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!

But there isn't a spectrum that exists either. So how does it suggest that no binary exists.

It would be like trying to show that unicorns don't exist because fire breathing dragons do.

Or, if we didn't think of breasts as sexually significant, and attend to them in concordant ways, they would still be there (or not on some women) but they would not be appropriated to an aesthetic regime. We would treat them as we treat ring fingers now - the fact that most women have shorter ring than index fingers and most men have longer ring than index finger has not produced an aesthetic or fetish of finger length and manliness/ femininity. It's just a slightly interesting, though not definitive correlation.

In the terms that we understand definitions of what is a women and definitions of what is a man- e.g. reproductive capacities or genitals - there is a spectrum though? A small but significant amount of the population are intersex, for example. Not all women can have children. Some men have penises which are tiny and some women hav long, penislike clitoruses. There are significant overlaps.between thing like stamina, strength, and brain organisation. There is no stable defining identifier in social terms, which would describe us as male.or female.

Does that not rather place a rather unfair burden on most of the world's women, as what they do with their breasts is a matter of life and death, and yet their attendence to their breasts is not distinguished from performative acts carried out using ear lobes?

It seems rather like dealing with the issue of famine but not making a distinction between rice and guitars.

So there is no absolute binary stable grounding system for the social construction of binary gender

No, the spectrum is as socially constructed as the binary. Nothing exists prior to social construction.

I don't think I understand your rice and guitars thing. Breasts are just an example and the whole world does not expect a particular practice of attendance to breasts because they are not sexually significant in all.cultures. Butler does say that not doing one's gender correctly is extremely dangerous

No, there isn't any such thing, I agree. But it may be a part of the gender system that is worth keeping, with some modifications, from a moral perspective.

Okay, well, like I said, the spectrum was a way I suggested you might think of bodies in the absence of a binary because there was a question or point made that biological sex just is a binary. The point I made - not very clearly, obviously, - is that one need not see biology in these terms

What might be worth keeping from a moral perspective, sorry?

I agree that some aspects of the way we think about biological.sex may be useful. I think Butler really is only concerned with the violence it does against the subject

If all women stopped carrying out the performative act of breast feeding, most of the world's children would die. If women stopped performative acts with ear lobes they wouldn't.

If we deny people food they die. If we deny them guitars they don't.

The binary is worth keeping, with modifications.

No, breastfeeding is only a performative act when we attribute breasts with the power of generating femininity. Women in cultures who do not have this grounding idea still breastfeed.

Butler isn't really suggesting we stop doing things so much as asking us to rethink what we imagine those acts mean

If breastfeeding was not cross culturally associated with some constructed concept of gender and biological sex, males would be as likely to attempt to breast feed as females.

I disagree about that because men are not known to try and breastfeed in cultures where breasts are not treated as sexual signifiers. I have heard that men have mammary glands and could breastfeed if routinely stimulated and even remember reading someone theorizing that they would take part in the village feeding practices that some cultures already regard as normal (where any lactating person can be part of childcare provision for even the very young) but I don't remember it being entirely clear and I don't even think you need men to breastfeed in order for gender taxonomy to stop being so violent.

The performative dimension - where something comes to mean something - is infinitely plastic. It is the performative of acts which is the site of contest, not necessarily the acts in and of themselves except where those acts are only made to have a performative outcome. In this way, if you address the aesthetic regime of gender you might expect things like clothing to change (we might wear fewer uncomfortable underwired shelf bras) and you might expect prohibitions against women doing certain kinds of activities to dissolve (so women were not socialised to take up less space and develop fewer muscles) but you wouldn't expect women to stop breastfeeding or having babies. You would expect that those activities would not be mobilised to oppress them, however.

And such activities as breastfeeding or say standing to pee, would not be used as the measure of gender worth and used as violence against individual subjects who for whatever reason did not conform to the general pattern that the average person of their particular set of physical attributes modelled.

And things like having periods or giving birth would be thought of as a part of human experience, rather than unimportant deviance from the idealised subject.

I think I'm wandering off on another thread here. But also, there wouldn't be a single an quite unsuccessful model of human sexual or parenting relationships that whose basic failure did not in any way prevent millions of people feeling like they were at fault when they couldn't make it work for them

And people throughout the developed world would be trying to think of ways that the community could enable and support childhood rather than leaving it in the hands of mainly the birthing mother.

