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]

Sorry, I went silent - I can't muster the intellectual level (or possibly just understand the opacity of language) for this thread when I'm on the go!

basil - I agree with you that really striking, important ideas are usually simply, but I think you can batter away trying to understand them and finding them really frustrating for ages, too. As people do with feminism - say with the concept of patriarchy. I think it's really simple, and I can explain it to myself in small words and so on, but I also remember finding it bewilderingly ungraspable, and reading feminist theory and having absolutely no clue. People kept saying 'FFS, LRD, would you go and read a book?!' and I'd think 'huh? I tried, and it's really confusing! How come you understand it?!'

That's pure cognitive dissonance really, but with a touch of the fact that (for me) most things are easier to understand by discussing than by reading the whole book, and I'm willing to push a bit with Butler to see if it all suddenly becomes clear.

I doubt it will, but still.

missrenata - sorry about angering you. Perhaps if I were retired, rather than trying to earn my living, I'd have the luxury not to think about Butler - but as it happens, I don't. I'm aware that comes across as snippy (and it is), but is annoying that some of us have to engage with shite, trite kinds of 'feminism' or 'gender studies' in daily life, and we can't all throw our hands up in horror and declare we'd rather be marching on Downing Street.

I would rather be marching on Downing Street, or volunteering at Refuge or Rape Crisis, TBH. But there's an extent to which I need to get my mind around this stuff because unfortunately, it is one of the dominant ideologies out there.

donkey - that's such a helpful quotation, thanks! I think Nussbaum is absolutely right, TBH.

[wol1968]

scallops

a prediscursive anatomical facticity (my spell-check doesn't recognise it either ) = you either have a female body (ie one with female reproductive organs, whether complete and functional or not, and XX chromosomes) or not, it's not up for debate. In other words, you've either got a pussy or a dick. Prediscursive means before talking about it. Anatomical means pertaining to bodily parts. Facticity isn't a real word but I take it to mean a fancy-sounding academicised version of 'fact'.

I used to define phrases like this all the time in my English degree - annoyed my Literary Theory lecturers no end and probably why I got a 2:2. I am allergic to this sort of BS.

[DonkeySkin]

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.

Agree 100% with this Basil, and Miss Renata, while I understand your bewilderment that feminists these days spend so much time arguing about trans issues (I'd also much prefer to be concentrating on issues that would improve the material conditions of women's lives), we have to push back on this or else we lose all hope of even being able to talk about women's oppression coherently. If we agree that a woman is simply a someone who performs feminine sex-role stereotypes, or an idea in a man's head, and that female biology is irrelevant and/or non-existant, then we lose all our language and the very basis of feminist analysis.

Trans politics in its current form, which also happens in large part to be based on the pomo genderist nonsense advanced by Butler and her ilk, is an existential threat to feminism, and, as Basil intimates, all of it - trans ideology, 'sex positivism' and choice politics - is pure backlash to second-wave feminists' unflinching articulation of the reality of male dominance and female oppression.

Indeed, Butler has built a glittering career on replacing actual feminism with a pseudo-feminism whose central tenet is that sex-based oppression - nay, sex itself - does not exist. When you think about whose interests this idea serves, you don't need to puzzle about why her academic career - in spite of the utter turgidity of her thought and expression - has been so successful.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Absolutely agree again, donkey.

This stuff happened in, what the 90s? And you end up with generations of people who think that it's 'sexist' not to have a man's officer for every woman's officer at university, or who whinge that there's a women's editor in the Guardian and no men's officer.

Yes, it'd be lovely if they just stopped and no-one ever debate the need for feminism again, but they won't. And it is clearly connected to all the rest, the rape and porn culture and the violence, they're not separate issues.

Darn.

I think I've tipped from 'trying to read Butler' to 'being fucking fed up with Butler'. Again.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Oh, and sorry, I forgot to comment because I got distracted, but zennor, I think the cats are cute but I still have no clue.

