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 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.

OutsSelf. I'm very sceptical that this is what Butler or her work does though. Firstly I don't think she does insist that the female experience is central to philosophy. Or rather I don't see how she can because I don't think the female experience is central to her thinking, writing or philosophy. I think her perception of gender is central to much of her work and she may well insist that gender is central to "the project of philosophy" but I don't see how this furthers the feminist cause as (as I said before) Butler depoliticizes radical feminist ideas and the feminist cause is a revolutionary one. It is a struggle for liberation.

Butler may well be radical in philosophical circles but in radical feminist circles AFAIA she is considered to be establishment. And her ideas on gender queering and transgenderism are considered deeply conservative and anti woman.

I suspect that discussions about Butler and interpretations of her elitist and clear as mud writing would be a lot more straightforward if we used "sex role" in the place of "gender". And if we talked about gender as being a hierarchy rather than a spectrum. Gender as analysed by radical feminists is a power structure, a hierarchy, a system of control, a tool of oppression. It is a caste system that only contains two castes. The notion of gender parody as somehow subversive feels deeply degrading to a lot of radical feminists.

Ugh, I just typed.a.massive reply which I lost.

I'm not going to type.it all out again right now. The headlines were I meant village as in it takes a village to raise a child, not because I'm certainly assuming that some painted people in Africa are all breastfeeding happily in the absence of a gender regime. I'm really stung by that accusation actually, and the assertion that I've.just made up some new intellectual colonial picture of my very own because I'm not even talking about Butler anyway.

We got into that discussion of breastfeeding because you seemed to think almond that breastfeeding = something women do = the gender performative. I see a problem with each part of that equation and in any case it's not really how the regime of the performative works. Women in this country often are troubled by the performative of breasts to the extent that they don't feel able to continue with it and our culture colludes with this. So the performative realm isn't straightforwardly following a women do x, therefore x performs womanhood. Further it's not just that gender binaries trouble what would be a straightforward act of bio sex because bio female doesn't mean you can bf, being a birthing mother doesn't even mean you can.

I think I need to go away and rethink how I'm talking here. I am actually quite upset by the assertion I'm in the business of othering people who don't practice breastfeeding in the way that we do in this country and can't think of how to point to the fact that the performative is somewhat more complex than I do x and become y, it's more like, I believe z so when I come to do x I simultaneously form a relationship with y as a concept. I was trying to use breastfeeding as an example of that but only by pointing to the way it is ordered and practiced through our understanding of it, and doesn't arperfoperform either bio sex or gender in a straightforward way. The examples were from LLL discussions on bf as a cultural practice.and also a publication called the Womanly Art of BF I think published by WHO or.at least through WHO researchers. And also of course the many hours I spent online reading about bf given that I was finding it really hard due in no small part to th politics of it.

Basically, I just don't recognise your reading of what I have said and again, I think we think of performativity quite differently. I'm thinking that Ranciere is describing the field or structure of the performative, when he describes the aesthetic, and he's describing the way that performativity operates when he talks about the distribution of the sensible, if that is any help.

I'm not sure that is what feminist historians are doing, either (sorry, on train with crap wifi, and can see beach is quoting but can't find the quotation).

It's not that we think female experience is central. It's that we object to the ways it has been marginalised and the ways this marginalisation results in a fake representation of history (and one that is very useful for perpetuating women's oppression).

It's not enough to say 'I am a feminist historian so I will write histories that treat women as central'. David Starkey could say that he does that.

I accept that, obviously, someone who's a philosopher first and a feminist second, or a philosopher by profession and a feminist by conviction, isn't necessarily going to spend all their time writing new feminist theories. But I don't think that's the problem I have with Butler anyway.

Btw, I've just started reading Miranda Fricker, who is a feminist philosopher working in epistemology, and found her very clear and direct. Just putting it out there in case anyone else is interested.

Sorry if I'm not contributing very helpfully here.

Btw, I simply don't get follow the discussion about race. I'm not belittling it by not addressing it - I just don't think I have any purchase on it.

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 have long, penislike clitoruses.

This is massive overstatement of the significance of intersex and the "spectrum" of biological sex. No women have a "penislike" clitoris. It may be elongated but it does not have a urethra and is not attached to gonads. A man with a small penis is still a man, his small penis is not attached to a uterus. Sexual dimporphism is not a spectrum. There are females and males with a tiny number of people who have some developmental disorder. It's like saying because there are some people born with one leg or no legs that human beings are on a spectrum of bipedal to non-pedal. This is not correct. The human race can be classified as a bipedal and sexually dimorphic species. The existence of anomalies does not change that fact.

I have a problem with any theorising that denies this because I think it starts from a flawed basis. I think this is what Butler means by the "prediscursive domain" but my reading of her is that she thinks this is objectionable and should not be prediscursive (?) whereas I think it belongs in the prediscursive domain because it is a foundational set of facts on which societal values, gender, performativity etc are built and it should be recognised but not denied.