But Butler has said that a binary is created (and by her argument any form of making distinctions between people of different biological sexes as a result of gender).

If in every culture (or almost every culture) in the world, women make up the vast majority of people who attempt to breastfeed and men make up a tiny minority, then the attempt is gendered and sexed.

Breast feeding is an action. Being pregnant is not. Breast feeding is a per formative act.

By Butler's argument an action carried out mostly by one gender produces their idea of gender and biological sex. It produces biological sex. If most of the people breastfeeding are those with visible breast tissue, the act is socially producing biological sex.

It is not clear if you are using sexual to refer to sexual dimorphism or sexuality, but in Butler's argument the former is culturally produced as a way of enforcing cultural ideas about the latter.

Any act which is culturally performed by one gender and not the other produces a biological sex binary which enforces a gender binary and sexuality.

All the rest about how breastfeeding and child birth not having to be used to oppress women remains the case regardless of Butler's argument about per formative acts. Lots of people who believe biological sex isn't culturally produced (WHO etc) still believe that.

And it is hard to see how if you do not make a cultural (gender) distinction between people who may get pregnant and people who do not (a binary), you can differentiate between them to meet their different physiological needs or even be able to recognise whether or not you are unintentionally setting up institutions that disadvantage the people who do those things.

With the exception of standing up to pee (which is a gendered rule - half of my household is male and nobody stands up to pee) - having babies, breast feeding and periods are what everybody else refers to as part of biological sex. Saying 'such activities as' and then listening what everyone else considers to be part of biological sex is a way of reinforcing a binary biological sex but simply not using the words 'biological sex,' then putting those activities into the category of 'not per formative.'

That is reducing Butler's use of per formative to a binary between the materially real and the socially constructed, but replacing constructed with performative.

The rest of the argument about the consequences and possible futures is shared by most feminists, including all those who disagree with Butler. Mentioning them doesn't make Butler more convincing. You are arguing as if her ideas are a premise required for not discriminating against people on the basis of them breastfeeding and giving birth (aka biological sex to most people), which is not the case.

I don't think you and I have the same understanding of performativity. Performativity to me is not just about an action associated with a certain gender but also about its relationship to gender aesthetics. Breastfeeding, I would say in our culture is not part of the performative of gender, in fact you could argue that it more likely performs a resistance to gender aesthetics. Clearly women in our culture do not all stop breastfeeding because of the ambivalence of that action in relation to gender aesthetics, but there is certainly a lot of discomfort about how breastfeeding relates to the cultural fetishisation of breasts, many women feel very uncomfortable about people seeing their breasts and many people express discomfort at witnessing an infant breastfeeding. Any discussion of full term breastfeeding throws up some shuddering and weasly comment about a child being traumatised by a memory of sucking their mother's breasts. So breastfeeding, in our culture where gender identities do hinge on breasts, nevertheless does not register performatively as being associated with sex and gender; performativity is not straightforwardly a question of lots of women do this ergo it is a performance of sex.or.gender.

WRT the thing about feminists saying the same sort of stuff, well I agree. Butler's relevance is not that she has a whole new world for.feminists to create or imagine, etc, feminists already do that in better and more practical terms than anything Butler does. Her importance is that she asserts the gender problem as central.to any ontology of the subject, and she does it using the arguments and terms of phenomenology and post structuralism in such a way that that discourse must either accept the problem of gender or disavow continental philosophy from the 1970s onwards. Which is a neat manoeuvre.

There is an issue in general, not particular to either you or Butler (and I actually think you are arguing in opposition to her), where people from one discipline borrow ideas from another and rename them. This has to be done to get new ideas into a field, but in the process of doing so you can end up simply repeating the earlier mistakes that the previous discipline pointed out.

What you appear to be doing is attempting to argue without using binaries. In the process of doing so, you are actually recreating the binaries that exist in other fields, but because you are not mentioning them or renaming them, all the stereotypes and assumptions are still there but without any critical awareness of them. The biggest issues are the binaries you are using between our culture and the people you have othered, and between biological sex and socially constructed gender.

Part of Butler's argument is that gender produces biological sex. There isn't, as far as I can see, any argument against this. Unless somebody is claiming a superhuman power to view phenomena through anything other than the lense of socialisation, what they perceive biological sex to be is a product of socialisation, which is gendered. One of the main examples she gives of a highly gendered performative act is breast feeding.

