditioning is HARDCORE, once you notice it) from the word go to believe that coupledom - and heterosexual coupledom, at that - is the natural state of human beings, we naturally expect huge things from monogamous heterosexual relationships, which they often can't deliver, and that leads to a lot of unhappiness.

I don't think that the desire for intimacy or even the desire for sex is 100% conditioned, but I do think that (a) it's more under our control than we are led to believe and (b) sex and intimacy are not the same thing. Touching people is very sexualised in our culture so I think we tend to not touch each other a great deal, so often sex is the only time we are really touched by other people... I'm making this up as I go along now, I should probably stop and think it through.

I really struggle to follow how sexuality and gender relate
I think the only connection I was making was really very clunky: sexuality relates to what you do with your genitals and who you do it to; gender is based on what your genitals look like and what purpose they serve. I do think that the massive emphasis on sex/sexuality/sexiness definitely props up patriarchy to a significant degree: it perpetuates the role of women as visual objects and things that exist to be penetrated, for starters.

But actually, now that I think about it, people really do see sexual relationships in terms of the person who penetrates ("the man") and the person who is penetrated ("the woman")... Is that what I mean? Hmmm. I need to think more about this too, evidently!
Mae Martin says it best here, I think!
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=c-2KKHOXnY4#t=413

[IrenetheQuaint]

Sure, LRD - I'm absolutely not saying that sex and sexuality aren't important, or that people shouldn't care about them. We are mammals, after all, and social animals.

It's the assumption that sexual relationships are always, and always should be, central to people's lives from mid-teens to old age that I want to challenge. People are different, and lives have different phases (as your nice mediaeval example makes clear).

[DonkeySkin]

So much of the oppression of women is related to fucking women and I wonder how interested men would be in fucking women if they weren't constantly told that fucking women was the absolute essence of male identity.

I agree with this 100%. It's also why gay men are seen as less than real men.

Since coming across radical feminism, I've also been thinking a lot about how conditioned my own sexuality may be. While both men and women are socially coerced into heterosexual relationships, with women there is the added dimension of psychological coercion, or Societal Stockholm Syndrome.

This is the theory that women trauma-bond to men because of ubiquitous male violence. The fact that some men are violent towards women induces bonding tendencies in women towards men as a group, like hostages bond with their captors. In this scenario, small kindnesses shown in the midst of the threat of violence induce disproportionate feelings of loyalty and warmth towards the captors on the part of their hostages.

So if, for example, a woman is beaten by a man, and is then shown kindness by a different man and a woman, she will have stronger feelings of love and warmth towards the man than the woman, because he resembles the person who attacked her, and she unconsciously associates him with the power to both harm her and take away the harm.

[gincamparidryvermouth]

It's the assumption that sexual relationships are always, and always should be, central to people's lives from mid-teens to old age that I want to challenge

100% agree with this.

I also agree with your previous comment - "These days, in my liberal social circle, it is much more transgressive to be happily and deliberately celibate than to be gay. People are genuinely shocked by it." I have found this too. I don't even try and tell people that it's deliberate and that I'm happy though - the lady doth protest too much and all that.

[gincamparidryvermouth]

Donkey thank you for that - it's given me a bit of a lightbulb moment! I have read about the trauma bonding theory but I didn't really get it. Your explanation makes it make sense.

[ZennorCalling]

Sorry, no time to add anything more meaningful than this:

binarythis.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/

[DonkeySkin]

Just wanted to say something about almondcakes's observation that she could be considered a 'third sex' because she can't gestate children.

Almond (forgive me if this is intrusive), you haven't stated whether this is because you have passed childbearing age, or whether you have fertility issues (although your last post indicated it is the former - again, sorry if this is intrusive). But I would say that in either case, women do not escape being discriminated against as women. Nor are they treated as a class apart from other women. The misogyny and marginalisation that older and infertile women receive is entirely of a piece with sexism in general, in that they are treated this way because women's value under patriarchy is as sex objects or mothers. Men invented the gender system in which women were said to have value not as human beings in their own right, but in terms of how useful they were to men. Men then solely defined women as useful solely for sex and childbearing.