[AskBasil]

"But there's an extent to which I need to get my mind around this stuff because unfortunately, it is one of the dominant ideologies out there. "

Fuck me, that's incredibly scarey. I had no idea it was one of the dominant ideologies of our time, I actually thought it was just a load of bollocks on the internet. I guess because I don't move in academic circles and I'm slightly older and don't bother to read newspapers anymore, I don't know anyone who has heard of JB or even any of this genderqueering bollocks, outside of a small group of radical feminists whom I've mostly met on MN. One of my best friends is a lesbian of 30 and she's never heard of any of this shit.

But yes it is important to engage with because the next generation of people who are growing up and coming of age now, will have been brought up with this shit if we don't challenge it - the next generation of guardian readers will have some vague idea that sex is on a continuum and people who argue with that are just silly transphobes, just as my generation has a vague idea that sex is biological, gender is socialised. The ideas filter down into the mainstream and while my mainstream is pretty much old-school lefty and feminist, that will not be the case for a younger generation. So we do need people who have the patience and determination to fight through the smokescreen, to get to the bollocks at the heart of it, to do that and to share it with those of us with less patience and application. Thanks LRD.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

No, I think it really is a dominant ideology.

Not necessarily in the format of 'this is Judith Butler's thinking,' but certainly in the 'this is how the world is' format.

Genderqueering is only a very small part of it. Trans issues are only a very small part of it.

The idea that 'woman' isn't an important, meaningful category, that everyone should just lighten up and just enjoy feeling empowered, that we should all second-guess rape allegations and pretend that moral absolutes ('killing women is wrong, children') don't exist - those things are all over the place.

I know there are plenty of people with their heads screwed on tight who were never taken in by any of it, sure. Not disputing that.

[FloraFox]

Sorry for jumping in late. I'm in two minds about whether to pay any attention to Butler's writing. On the one hand, I agree with others like basil and donkey that Butler's writing style obscures the fact that she isn't saying much that is significant. A number of people on this thread have interpreted Butler in a much more sensible way than I think Butler intended (esp gin ). However, as basil says, her work seems to be having an impact on young people, especially on trans issues which makes me think it should be understood and addressed. I can't help wondering when scientists and doctors are going to get involved in these issues and say "hang on, sex is not on a continuum and we are sexually dimorphic". At the moment, scientists are not engaged in these discussions at all and any discussions I have with scientists or medics leave them completely baffled that these ideas are given any traction.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I wish scientists and medics would weigh in.

I know I'm harping on about trans issues having said they're not central, but something that really bothers me is how many people believe that surgery is both commonplace and pretty successful. Loads of people seem to think you come out as trans, you have surgery, and then you're pretty much sorted. They have no idea how many problems there are with surgery and how many people (probably quite sensibly given said problems) do not want it, or are terrified about it.

And the fact that this idea has any traction at all - the idea you can pretty easily just reconstruct a functioning penis or a reasonable facsimile of a vagina - seems to me to be very much part of this ideology. Cf. the bollocks (word used advisedly) about bodies being constructs, which I cannot follow.

[FloraFox]

I agree LRD I recall reading somewhere that the determination of whether MTF surgery is successful is whether the constructed "vagina" is capable of being penetrated for PI"V", that being its "function". I also read on twitter recently that there are no doctors currently working in the NHS in England on genital surgery for transition (not sure if that's true). It made me wonder whether doctors are reluctant to perform these procedures on healthy bodies.

[PetulaGordino]

My mum is a GP. She has had trans people as patients. Obviously there is pt confidentiality so she doesn't talk about specifics. The impression I get is that from her POV is that the trans people she sees are vulnerable people who need support and compassion. She is non-committal about whether surgery/hormone treatment is the right type of support - neither for nor against, just not sure (and of course it's beyond her level of responsibility). I think she just comes from the position that this is a person in pain who has come to me for help.