She also argues that it is impossible to resist the dominant ideology of gender by acting outside of performative gender. Any act that attempts to resist or subvert gender is itself performative and must simultaneously imitate and resist the dominant gender ideals. She also argues that every performative act creates our sense of (gendered) self, often through repetition. I disagree with all of this, but as what you have written entirely contradicts Butler's view on this anyway, it seems a bit irrelevant to rehash why I disagree with her.

Your argument seems to include the following:

1. Western cultural imperialism. You have given a lot of information (none of which I disagree with) about how breasts and breastfeeding are viewed in our society. This is what is often referred to as socially constructed cultural norms, but somewhere in the process of borrowing are now a combination of performativity and gender aesthetics. You then refer interchangeably to various 'other cultures' and how they breastfeed, which have no names and no explanation of what they believe about their cultural norms around breast feeding, or any differentiation between how they sometimes do the same thing as each other (shared breastfeeding for example) and attribute entirely different gendered meanings to the same act. This then allows you to claim that these things, when done by these others, are non performative and don't have a gendered aesthetic. Which of course they don't, in your Western perspective, because you have given no contextual cultural information about what they think.

1. Noble savage myth. You rename things (periods, breast feeding, having children) that fell into the old bio sex, nature part of the bio sex vs. gender, nature vs. culture binary as 'non performative' or not part of a 'gendered aesthetic' except when we do them. You recreate the idea that there is some group of people sitting about in a tribe or village somewhere behaving in a natural way without all of these loaded meanings. They are now stripped of their own, different cultural meanings. Thus you create the idea that there are cultured people (us) having meaningful gendered relationships and natural people who essentially just do breastfeeding with no gendered meaning, as if they were animals. But by naming this as a 'gendered aesthetic' based on push up bras or whatever, derived from our own culture, you can claim to define everyone else as lacking this cultural behaviour.

1. Cultural appropriation. Having set up the idea that such people exist somewhere, operating outside of this gendered aesthetic of breast feeding (which you just give as a list of Western cultural norms) you then imagine a world we could live in if we adopted this gendered aesthetic free life ourselves, having already stripped it of the complex gendered meanings it had for them.

And this whole mess of racism is exactly the kind of thing post structuralism was supposed to address. Of course every other culture in the world holds sets of beliefs about biological sex which they view through the lense of socially constructed gender, I believe (according to Buffy), these are called competing truth claims by post structuralism. While I disagree with Butler, she isn't claiming what you are claiming. You have essentially just used a whole load of 19th century colonialism and renamed it, but every time you start to define those things by categorising, it is obvious there is nothing post structuralist about it.

And this is what feminists say about the way post modernist thought is filtered down into the popular imagination. It is the same old arguments and stereotypes about women's bodies, while claiming our mentioning that sexism is about us having particular bodies is oppressive.

I'm checking in, mainly because I don't want to come across as if I'm ignoring a thread I started. I'm aware I'm not exactly contributing here (and I'm off to Edinburgh for a few days so not likely to much better).

outs, if you'll forgive me for the RL reference, something you said yesterday struck me. You said we were tending to judge Butler as if she were a feminist theorist, and this is a bit unfair because she's not really writing in that tradition and therefore we can't expect her to be full of radical feminist ideas.

I thought about this when almond claimed Mary Daly has made the same point (though I don't know if you'd agree anyway) as Butler and done it first.

I don't know whether or not Butler's conceptions of gender and performativity are valid within their own sphere. I've no automatic issue with someone whose work touches on feminism or gender roles without being radically feminist or making new feminist theory. But I don't think it's ethical to make claims, on the fly, that suggest you know who's oppressed and who isn't, and then not worry how what you're saying relates to that oppression. And I think she does this.

There are evidently, in Butler's view, human beings in categories whose lives are harder than the lives of other human beings. In a passage I quoted upthread, she includes women, especially poorer women and non-American women, and elsewhere, she includes people whose gender is not 'legible,' which in the context appears to include (and probably isn't limited to) people who're trans or perhaps who're gay or lesbian (as sexuality has a bearing on how people interpret your gender).

Ok, fine. I read those things and I think, right, she's acknowledging this because the situation isn't the same for all of us. So, I expect her theorising to be differentiated a little bit according to these categories.

Except, it seems it isn't really. We all perform gender, and some things are specific to some of the oppressed groups mentioned, but there's no sense of how the system of gender creates any of the oppression that's being mentioned. It's just dumped out there.

Or does she get to this?