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!

I think a lot of post modern writers end up declaring they have been misunderstood.

That may well be true.

Thanks so much for your posts, OutsSelf, I actually understand them!! Though I have yet to graduate to the point of being able to express an opinion on their intellectual content.

Why can't JB express herself clearly like that, though? Then we (or rather, people on this board who are cleverer than me) would be able to discuss her ideas properly rather than having to spend ages puzzling out what she means.

LRD, I apologise for butting in to your thread. I do understand that you have to engage with this stuff, and how frustrating it is to have to deal with what looks like deliberate obscurantism. When someone intelligent, as you clearly are, has to struggle so hard, I don't think the problem lies with you. Surely the first duty of any academic writer is to communicate clearly? I'll go away now!

No, I'm sorry. I was being an arsehole, and letting my frustration with Butler spill over.

That's OK. I really shouldn't have stuck my oar in. I remember struggling with Mary Daly, but had the luxury of being able to put the book away and read things that made sense to me. Best of luck with Butler.

This is a great thread. OutsSelf, to my mind you are doing a better job of explaining Butler than Butler herself.

almondcakes, I don't know if this is going to be helpful, but I'll give it a try. Having breasts is indeed not an act; neither is having earlobes. But culturally speaking, not/having breasts is meaningful, whereas not/having earlobes is not. Why do we choose to ascribe significance to some anatomical differences — and label them as 'biological sexes' — but not to others? (And that's without getting into the question of how to 'sex' a woman post-mastectomy, etc.)

Butler traces this ascription of significance to the heterosexual matrix and compulsory heterosexuality. But she left me wondering how those discourses acquired the power that they did — the power to shape all human sexual activity and, indeed, the power to produce gender as we know it. If the heterosexual binary was able to reproduce itself as the 'biological' sex binary, it must have been very potent. At some point in time, the idea emerged that procreative sex in monogamous couples, consisting of one person with a penis and one with a vulva, was the only legitimate form of sexual activity. Butler talks about the role of christianity in this, but I don't think she explains how "compulsory heterosexuality" could have preceded "compulsory sexing according to genitals" as a concept. It seems to me that one requires the other.

Butler's attempt to cast gender as something men and women perform is inherently neoliberal. It removes the coercive context of gender for women, denies De Beauvoir's insight that femininity is created in women by psychically breaking them throughout girlhood, and and posits instead that it's something we choose to perform.

This blog provides a good breakdown of the flaws in Butler's theory of gender:

Butler has framed Gender not in terms of a cultural system into which we are conditioned, but as a thing that we do. Moreover, as a thing that we can electively do in the same way as making a bet. By treating Gender in the same way as performative verbs, the stifling norms of Gender simultaneously (and confusingly) become “a domain of freedom and agency”. This treatment elides the reality that Gender is in fact a set of cultural products we internalise through our social learning from birth. Gender socialisation shapes and constrains who we are in a very real way, whether we like it or not.

rootveg.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/i-say-it-therefore-it-is-so/

And this blog points out the obscene and cruel implications that the performative theory of gender has for women:

Take this premise – You are a woman because of your behavior or your feelings - and combine it with the far less controversial (I hope) premise Men rape women because women are women. These two interrelated concepts posit a cause for sexual violence and a criteria for womanhood. On queer theory, men rape women because women are women (the cause), and women are women because of women’s behavior or women’s feelings (the criteria). A because B, B because C. Drop the middle, and what do you have? Men rape women because of women’s behavior or women’s feelings. Uh oh.

genderdetective.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/gender-performativity-is-victim-blaming/

Well, I'd dispute that reading of choice because Butler is in no way that asserting agency in the distribution of social roles. I'd therefore counter that as a misreading that arises because of neolib assumptions about social role and agency, you can only read it in that way if you believe in the neolib conception of choice based identity. JB is writing out of a continental tradition which would refute that view of the subject.

That ear lobe/ breast thing is a brilliant explanation, Ezinma. I think that the suggestion Butler makes is that there is not a sex binary which predated the gender binary but a spectrum which is before the binary. To see how this could work I also think it's helpful to remember that second wave feminism describe the binary as operating not as dividing between men as a positive identity and women as a positive identity, but more on a basis of men as a positive identity and everyone else, the not-men are defined in relation to this under the term women. Women are not a social class because they have the positive qualities of the category women, but rather because they lack the positive qualities of the category men. Therefore a spectrum becomes two simple social classes.