So the social pressure on young women to be sexy and have children, and the conditional rewards they receive for correctly performing these roles (always a double-edged situation - because these same roles also define them as inherently inferior) has the same root as the contempt those same women will get once they get older, or if they cannot or will not perform sexiness/childbearing properly. Such women (whether older/non-compliant or judged 'substandard') are deemed not to be 'proper' women, but that is only because men have defined womanhood as something other than full personhood, and only in terms of women's usefulness to them.

Now that the dominant feminist discourse has been taken over by neoliberalism, there is a tendency to pit women with different issues and at different stages of life against one other in some kind of battle over who has the most/least social privilege. While this is certainly relevant when talking about how women are positioned differently along other axes of social power, such as race and class, it is fundamentally wrong when it comes to sex-based discrimination.

Thus, we see the idea that skinny women hold 'thin privilege' over fat women, young women hold 'youth privilege' over older women, women who observe patriarchal beauty mandates hold 'femme privilege' over those who don't, and so on. I once saw a poster here who identified as genderqueer claiming that women who had given birth held 'mother privilege' over those who hadn't or couldn't. All of this misunderstands what privilege actually is (social power) and obscures the fact that patriarchal standards of thinness, beauty, motherhood, etc never operate to the benefit of any women. Indeed, they are precisely designed not to.

No women ultimately benefit from a culture that objectifies young women and invisibilises older women, or that holds women to impossible standards of thinness and beauty (whether they manage to starve and cut and bleach themselves to meet those standards or not). Mothers are given a token lauded status (indeed women are praised constantly for it - otherwise many of us might opt out altogether) but do mothers, as a group, wield social and economic power? Or is that still largely in the hands of men? If we can't see the common root of sexism that binds all of these issues together and blights women at all stages of life and in many different personal circumstances, then we lose all hope of ever overcoming it.

[MissRenataFlitworth]

I have been celibate for more than 30 years. I chose this path quite deliberately in my mid-30s because I wanted out of the relationships lottery and at the time it was the only way to do so. In my experience, men fell into two groups - the boy children who wanted me to mother them and be responsible for their lives, and the domineering ones who wanted me to be a doormat. Having nothing but contempt for either, I decided to go it alone. There are some decent men out there but I couldn't be bothered to go through all the rubbish to find one.
I agree completely with everything Gin and Donkey have said, and would chuck in the pernicious idea of romantic love which is also all-pervasive. It is dangled in front of women and girls as the reward for putting aside their humanity and self-determination so that they will willingly provide sex on tap, not to mention all the wifework.
It will never happen, but I would love to see women just stop trying to make this stupid system work. No more marriages or partnerships, no more sex, no more babies. No more cleaning and cooking and drudgery. Can't get decent work with fair pay and conditions? Don't accept it. Claim benefits. If we withdrew our emotional and physical labour how long would the patriarchy last? It sure as hell wouldn't be long before the carrot would be withdrawn and the big stick would appear. Then we'd all know what the patriarchy really means.

[AskBasil]

You know what, I was thinking about the utter obscurity of Judith Butler and I know, I know, I've never read her, I just keep coming across stuff like this where I usually give up after 2 paragraphs, I know nothing about this gender shit, but FGS - the biggest ideas in history - the really cut-through ones, like Socialism, Christianity, Feminism etc., are simple. Whether you agree with them or not, they can be understood by any idiot with the motivation to engage with them. They don't need to dress themselves up with impenetrable language and incomprehensible syntax. They are clear and accessible and eager to communicate, not wrapped round with mystifying crap.

I have a deep, deep suspicion of anything that is so obscure that intelligent people who are actually trying to wrestle with the ideas, are simply baffled because the language seems to be being used as a barrier to understanding rather than a tool to enable understanding. I'm not talking about complex stuff like John Donne whose poetry James I described as like the peace of Christ, surpassing all understanding - his poetry is perfectly understandable if you're prepared to read it a couple of times and think, or TS Eliot or any of those other obscure types who people criticise for not being instantly accessible. I don’t think people need to be instantly accessible to be valid and worthwhile, but there's a difference between needing effort and thought and needing an expert-interpreter to explain it to the mignons and if it's the latter, that for me is the sign of an idea which at its core, is probably not that robust which is why it needs to be dressed up in the first place.