[gincamparidryvermouth]

And the fact that this idea has any traction at all - the idea you can pretty easily just reconstruct a functioning penis or a reasonable facsimile of a vagina

Yes. I think trans people are being lied to, to be honest, and I think it is profoundly, unforgivably immoral to encourage someone who is already obviously suffering and vulnerable to have surgery that is so devastating and so irreversible, and also absolutely not guaranteed to give them a satisfactory result. I get the impression that creating a penis is regarded as far trickier than creating a vagina, because a penis has to do something, whereas everyone knows that a vagina is just a hole, right? Nothing more to it, right?

Have you read the comment thread on GT about reconstruction? It is incredibly distressing. I even find "top surgery" for T2M transgenders distressing to think about - and yes, I know, what the fuck's it got to do with me? They're not my breasts. But I see photos of 17, 18-year old girls standing with their arms around each others shoulders, bare chested, proudly showing off the scars where their breasts used to be and I just want to cry (I should stress that I feel exactly the same about all forms of cosmetic surgery, for men as well as women).

And I'm very sad but not surprised to read what Flora says about the functionality of neovaginas. What else could they be for, apart from penetration? No babies are ever going to come out of them, so they're only really for putting things into. That's the definition of a woman right there, I guess: if you can get something out of it or put something into it, it's a woman.

[AskBasil]

Yes.

I think there is something brutal about the way the medical profession is happily experimenting on very vulnerable men who are desperately unhappy in their bodies.

An awful lot of medical knowledge must have been gathered from the willing guinea pigs for whom doctors have had too much contempt to actually help. After all, they're men who aren't performing masculinity and aren't happy with the way they're supposed to perform it, they're letting the side down, so the usual rules about medical ethics don't apply to them.

[gincamparidryvermouth]

I want people to start suing, TBH.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I wasn't even thinking about trans people themselves (though I see I should have been ).

I was thinking of people who are simply not aware of any debate - who're not trans, or feministy, or in circles where this gets debated. I reckon a lot of those people are just unquestioning about the medicine of it.

The same people are happily 'post-feminist'.

The little I understand of Butler, it seems to me either this is something she had a hand in creating as a world view, or she's picked up on it coming and academicized it. I wouldn't know which.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

basil - yes, and it seems it was partly the medical establishment that supported the idea of asking people who want surgery to live as a stereotype of masculinity/femininity, is that right? I am not sure. It just seems such a conflicted, paternalistic situation.

Sure, for all surgery you have to make sure people understand the risks, and I can see a case for treating all surgery that's 'cosmetic' in some sense as needing really careful counselling. But no-one when you go in for a boob job insists you wear balloons on your chest and live as a large-breasted woman (and, more importantly, no-one claims that you need to develop the classic 'large breasted woman personality' too).

This seems quite patronizing to trans people wanting surgery, and at the same time, extremely crap for reifying gender stereotypes.

[OutsSelf]

Right, I read Judith Butler as an angry 20yr old when All Feminists Were Good, so I read from the point of view that JB was out to liberate. And I haven't since. So this is how young, idealistic Outs read the JB stuff. I'm sort of going to do this backward.

The most important thing is that JB worries that there might not be a stable subject for.feminism i.e. woman, and woman is already conceived of.within a binary system which ipso facto will always lead to discrimination. So fighting for.the liberation of women in this particular sense might also be causing the intellectual conditions that equate to the long term oppression of people cast as women. This doesn't mean that those people shouldn't be fought for and liberated and aren't experiencing sex based discrimination. But the sex basis of that is not so stable and innate. Sure you've got your xx and your xy but the physical bodies that are.produced don't fall into a simple binary, it's more like a spectrum.

Just thinking that through in relation to the kinds of sex based discrimination named up thread and we could suppose that people we think currently of as.men could be raped and subject to reproductive control. Which I'm only saying because this way of thinking is more like a thought experiment than a description of reality, but in our reality we tend to believe that having a vagina is fundamental to those impressions but you could dream up a world where it isn't. The other stuff like having babies might only be possibilities for certain kinds of bodies but those possibilities aren't straightforwardly binary and also they need not form the basis or means of oppression. Again, in thought experiment world we could be living in a world where men's bollocks designate them as fundamentally, biologically and innately fragile and subject them to control based on this. JB did not write this, I'm just trying to make the argument work. The argument that biological sex isn't an innate, immutable fact but is instead mobilised as a discursive reality to produce gender

[caroldecker]

Not read JB (thankfully from what I am hearing), but you could dream up all sorts of worlds, and people do all the time, except they are artists, not academics.
Surely we have to tackle the world as is, and, debating the basis of gender and sex is only helpful if it leads to a solution, otherwise it is lazy intellectual masterbation in a nice college.

