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]

Legibility is about the precise process by which signs are interpreted. They are physical shapes in space, not "just" concepts which we process cognitively. She's a phenomenologist - she's trying to remind us that we are writing corporeal, there is a sensate, felt aspect to sex and gender concepts.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I really wasn't trying to suggest anything was intellectual masturbation.

I just find some of it bewilders me.

I don't find the idea of performance helpful in understanding how we relate to gender roles. That's perhaps naive of me. But I think the connotations of agency and entertainment in 'performance' are really dragging that idea down, and if this is a theory that wants to be precise, or to respond to society as it is, then it cannot ignore the connotations of words.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

out - cross post.

But, writing is a technology. Spoken language is not. I struggle with her, because metaphors of legibility imply (to my mind) that she's conflating technology with innate/learned linguistic processing. And they're not the same, are they?

[OutsSelf]

No, I know, the intellectual masturbation was Carol' s

I have a different idea of performativity and it is specifically that performative actions make reality. I do thing with a double meaning - to achieve my end (I want a cup of tea, say) and because it is socially meaningful (it is a gesture of welcoming, comforting, soothing). So we drink tea together but it's not really because you or I are thirsty

[caroldecker]

outs again how does this help - so we can spot a woman dressed as a man?

Have more thoughts but unable to compose them at this time - back tomorrow

[OutsSelf]

Hmm, spoken language is in one way a technology otherwise why is everyone not speaking English?

Which is an aside really - I think you could use a version of Foucault' s technology of the body to understand Butler's notion of the performance of gender.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Ah, right, of course!

But ... you're not using metaphors of written culture.

I agree spoken language can make things happen in the real world. Sure.

And I agree some speech acts/gestures can convey more and differently from their surface meaning.

But is that what Butler means? And if it is - why use a metaphor drawn from written culture?

It make me really uncomfortable, because I feel as if she never really manages to connect with the real, physical wordl, and I feel as if she assumes that the normative understanding of the written word is the only meaningful one. She universalises it into a metaphor, as if everyone will experience it in the same way.

(Or, you know, I may be totally missing the point.)

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

outs - but spoken languages have features in common, and often common ancestors. Written languages, partly by virtue of developing so much later, are that much more artificial.

I think we're broadly 'wired' for spoken language. Written language is, obviously, responsive to our needs (at least at crucial points in development), but I don't think it is innate in the same way. Could well be wrong.

[OutsSelf]

Ha ha, so it's very late and I'm up very early for a conference so I'm just going to speak as quickly as possible.

The way you have written about cognition and writing and understanding sounds bodiless. In a strange way, so do the gestures you describe, as if they are discrete signs I make from time to time, which sometimes have a surface and hidden meaning. But Butler is a phenomenologist; everything is rooted in the sensate - writing, cognition, understanding all have a lived and felt dimension. This lived dimension is where everything feels real. So Butler is saying, my lived felt experience of being female as aside from being feminine is produced by the actions (including spoken worlds) and gestures that I make rather than the other way round. She sees no need to connect to the physical real world because that precisely is the dimension she sees herself working in

[OutsSelf]

Also, in legibility, in the way that writing has a sort if artificially, so do the languages of the body, which feel innate and given but are in fact technologies that have interpolated us into (in this case) the social.project of constructing a sex based hierarchical duality

[OutsSelf]

Interpellated

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

That's strange - I mean the exact opposite.

I think that Butler doesn't pay enough attention to physicality.

Obviously, languages of the body aren't completely innate (and surely for feminists they feel very non-innate as we're very conscious of being forced to act in certain ways). But that does not mean that they're effectively 'written'.

If sex is ultimately a construct we understand through signs - what about rape? It is a physical reality. What can we do about that?

I don't see her answering that question, which is what makes me uneasy. And her whole framework doesn't seem to me to provide a position from which to say 'this is absolutely true - rape is wrong' because she is interested in the ways perception and language shape everything. Ok, fine - but feminists need to be able to say 'this is absolutely wrong'.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I think part of my difficulty is you're talking as if technologies are entirely interchangeable - I say writing is a technology (in that it's not innate and we learn to do it) and you say yes, but so is gesture. It is, but not in the same way. The one is much more rooted in the body than the other.

I'm uncomfortable with 'legibility' as a metaphor for every kind of understanding as it seems to me to fail to acknowledge that we're not theoretical constructs of human beings who process information in the exact same way no matter what we're doing.

[almondcakes]

I am more and more confused. Surely technology refers to culture created through using a tool. Writingis technological. You at leastneed a stick and a bit of clay. Spoken language usually requires notechnology.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

What I mean by technology is something learned and artificial (and yes, I'd been thinking of writing with tools).

I accept outs point, though, that obviously spoken language isn't something that just happened one day, through the innate brilliance of our minds. Language is constructed, and so are gestures (I guess there, your arm or hand are 'tools' and it's true that different cultures interpret gestures differently, so we do have to learn them).

Ok, I get the basic point (or I think I do). What ever sign we use to make meaning (a written word, a spoken sound, a v sign with my fingers), it doesn't ever completely map onto the exact meaning. There's always a bit of room for confusion.