Sorry if that sounds philistine and kneejerk, I’m really trying not to be, but I simply do not believe that she’s got something better to offer the world than Andrea Dworkin or Karl Marx or John Stuart Mill and they don’t need to present it with linguistic masturbation thrown in. I’m filled with antipathy every time I read a paragraph as I’m reminded of all those ghastly male authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence, full of portentous pompous willy-waving bollox all strutting their stuff and signifying nothing. I had a flash of memory of reading Mary Daly talking about Virginia Woolf taking the piss out of male celebrations and ceremonies, all full of risible shite designed to elicit awe and respect and mystify and overawe the watchers so that they can't see the crap at the core of it. This sort of shite seems to me to be in exactly that mould – that tradition of over-important, puffed up men constructing mysterious awesome screens in which they hide their non-existent glory like the fucking Wizard of Oz, with the same amount of substance.

Sorry, that turned into a rant.

[DonkeySkin]

[Romantic love] is dangled in front of women and girls as the reward for putting aside their humanity and self-determination so that they will willingly provide sex on tap, not to mention all the wifework.

MissRenata, I agree. I'm in a LTR relationship with a man, but if we were to break up, I can't see myself ever pursuing a relationship with a man again. Just can't do it anymore (and can't believe the stuff I used to put up with when I was younger).

I also agree that if women were to withdraw their sexual, domestic and emotional labour from men en masse, the response would likely be extremely ugly. I mean, look at the strength of the MRA movement, and that's just in response to women asking for basic formal equality.

Basil, Butler's writing style is designed to make people feel stupid, like she's saying something so profound that ordinary mortals can't grasp it. It's smoke and mirrors to disguise the moral and intellectual bankruptcy at the heart of her arguments.

Martha Nussbaum summed it up in her definitive takedown of Butler, 'The Professor of Parody':

[She] bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler's books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

perso.uclouvain.be/mylene.botbol/Recherche/GenreBioethique/Nussbaum_NRO.htm

[MissRenataFlitworth]

Yes indeed, Donkey. I should perhaps say that I have never been raped or abused in any way. I left my husband because he was a weak and needy person who tried to dump his emotional wellbeing into my lap while being incapable of offering me any emotional support in return. There were one or two short-lived relationships after that but they were all the same. The city I live in was a hotbed of radical feminism in the 70s and I did a lot of reading and talking with friends. It was all very exhilarating, but the more I learned, the more angry I got. So I decided no more relationships. Brought my son up, got a degree, worked - the usual stuff.

Now I'm retired and finding myself as angry as I ever was - like Val in the Women's Room. This isn't the kind of society we wanted and fought for, and I feel massively let down by the choice feminists, the post-modernists, the pornography apologists - you know, the kind of women who go into social work and refuse to help twelve year olds who are being raped and abused because they say these little girls have made a "lifestyle choice". It feels as if we're fiddling while Rome burns. All this angst about a few transactivists, while legal aid has been slashed, the already-pathetic funding for refuges has been slashed, men who refuse to pay maintenance for their children get away with it while the courts force women to hand over traumatised children to their useless abusive fathers in the name of some mythical bloody parent-child relationship and threaten to throw them in jail if they don't do it. Men who ignore court orders for access, of course are not pursued.

I'm sorry; I don't mean to get at anybody on here. Of course the theoretical side of feminism is important, and it is interesting to discuss and share stuff. And on a forum all we can do is discuss. But it won't, as my granny used to say, buy the baby a new bonnet.

[AskBasil]

Yes the hijacking of feminism by the trans movement does make it look as though it's a deliberate MRA plot.

If men had wanted to undermine women's claim to humanity, they could not have done better than embrace the ideology of prostitution and other sex work as empowerment, feminism being all about individual choice and men actually being women just because they say they are.

Haven't they done well?