[OutsSelf]

The thing about legibility is that it is not just about it being understandable but that gender is performative. So I communicate by means of the actions of my body, they aren't simply understandable but understandable because I do things in physical space - the way I hold my cup, the way I walk etc. all perform my gender. Think Iris Marion Young who is both spot on and also I think a precursor to JB. And it is like an act of writing, of making signs in space. Just like a writer, when I make those signs legible to you, simultaneously they become legible to me. In performing my gender, I simultaneously sex my body as female in my mind and yours. This isn't so much in the big things like wearing a certain style of dress or making "female" choices but in the tiny details of the angle of my head when I listen to you or the position of my body in relation to the seat. In this way I produce my body not only as gendered and feminine socially but also in relation to my belief in its actual femaleness and conversant beliefs about it's strengths, shapes, vulnerabilities and agencies. Again, think Iris Marion Young - of course my body is relatively weaker when I have been doing a lifetime of relatively fragile movements in comparison to other bodies playing rugby etc.

I know that how I perform my gender does not produce the fact of my vagina or how I'm able to give birth. But there again, simply 'being' female doesn't guarantee me a vagina connected to a womb, the ability to give birth, etc etc. And it might not guarantee that I will be subject to oppression based on that except in the case that we have constructed it as innately meaningful, and created a social world in which my being cast as female or seeming as if I have got the ability to bear children has become socially meaningful

[scallopsrgreat]

Thank you wol1968! It's appreciated!

As you were.

[OutsSelf]

X post, sorry. Well, if the world as it actually is constructs a hierarchical duality which need not exist then it might be worth arguing against.

[caroldecker]

outsself so?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

outs - thanks!

That is more or less where I came into it, too.

Of course, we could dream up a world where sex-based oppression was different and people (including me) start threads asking what a matriarchy would be like. I guess that's it. So I get that second bit, even if I think the response is the 'c'mon, let's live in the real world' one.

But I don't get the binary system bit. I mean, I don't see how it is helpful, practically or theoretically.

carol - see, I don't mind dreaming up other worlds, so long as there is some use to the process. I mean, if someone imagines a gender-equal world, they might then work backwards and figure out what would be needed to create that world. Fine. But otherwise, what I mind isn't that it's useless - it's that it's actively damaging to keep on pretending issues are only theoretical and not real.

outs (again- sorry, just seemed more sensible to approach your two posts separately) - but why does she use 'legible' at all? I don't follow. I mean, I'm up on my theory and I do get that gesture can be interpreted. I get that signs require interpretation for us to accept them.

I do not get why legibility is a useful term? As opposed to something that is interpreted/understood/recognized. She seems to find it crucial as she uses it or variants on a theme, often.

(I hope it's clear, but in case not - I am just struggling with this, and asking what may seem to be stupid questions because I worry I'm lacking the basics.)

[OutsSelf]

Also artists are not principally engaged with dreaming up other worlds but usually engaged with reflecting this one. Even Utopian thinking is in dialogue with the world as it is. But thinking about world in which what we commonly assume to be real or given is put into question is actually a fundamental part of social processes. So I wouldn't be so quick to write off highly theoretical work as "intellectual masturbation". The idea of performing one's gender, which is such a useful way to think about how we collaborate with gender roles, come from this branch of philosophy

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Cross post.

outs - yeah, sure, we could all argue against hierarchy or duality. But we need some coherent reason to argue, right? And I think we have coherent reasons.

I don't like the current hierarchy because it places men above women (amongst many other issues). I don't like duality because it accords us very limited positions.

But saying that isn't enough.