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!

Does no one do psychology?

I dunno if this is relevant, but a friend of mine who studied philosophy said that he'd read medics talking about the way that you can (apparently?) identify neurons firing in the brain before someone consciously makes a decision to do something, and claiming this was philosophically important because it disproved free will. And my friend's philosophy teacher thought this was a load of bull, because if you make the 'self' so small everything is defined as being external to it (like here, where the implication is that the conscious self is smaller than the brain firing its neurons), then of course you're going to find more and more of the stuff we think is fundamental to identity, is 'outside' the self.

I think that might be relevant here, though I need a psychologist to explain. I think this is some of the issue I have with Butler, that you can keep splitting hairs about what we're doing because we're conditioned to do it, and what we're doing because it's part of who we are as people. But ultimately, you end up reducing 'identity' down to something very, very, very tiny - or you end up going the other way and saying everything has to do with identity.

I think that consciousness and sense of self (identity) are not the same thing. I'm not suggesting that people aren't aware of, say, the fact they are holding a box, having a wee, feeling excitement on a roller coaster, or having natural hallucinations during meditation.

I am saying that not everything we have a sensory experience of or feel as an emotion registers as part of our sense of self. An individual can experience something and know themselves to be experiencing it without it being about their sense of identity, and indeed an amplified sense of identity may reduce sensory, emotional and creative functioning.

Ugh, am at a conference so not really able to post, will try and post later.

Performativity is when an action changes reality or creates its meaning, body language is not really performative so much as communicative.

In our current culture rape is performative because it both achieves a certain end for the perpetrator but also reinscribes gender and sex hierarchies as well as producing a terror effect not only on the individual but on women as a class. In the way it is a weapon of war it is also performative

All actions change reality. I don't understand how it is decided which actions are performative and which ones are not.

Right, but the power of specifically performative acts is in that they posit and require an audience, it is specifically the audience who is changed by the act and not necessarily the actor of the person acted on

So a performative act is a communicative act that changes the audience. How do you decide which communicative acts change the audience and which do not?

But communication requires an audience too, surely?

outs, I hope your conference is going well and I really appreciate you taking the time on this!

And in your rape example, rape is only performative if there are witnesses. A rape which isn't seen by anyone other than the rapist and the victim is not performative, by your definition.

I really dislike the idea of rape as performative.

I am aware of course that she doesn't intend that to be a triggering or upsetting concept, but it is.

And this is where I struggle. The rhetoric she's using is so out of touch with how people actually feel. It's the same as when she acknowledges discrimination against women does exist, but writes it as if she can move on from that point without expending time and energy being furious about it.

I dislike it too LRD.

If a performative act is one that changes the audience not the actor or person acted upon, how can peformativity be powerful for women, when so much of what women do is pushed into a private sphere where there is no audience?

I don't think it could be.

But I don't think that's even the root problem - the root problem is, women are already accustomed to their actions being analysed as if the person who defines them is their audience, not themselves. Why add to it, if you want to be a feminist?

Sure, it might be accurate to say that rape is performative for society as a whole, and the idea of it does keep sending out the message that women are the sex slave class. But why not focus instead on how women who've been raped could think about things? It feels the wrong way around.

Okay I am not doing well at this.

Communication can just happen between two people but performativuty is talking about how that interaction plays to non involved participants. It does not imply that rape is only meaningful if it is witnessed but iinstead its oppressive power is multiplied through the performative dimension. It does not deny that rape is really used against real women to opress them.

The classic performative action is the wedding ceremony. where the ritual words and actions between two participants change the social world of those around them even if they aren't there directly to witness. People who don't witness are still an audience to this act because they now reorganise the social world around the married couple

Performative statements were already precisely defined prior to Butler. Her describing gender as performative is contrary to the definition that includes marriage, hiring, finding guilty etc.

Much of bio sex is inaction, not action, so how can it be a performative act?

Well, Butler is talking about performative acts. Performativity is not a regime of thought that was neatly defined then Butler came and fucked it up. Performativity is discussed as part of the aesthetic regime which is in turn understood (think Ranciere) as the political. Performativity is precisely the register in which one man's act of violence against one woman comes to participate in wider structures of oppression; and one woman striking one man does not act oppressively against all men because it lacks performative power. Because a woman striking a man has no corollary in the aesthetic regime of how we have constructed male-female relationships, it has no performative power. It does not perform that aesthetic. However, when a man strikes a woman it performs an aesthetic which is recognised and has a conceptual position which Ranciere describes as sensible (and clearly political).