Fine.

This is even true of very concrete physical things, I'm sure.

My issue with using 'legible' and 'illegible' the way Butler does, is it acts as if all of these ways of communicating are fundamentally the same, and all located at the 'very very artificial' end of the spectrum.

There are loads of people who don't habitually use 'reading' as a metaphor for understanding. It's not universal or automatic. I feel slightly suspicious that, in using that metaphor, she's sort of taken all the social and education privileged of people like her, and assumed it comes naturally. And then she's applied that to everything (speaking and gesturing and physical actions), in order to call attention to how much they're only understood through the matrix of language.

But in all of that, where's the place to say, as a feminist, rape is wrong. Violence is wrong. Or to say, yes, gender is a cultural construct but the situation is actually worse for women than men.

That's the step I'm not getting. For a theory to be valid, surely it has to offer some kind of 'and here's the solution ...' bit?

[almondcakes]

Outsself, what you (and Judith Butler presumably) refer to as performativity is just what everyone else refers to as body language (as far as I can make out). I assume thatthe reason Butler prefers the term performativity is that it allows her to conflate states like pregnancy which are not primarily about social communication with those that are like smiling in a certain way.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I didn't think that was it.

I thought performativity was much wider than that.

[almondcakes]

Lrd, we already have a word for things that are learned and artificial -culture. What is the point of using technology to mean culture? That leaves no word available when we want to describe creating things through using tools (not just the body).

[almondcakes]

So what is performativity then? I am only going off the explanation in Outsself's post.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Oh, sorry - I didn't mean that as criticism, just weighing in to hope outs will explain. I don't think it is body language, from what Butler says, but I don't understand either.

I agree with you about culture. I only use technology because Butler seems to be in the process of arguing about what culture is, so I need another word. I'm really only using technology to show I get that Butler thinks all of this is constructed. I wouldn't feel the need to do that on FWR generally because most of us already accept culture is constructed.

I have to say, I feel incredibly stupid on this thread, so I hope I'm not making people feel impatient. It's just, it's helpful to be able to say the stupid things and work forwards. I know I could just ignore it all and say I think she's talking cobblers, but I'd like to get to understand it on her terms first.

[almondcakes]

I don't think that you are being stupid LRD.

I just disagree with post modernists (im this case Butler) using words which have a precise meaning to mean something completely different, particularly if that reduces the ability of people to make distinctions between different categories. It is Orwellian.

The whole binaries are bad thing is Orwellian in itself. Trying to reduce people's capacity to be able to say something is or is not x is damaging to basic communication.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Well, I bloody feel stupid! But thank you.

I think I am struggling with the same thing, though I am sure there are words I've picked up as jargon that I do the same thing with.

I think I agree with you about binaries, though I wouldn't have put it like that, because I associate binaries with the patriarchy making us feel we fit in one of two boxes, which is also damaging. But, what you're saying is, I think, what I'm getting at with my feeling there is no place in her theory to say 'such-and-such is wrong'.

And I do think this is very much dominant ideology, because I read Rhiannon Cosslett (who is not one of this life's intellectual giants and fair enough for her) insisting that people who called her out for victim blaming lacked 'nuance'. And she wrote as if this was self-evidently a bad thing. I think that's part of the same attitude Butler has. And it seems to be really widely accepted.

Now, nuance can be great. But it isn't great in and of itself. And there is a time for saying no, sorry, there is no 'nuance' to be had here: rape is wrong.

[almondcakes]

My other issue with it is that it keeps attempting to define how the human brain works without any actual reference to the whole field of psychology.

The whole social meaning and senseof self being created by the body 'creating' signs or the body 'writing.' What has that got to do with how the mind works?

Firstly, if I touch an object in a particular gestural way, the immediate calculations are done in the neurons in the hands, not the brain. So the observer is not getting most of the meaning created through the gesture, because they didn't carry it out and so most sensory information created by it isn't available to them.

Secondly, only part of the brain deals with sense of self. A lot of emotion and sensory calculating is carried out with no reference to sense of self, so the idea that somebody performing femininity (whatever that means) is made female in their sense of self is not even neccesarily true; it is just an assumption. I don't identify as a bird if I flap my arms about, but Iprocess a lot of sensory information and experience emotional states by doing so.

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

I don't know a lot of psychology at all.

But I'm really uncomfortable with that too.

[almondcakes]

No, I don't know a lot about psychology either. I just happened to read some papers recently on gesture and neurons, and on activities that reduce brain functioning that amplify sense of self rather than emotional states.

People on this board know a lot collectively about class analysis and the study of society, and have been able to critique gender, gender identity and so on from that perspective.

But I think we lack a feminist psychologist. The whole thing of insisting people have a gender identity when it is defined in a really vague to the point of no meaning way surely has psychological consequences, not just in terms of gender, but in terms of making people think that feminism, happiness or morality is achieved through some kind of very strong sense of self? Maybe a strong sense of identity actually makes people unhappy. Otherwise why do people use techniques to 'quieten' down sense of self so they can be happier - like prayer, meditation, psychedelic drug use, chanting etc.

Sorry, rambling.