It's not that we think female experience is central. It's that we object to the ways it has been marginalised and the ways this marginalisation results in a fake representation of history (and one that is very useful for perpetuating women's oppression

I'd like to borrow that as a way of expressing how Butler intervenes into the ontology of the subject. I read Butler and thought, well there it is you bastards (of continental philosophy) You can't read this and continue your discussion of the construction of the subject as if that discussion were not an issue of gender, and as if your genderless description isn't a form of oppression of women. It felt like a demand to engage with gender as a primary enquiry of philosophy or participate in the oppression of women by silence.

Agreed Flora. But I do think leaving sex as if it were an originary and discursive fact is a form of violence against those whom we are then forced to describe as disordered. From a subject position, the subject can always be complete and functioning within the bounds of its own project. The so called disabled body actually enables.a complete subject position which is only deviant insofar as we are committed to a norm?

I also think that it is hard to discuss Butler without injecting concrete examples of what she actually means and how her thoughts actually translate into reality.

IMO, when you pin Butler down to something concrete that is where it becomes obvious that her brand of philosophy is not female centric and isn't actually feminism. It isn't feminism because it isn't political and because it ignores gender as an act of male violence by men as a group/class/caste against women as a group/class/caste.

For example the practice of drag - which Butler sees as an act of subversion and a challenge to what she calls the "rigid regulatory frame". She talks about this as though the "rigid regulatory frame" has an equal value to masculinity and femininity (terms I'm using as they are understood in second wave feminism). And so she takes the political power struggle and male dominance/privilege/violence out of the picture whilst disappearing the female subjugation/females as the recipients of male violence that is compulsory for that male privilege to exist.

Same goes for what Butler says about transgenderism.

She sucks the politics out of the concept of gender. And I think that is anti feminist. I think it is dangerous to feminism and therefore women. I think it is hindering the feminist cause not furthering it.

OutsSelf I don't agree that's a form of violence, any more than any recognition of disability would be a form of violence. The disability may be irrelevant and may also be aggravated by society being arranged for the norm. However I think that is too apolitical and focusses too much on the individual. I agree with Beach that Butler takes out the politics. I can only see feminism on a class level for it to have any meaning and I can't see the class analysis in Butler's writing.

I actually think I'm not helping here at all, and that I need to say again that I read Butler as a newly awakened undergrad and that I accepted her position as basically on the side of the righteous so worked through how that means her position and mine relate. Which is a tendency of mine anyway.

I'm feeling very doubtful right now! Because everyone here is someone that I really respect, and with whom I've agreed about almost everything but who are all saying there is a massive problem with something that I have actually accepted, which is that Butler is fundamentally and ethically concerned with the oppression of women (though she might say that she objects to the oppression of people on the basis of their womanhood). Might go and dig out some old notes etc. I especially think I am not being helpful in discussing the example objections because with each aspect of the discussion we seem to get further away from actually discussing Butler

Right, well, my understanding of disability discourses is that bodies aren't disabled except in a social world that refuses to accommodate them, and describes that process as arising from the fact of the disabled body rather than as arising from the fact that there is a dominant norm which labels bodies outside of it disabled and refuses to accommodate them. I think that is entirely political.

Borrow away!

I think flora's point about intersex conditions makes a lot of sense.

outs, you are being helpful because you're trying to explain this from a position of seeing it as useful.

But I don't think I'd agree about disabled bodies. I accept that, obviously, it's worse to be disabled in a society that doesn't try to accommodate you. And obviously, there are some things that simply wouldn't count, and wouldn't be recognisable, as a disabilities in some societies.

But many disabilities would always be obvious to the person who had them. If you have a condition causing you a lot of pain, for example, society can be as careful to provide you with painkillers, and mandate that you should not have to do things that aggrate your condition, and so on. But society on its own couldn't remove the pain, and the painkillers would gradually damage your body further.

I agree that she is not woman centric and not feminist. But neither is Foucault and his work is useful to the project of feminism and he is not rejected in the same way as Butler is despite this lack. It honestly looks to me like she's being held to a standard that is not applied to other thinkers in her discipline.

I just think she got drag etc wrong, I'm not certain but think she has agreed to this. I think she was using it to point to the way that bio sex is considered stable where gender sex is not, but that she thinks that clear and simple division is not straightforward. As PP have said this means she has a discussion of drag which does not consider the violence that drag acts have done against women's subject position and from a feminist point of view that is objectionable. However it doesn't mean that the way that drag articulates the layering and relationship between bio sex and gender in thought is not a useful model of.thinking for feminists. I also think she fails to make a distinction between the ongoing violence that women are subject to in order to produce their subjectivity and the violence that men experience when they step outside of it. But as her core argument is that gender regulation is a form of violence against the subject, and her central questions would be to consider the ways that subject is regulated and confined, I think she sets the ground for rather, and invites an urgent consideration of the many violence that women are subject to in order to produce the category women. Which Foucualt etc. totally failed to do.

