Writers and gender theory

[Emmags0309]

I’d be really grateful if anyone has who has read books by Judith Butler (feminist academic) can give their opinion of her books before I buy any of them.

I am frustrated by gender theory. I first learned about it on MN, then learned more by looking at the Mermaids, GIRES and Stonewall websites. From this, I realised I was ‘gender critical’. I’m a woman because of my body, but I can’t believe that I have a gender. Using society’s view of gender behaviour as a yardstick against which we assess our personality to decide whether we feel manly or womanly could be quite dangerous and I’m quite concerned that those promoting gender theory seem to be saying that having a gender is the norm.

My sister, an academic who has lectured gender theory said I was talking nonsense when I said that I don’t have a gender. I tried to explain that I don’t believe in gender, and it’s similar to being an atheist who doesn’t have a religion. She said that I do have a gender; my gender is female because I wear skirts and makeup. She said I shouldn’t be “getting my feminism from mumsnet” and I should read works by Judith Butler.

To quote a phrase I’ve learned from MN, I think she drank some Kool Aid, but if posters think Judith Butler might be worth reading I’ll order some of her books.

And surely, if a person is free to have a gender, a person is equally free to reject the concept of gender and say they don’t have one? Is it not socially acceptable to say this?

Thanks for any replies

And no she isn’t contradicting herself - she distinguished between gender presentation (basically people should be able to present however they want, free from societal expectations) and biological sex (society maps one into the other, but shouldn’t). But as I say, she does have to state that position with a lot of caveats to avoid being accused of being a TERF.

Op - I’m pretty sure your sister will be hounded out of her job if she dares to breathe a common sense word on the subject. Universities are so deep in the kool aid that you have to be extremely careful if you don’t want formal complaints made about you by students.

I think Butler's thought is often oversimplified or misrepresented, and that's a shame because it's worth engaging with. But it's true that she's quite difficult to read - I think if you can get to the end of a book you'll have a better idea if what she was saying at the beginning.

Bear in mind as well that she's much more interested how gender is performed by lesbians than by trans women (and now I'm oversimplifying).

But yes, do read Butler. Even if you don't like it, you'll have a clearer picture of how some of the debates about gender work. Her thought has been enormously influential. And as Sashkin says above, she's the opposite of a gender essentialist.

Emma I bet even if you read Judith Butler your sister wouldn't debate gender with you. She set JB precisely because JB is difficult to read and so you probably won't read her and if you do she can tell you that you don't understand JB. Think how difficult her life as an academic would be if she started questioning gender ideology. Obviously shes got the qualifications to correctly understand the matter. You on the other hand listen to those silly mumsies DM reading types on MN. Maybe you even want to refer to rl and your own experience. The nerve.

I've found Judith Butler . Might give it another go one day.

This might interest you - Unpacking Queer Politics by Sheila Jeffreys is available as a free download on RadFem archive.

I’ve started working through the links that have been posted. I will also read some of the other suggested writers.

At this point I feel a bit angry. I think the idea of gender is harmful and the only thing I can do about it is to refuse to have a gender myself. I’ve effectively been told that I can’t refuse the female gender unless I choose to “perform” in a less womanly way. Obviously my thoughts mean nothing.

There’s no point in discussing this with my sister any more. Her work to date has heavily focused on gender and fashion in history so she is heavily invested.

I don’t want a repeat of yesterday because my 6 year old daughter heard the ‘skirts and makeup equals female gender’ comment and my husband and I had to do a bit of damage control.

I have read some of her stuff and the excellent Nussbaum piece.
We had to do a queer theory module when I did my social work degree. It was absolute bollocks, childish nonsense.

There is a clip on you tube that I've seen of an American academic who mentions Butler as an advocate of incest. I can't remember his name but I think Jensen or Jenner? Does anyone know?

Derrick Jensen of Deep Green Resistance l? He's not a fan of queer theory.

Terfmore

Strangely I was just looking at the clip I think you're referencing the other day, link below

Derrick Jensen also did an interesting interview with Susan Cox about queer theory.

If course you can refuse the female gender. But society will probably still judge everything you do through a lens of gender conformity/non-conformity. So in that sense it is inescapable.

I have no clue where your sister stands on it - if she is a women’s studies lecturer you would hope her point of view would be a bit more nuanced and perhaps she is just expressing herself badly. Or maybe she is a bit thick. You are probably the best judge of that.

Thankyou, I wanted to look at his references.

Focault did indeed say the age of consent should be abolished. I read his argument (admittedly on wikipedia) and can see where he's coming from. But then it all gets too weird. What a stupid stupid man.

I can't find Gayle Rubin's justification of paedophilia that he talks about. (I don't want to look too hard)

Pat Clivia - what a creep!!

I've yet to find Judith Butler's reference to incest but I can imagine it. She seems to think its all a fun game without consequence.

I can see why "anti intellectual" has become popular.

I'll watch the interview in a while. I'm off to my allotment for some fresh air and have a think!

"She said that I do have a gender; my gender is female because I wear skirts and makeup."