WRT to that reading of Butler you found, Donkeyskin, I'd also say that Butler directly inherits de Beauvoir' s fundamental assertion that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. Butler is more or less outlining the extent to which this could be the case. In Butler's formation, men rape women not because of innate or pre-existing sexual appetite, but as a means of becoming men, because sex, and overpowering, coercive sex, are signifiers of manliness. They rape women to realise their identity as male in the eyes of themselves and other men. They rape women to realise and inscribe the hierarchy of social order in their own identity (thereby reifying it for others).

Performativity does not take away, compete with or deny the horrors of being raped but instead describes the means by which that horrible is amplified as a tool of oppression.

I was talking to a colleague today (who teaches performativity) and he said the basic thing was to think of the way that a transaction between two parties (or more) has a dimension to which it becomes meaningful to a the wider community in which it takes place in, and plays a part in forming the social order for everyone not just those involved.

Another thing that occurred to me about writing, legibility and inscription as a way of talking about social actions and transactions is that in theatre and performance there are play texts, which are indeed just written instructions and dialogues - only made of words in the narrow sense - but there is also the performance text which is made up of the totality of signifiers which make up a performance event and these can include words but are also costumes, acting, scenographies, and even the wider aspects of the location and cultural location of the performance itself. All of these are understood to be 'read' by an audience who use them to make meaning from their experience of the performance. This process of reading a performance text of an event is understood to take place in any interaction with a cultural product like art, performance, film and is part of how things become and are interpreted as specific kinds of cultural products. So reading, writing and inscription and legibility in Butler's work draw on this sense that the symbolic order of gender is not arising from an innate, originate body but through a process of interpreting, ascribing and inscribing bodies as identities inside a particular regime of meaning.

men rape women not because of innate or pre-existing sexual appetite, but as a means of becoming men, because sex, and overpowering, coercive sex, are signifiers of manliness. They rape women to realise their identity as male in the eyes of themselves and other men. They rape women to realise and inscribe the hierarchy of social order in their own identity (thereby reifying it for others)

I do wonder where this takes women, apart from either surrender or violence.

second wave feminism describes the binary … on a basis of men as a positive identity and everyone else, the not-men are defined in relation to this under the term women

To me, that still begs the question: how did 'man' as an identity emerge? Why use penises as a group identifier rather than earlobes or baldness? I agree (with Butler?) that it's a dead-end to go looking for 'sources' of sexual signification. Still, I can't imagine that the notion of 'the male' originated in anything but the human body.

The further back we go in time, the likelier it seems that powerful "discourses" emerged more from material things than from language. A penis that swelled and became erect, and could emit different liquids, would surely have been attributed with some kind of significance, and inspired some discourses, even outside of the heterosexual matrix. To concentrate on the link between sexuality and genitals is, I think, to understate the role that toilet training plays in a child's discovery of their own body and its sensations. Rather than talk about children's bodies being 'sexed' as either girls or boys, perhaps it would be more logical if we said that they are 'pissed'.

I do wonder where this takes women

Well, this is, after all, an account of patriarchy. This order of relations is not a natural or inevitable consequence of having penises/ vaginas. In patriarchy, women are accessories to the masculine project. If the masculine project does not exist neither does the need to realise masculinity in these particular ways.

I like that idea of pissing rather than sexing boys or girls. I really like how it points to the way we fetishize the sexual function

Mary Daly described and analysed what Butler calls 'performativity' years before Butler wrote Gender Trouble. Daly wrote about it in Gyn/Ecology. And she wrote about it in a much better and clearer way than Butler. And it takes her about three sentences to do it.

I don't get on with Butler for a variety of reasons but the main one is that I don't find many of her ideas very original. She takes the work of others and deradicalizes it. She depoliticizes political ideas. The way I always think of Butler is as a masculine philosopher who takes the 'Woman' and the 'Movement' out of The Women's Movement. Quite an achievement - and not in a good way.

Well, I see what you're saying and to an extent I agree. I think if you come from the point of view of feminism, Butler's project is not so very radical and also has been massively and problematically (mis)appropriated.

But if you come from the point of view of philosophy it's actually an massively important intervention into an ongoing discourse which can no longer resist the problem of gender. She took the language and structures of post structuralist thought and insisted that gender is a massive and ethical problem at the heart of cultural processes already established in continental philosophy. In this way, gender can no longer be regarded as a marginal problem for philosophy but is actually anfundental structuring structure of social systems across the globe and that this represents an ideological project. While feminists engage the problem of living as a women inside a given system, and O would agree that this project is more urgent and more pressing and more relevant to women living in their lifextent, thends, to male an intervention like that into philosophy is extraordinary and radical and necessary. It's not so much that what she is saying is the radical thing but that she places it into a discourse which has otherwise remained untroubled by feminism, choosing to regard women's inequity as a problem arising out of imperfect Sicilia lb systems rather than a foundational structure of them. JB has insisted on that and been recognised inside of that discourse as irrefutable in the terms established by key thinkers of that discourse, - Foucault and so on.