Yes, but your pain is disabling if you think that your subjectivity is prevented from being realised because of your pain. Whereas you could say that the subject.position that the pain produces, even in the way it produces a.desire.to be free.of.pain, is a complete subject position which is only possible in the presence.of that pain, rather than otherwise one thing but then ruined by the pain.

That may well be - that she's held to a higher standard. I do think often, women get picked on where everyone ignores men's failures. It does stun me that I still had to teach (on a course I did not design) a bit about Freud, even though he is a raving misogynist and everyone does pretty much know that. He's got bizarrely long-lasting acceptance (even if just as a figure of now-rejected ideas - he's still being taught!).

The same thing that happens with Butler happens with, say, Julie Bindel or Sheila Jeffries - their work is picked over and they are not 'allowed' to be wrong, or to retract and opinion.

However, at this stage in the game, Butler is (fairly or not) the person whose work has become extremely powerful for the identity politics/queer theory crowd. This is, I guess, where I came into this debate, because I have read an awful lot of published academic work that uses ideas claiming to be derived from Butler in ways I think are damaging and pretty dodgy.

Of course that isn't necessarily her fault. Equally, it's not something that just so happened to occur, with everyone simultaneously leaping to the same misreadings of her work. It happened because there is huge pressure on women's work on gender/sex/sexuality to bend towards supporting patriarchy. And Butler's can be pushed that way, IMO.

(That was a cross-post ... that's how long it takes me to type something that banal, depressingly).

I do know people (very naturally) rationalise things like pain by saying 'well, but I wouldn't be this person if it weren't for my experiences' (which is as nearly as I understand subject position - tell me if I'm totally wrong). However, I don't feel it really cuts it as an argument that pain isn't disability?

Don't get me started on Freud. Many performance and acting practitioners can happily discuss th intervening history of thought that over and over again positions him as part of the right wing neolib project but then walk into a studio and basically get everyone working as if Freud were the most contemporary understanding we have of people and their actions

There is a video near the beginning of the thread where Butler talks about disability with a disability rights campaigner. They define disability there. An impairment is what you have, the disability is what society gives you.

Outsself, I think part of our discussion falls down because I'm trying to work out what Butler means (for similar reasons to LRD) by what is and is not action, an inaction, a performative action, subversion and gender.

I'm interested in knowing that in relation to the differing perspectives on gender given by - people who follow the WHO definition, the radical feminist definition, the Marxist feminist one, or the as yet unnamed gender definition of the mass of people who say things like problematic/check your privilege/die in a fire/cis/gender identity on the Internet.

Because those are the sets of ideas I come into contact with regularly in a research setting or on here. Judith Butler, as far as I can tell, doesn't define performativity as part of a gender aesthetic or an aesthetic regime. She doesn't seem to use those phrases at all. I have never heard those phrases before, and trying to come to terms with Butler is difficult enough without trying to combine her with learning about Ranciere. If a whole load of people start talking about Ranciere and roaming around discussions talking about aesthetic regimes, I will be obliged to learn about him. But at the moment, I am struggling enough with understanding Butler without making it even more complicated.

Pain disables a particular kind of life, agreed. But it enables another kind of life life and that subject position is whole and complete. It is only disabling when you think your life is not complete without realising the things the pain prevents you from. Which isn't to say, hurray, you can't kiss your children, isn't it marvellous how fantastically complete your subjectivity is? It is to say, your subjectivity is bound to this desire that and it absolutely contributes to our understanding of values and ethics, of the political and the organic. It is not a deviation from the project of understanding the construction of the subject but a key part of it. And if you want your pain to end so do I, I don't welcome the pain but I do welcome your subject position.

Gender aesthetic and aesthetic regime is a postButler description of Butler, it's just that it's easier to think of if you think using Ranciere, of what and where performativity happens. This is a non helpful thing I've done here, sorry

An impairment is what you have, the disability is what society gives you.

Ah, sorry, yes, I had heard this before.

It's the idea of all of it being socially constructed I wasn't comfortable with.

outs - I don't follow that, but I'll have a think.

Can.I.just say that the performance.of.gender is one.concept and.performativity is.another? They are similar sounding but name.different aspects of.social.construction.

Does Butler give a definition of the difference between the two?

No, I don't think she does because they aren't really her terms. I have children to manage right now but later will dig out my undergrad notes because I'm sure one of the readers I have does a neat precis of Butler's position. Which I feel I am spectacularly mangling here

Outself I'm really interested in your perspective because I agree with what you say elsewhere. I think I don't understand where Butler draws the line between the "facts" (e.g. sex class, impairment) and social construction (e.g. gender, disability). I think my beef with her is around that area.