The way to think about performance and gender is to remember that JB is writing after de Certau, Bourdieu and Foucault. In this formulation, we are consituted by our performance of social roles both to ourselves and to others. This isn't something that we do in certain situations but an ongoing accummulation of a social body which is marked or inscribed (hence the notion of legibility) by culture. Right now in this instant in the way that you sit in relation to the screen and the way you regard and hold your devices and the arrangement of your musculature (formed culturally) and even the very organic basis of the patterns of your thought are learned constructs which you reproduce. In this sense you are performing. Not in the sense that you are showing off for other people, but in the sense that you carry out all tasks from a framework of learned and socially constructed experience.

And the thing about the physical world is to remember that in phenomenology, writing is an extension of the body into the world. Writing is not separate from the body and the physical realm, in fact it is lived, physical experience which is the condition of writing. It is achieved, understood, and processed specifically through your organic body. If this is your fundamental assumption, then writing does not need to address the physical because writing arises only and specifically through the physical, it is physical. Think Heidegger and the way that the object world is not separate to human bodies but an extension of them.

I think I really believe that (a) Judith Butler demands emancipation for the oppressed (b) she believes that women are oppressed because of a false dichotomy of sex binary which is used to ground the notion of gender roles. This is not to say that the oppressions that women face like rape and reproductive oppressions aren't real. It is to say that the condition of your body does should not entail your oppression; it is that these oppressions need not necessarily follow from your biological status.

And regarding the performative, the audience is not really necessarily there. It's not my definition, it's how performativity is understood in my discipline (the arts). So a rape is performative even if unwitnessed and unspoken of because the people involved orientate their further behaviour around their beliefs about how the rest of society will view (i.e. form an audience to) the event. So women who do not speak of their experiences might be too ashamed and horrified by the experience, for example, but being ashamed to speak about it is about positing a social audience. Who already have a set of aesthetics about rape. Aesthetics in the sense that these are the conditions that they assume need to be in place for rape to take place. And lots of the time that aesthetic is very limited and anti-woman. Rape myths are the aesthetics of rape, in this formulation, but people like us try to contest and negotitate that aesthetic in order to have the violences against other women recognised.

I think I need a day off this thread

Sorry!

I do very much appreciate you taking the time on it.

And, I know you know, but I am certainly not disagreeing with you here. I'm not even sure I am disagreeing with Butler. I know I don't like what I perceive her to be saying, but the point of this thread (for me) is to figure out what she is actually getting at, and whether I can understand how to argue about that issue, or not.

Agreed we are not arguing. It's actually a great discussion and one I massively welcome Just a bit fucked from my mad RL is all

Ahh, I can imagine. I have no clue how you manage to have attended a conference and be writing coherent sentences, for a start.

We can always pick it all up later. Maybe when my brain has caught up.

Ha ha, you're kind. And tres smart.

I should ask a colleague for performativity

I think that I don't actually understand what you are saying, Outsself.

It isn't a great conversation for me because I don't understand it, or understand how this answers my questions.

Maybe if I ask the opposite. Which social acts are not performative? How does Butler explain the role of bio sex which is largely not an act?

Having breasts is not an action. Being pregnant is not an action. They can have acts connected to them butthey are not of themselves acts.

I'd love to know what your colleague say, outs. I should ask people too, but I'm a bit afraid of not getting it.

almond - I want to know that. I'm sorry it's not a great conversation for you (feel responsible because I started it, and did know when I started it I don't get it myself).

But this is what bothers me too.

What you are saying is making me see where I have issues with what I understand Butler to be saying.

Having googled butler made easy, I did find a download which gave quotes from her about bad readings of her work.

She was talking about how we don't know what a subversion of gender would be, and it doesn't mean trying on different genders like a commodity.

Not anyone's fault it is not great for me!

I think if I am to take Butler's ideas on board, I will say the great subervsion of gender in the UK is the massive decrease in the likelihood of pregnancy killing women.

Her new introduction to Gender Trouble (written ages after it was first published) reads like that.

I expect it is tough for her thinking she'd said something and then being misunderstood, but to say 'I didn't mean this or this or this' isn't helping.

(Sorry, dunno if it's obvious but I mean, for her to say 'I didn't mean this' is not helping. Not that your comment wasn't helping!)