Your sister is an academic? Sorry, but she's a bit thick. 'Female' is not a gender, it is a sex. 'Feminine' is the gender she was thinking of.

Sorry to be so pedantic, but if this is the level of expertise your sister has in her subject ("My sister, an academic who has lectured gender theory") then heaven help her poor students.

Terfmore

While I was looking for the stuff posted above I came across Jensen discussing Queer Theory with Sheila Jeffreys, it's also long but SJ is great. I have started to read Unpacking Queer Theory by her and this seems to be a good introduction to it.

Enjoy the fresh air!

Sashkin

She is definitely not thick but I don’t think she has encountered gender critical ideas before.

I don’t think not having a gender will be problematic for me because I will still be a woman, defined by my biology. Most people I speak to think that biology determines whether they are male or female. I honestly think that people only believe they have a gender once they have been ‘sold’ the concept.

The Foucault post is interesting; my sister lent me his book about sexuality. I might give that one a pass!

Nice bit of sanctimonious emotional blackmail included, I see (because her feminism is all about the female socialisation).

She could have a brilliant brain but I'm afraid pomo and queer theory addles even the best of them. The whole thing is pointless onanism leading to brain rot. Absolutely no use or helpful application to anyone's day-to-day life outside of university navel-gazing.

Apologies, OP. I pasted my previous copy! I was trying to quote you saying:

She is definitely not thick but I don’t think she has encountered gender critical ideas before.

www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/680642?section=pre-2008&keywords=academics-defend-pedophilia&year=2004&month=09&date=23&id=680642&aliaspath=%2FManage%2FArticles%2FTemplate-Main

Gender is performative, in my view.

Sex is a blunt fact that has been around since before language and is understood by all mammals even the ones with brains the size of a pea.

I personally experience gender as either a performance (the bits I control) or a masive PITA (the bits others control).

The trouble with gender theory at university is that it started as a progressive discipline aimed at creating for want of a better word the basis on which one could build a more effective fight for women's rights. In the sense of needing to know how exactly does this oppression of women work and what can we do about it. I was at uni in Germany at the time (not in America, they did this years earlier) and thought this very interesting and worthy. If I hadn't been at the back end of my degree, I may well have chosen that as a minor.

However it happened, the discipline went very wrong though. I can't think of any other academic subject right now where this has happened so entirely, but women's rights and equality do not seem to be of interest anymore. Instead we have all this intersectionality/no-platforming/triggering/safe spaces nonsense and the idiocy of "we can't criticise Islam for how it treats women coz that is Western centric Islamophobia" etc etc

Some people working within the discipline are very aware of this of course. In March '17 a book was published in Germany with a collection of essays written by gender studies academics and others which in its very detailed critique effectively eviscerated the discipline for having nothing to show for more than a quarter century of academic research and discourse - no invention, groundbreaking knowledge or any other useful result has come out of the discipline. Instead they attack each other relentlessly for being whatever ~phobic, in the wrong place on the privilege pyramid and not woke enough and so on.

Publisher and contributors got the usual abuse, doxxing, death threats, their events had to be cancelled but despite the fact that critics, especially other gender studies academics, tried very hard, they couldn't refute the points made in the book (coz they are true).

I'm not aware of any such book written by insiders in English, but the discipline has very vocal critics who work within it by now, despite the vast numbers of unquestioning adherents who truly think they are progressives when they spout their nonsense.

I don't know exactly what your sister is even getting at in discounting your opinion coz you haven't read Butler when what she said is clearly contradicted by Butler's writings on gender (ie it's not wearing a skirt and makeup that makes you a woman - that's just performance of femininity as others have pointed out).

If you're not tired of reading yet, I'd recommend Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics War On Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights (That's a link to the book on Amazon). It's an essay collection exploring the effects that gender studies and the resulting gender identity ideology has had on women and their rights. Quite an eye opener.

Ime gender is performed on as well as through the individual and by the whole of society and all its institutions. So where does choice come into it?

Tallulah

100 years ago, being Christian in the U.K. was seen as mandatory by many. Even today, athaeists send Christmas cards and abide by the 10 commandments without even realising they are doing so. Christianity is imposed on us by our society whether we like it or not, but we still have freedom to say “I don’t believe in that; I don’t have a religion”. Surely an individual can have the same attitude to gender? I’ve been thinking that religion and gender are both human constructs that can be rejected by humans.

The Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest
Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Judith Butler is a funny one because of the trans thing.
I loved much of Gender Trouble and found her idea of gender as performance really appealing.
Basically she describes the process of 'girling' beginning with the words 'it's a girl' and gender being to do with the actions we take and how when these are repeatedly performed they come to feel natural.
This I'm down with. What I do not understand is how this now fits with the TRAs who also seem to love her.
It's an interesting bit of confirmation bias, how two people with opposing views can feel those opinions affirmed by reading the same thing.

She talks about the parody of drag / cross dressing being a performance of a performance.

I'd recommend it I found it fascinating.

Cross posted with bewilderness

Yes she can be pretty oblique and overly wordy too！