To an extent then, if you are looking to her for feminist insight or action plans, you're looking in the wrong place. But if you instead imagine her to be doing for philosophy what feminist historians are doing for history - I.e. insisting that female experience is central to the project of philosophy then her work is important and radical and furthering the feminist cause

Sorry, typos, I'm ont bus with my fucking phone

This order of relations is not a natural or inevitable consequence of having penises/ vaginas

Right. But is it random - I mean, did it turn out this way by fluke, or did it evolve to serve a specific purpose? If it was directed, then what does the way patriarchy looks tell us about the interests of the people that patriarchy serves?

Ezinma, I agree that having breasts is highly meaningful to how we view biological sex. I am not disputing it. My point is that having breasts, if they grew on you, is not an act. You did not carry out any action for that to happen, so it is not any kind of act. If it is not an act it cannot be a performative act.

If a person's gender is created through their performative acts, then it cannot be the case that having breasts is meaningful to gender, but we just agreed they were socially meaningful in terms of gender.

So gender cannot be entirely performative. Whether any of your argument after that is valid or not in terms of the enforcement of heterosexuality doesn't change the basic failure of the idea that the meaningfulness of gender rests on performative acts.

And while I agree that Butler did not mean that performative acts are a choice, there is a huge difference between

If a person's gender is

Sorry.

While I agree that did not mean that performative acts are a choice, there is a huge difference between society placing restrictions on people based on their performative actions (as both these things can be changed by social changes) and placing restrictions on people based on socially ascribing meaning to an inaction. The first of these can be changed by society, the second can only be changed by increasing the number of performative acts to include making all pubescent females surgically remove their breasts.

And while it is not Butler's fault, those that have interpreted Butler to mean that breaking gender norms is more subversive than retaining them, there is now the view that those who remove breasts they just happen to have are the ones carrying out a progressive political act through their gender performance (or who did not grow them and have implants), while those who do not have them removed are oppressors because they are inactive and do nothing to remove their socially meaningful breasts.

And I think it is that last perspective that radical feminists take issue with. The radical feminist perspective doesn't need people to make a distinction between bio sex and socially constructed gender. It could just point out that having breasts and being pregnant are not actions. They are the lack of acting by cutting off breasts, having an abortion or inducing a birth. And as such, they cannot be a performative act because they are not an act.

Yes but not all cultures have designated breasts meaningful in this way. Other cultures, to name some obvious examples, have instead focused on small feet or long necks. It is not through having breasts that one performs one's gender, but the attendant practices through which one interacts with the body as a result of a specific aesthetic of gender. In our culture women habitually wear clothes that support and shape the breasts in a particular.way, women attend to their breasts in accordance with this aesthetic. Covering and/or supporting breast through clothing is not common across all cultures in all times so just the act of putting on a bra is a performance.of.gender, it is not necessitated by the fact we have breasts. And whether or not we participate in a particular practice.of this kind, our bodies are attended to by others with the assumption that we do. In this sense we are not able.to prevent our bodies being read and interpreted through these frameworks, we are not able to opt out of the aesthetic regime for ourselves (though we may choose to reject it as a means of.interacting with others).

Outsself, if Butler is saying that there is a spectrum of biological sex that exists before a binary she is contradicting herself.

Surely what she is saying (and this I do agree with) is that it is impossible for humans to comprehend anything except through social meanings, biological sex is only seen through gender. Biological sex cannot be seen except through the socially constructed lense of gender. So bio sex only comes into existence after the construction of a gender binary.

How then, can a spectrum of biological sex come before the binary?

Outsself, I never disputed any of that or argued against it.

None of that changes that simply having breasts is not an act, and yet they are meaningful to many people in their sense of what gender they are.

Butler argues that our performance of gender creates our gender in ourselves, not simply other people's readings of an inaction.

That's my bad wording, she's saying precisely as you say it, that bio sex is being perceived through the social construction of gender and suggesting that no absolute binary exists that produces it. The spectrum idea is a way to grasp what that entails rather than suggesting that a spectrum precedes the binary.

Butler does not say that having breasts is performative. How one attends to having breasts is how one comes to perform and therefore perceive oneself as female, although in the performance the subject typically misattributes that identity as coming from the breasts. When instead it comes from how one interprets and attends to the breasts.