Queer theory resisters

[Awayfromitall]

As has been noted before on this forum, trans activism has appropriated academic queer theory for its own political ends. This explains its success on university campuses. Finally, some scholars within queer theory have begun to resist.

blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/conversion-therapy-v-re-education-camp-open-letter-grace-lavery/

This piece is really worth reading. It makes many points noted by posters on here, but grounds these in queer scholarship. Some interesting quotes:

"the conundrum of why race, which has far less biological grounding than sex, should be socially constructed in the current moment as much more fixed and immutable than gender ..."

"Those who justify aggression as a response to the “violence” of being misrecognized fail to notice that everyone shares this experience on various registers of gender, race, age, class, professional status, nationality, religion, disability, attractiveness — the list goes on."

On TRAs:
"Imagining itself as standing up to authority, this cohort falls eagerly into quasi-medical discourses of diagnosis and cure and rushes to invoke juridical structures of rules and punishment. Calling itself progressive, this cohort presents an uncanny mirror image of rightwing politics with its exaggerated outrage, divisive us-and-them rhetorics, and attacks staged as self-defence."

"Is this demand to suppress voices that questions perhaps because you have no answers to our queries, starting with this one: what does it mean to clam to be “in fact” a woman? That question is grounded in a rich and complex body of feminist and queer scholarship — from Simone de Beauvoir, through Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, to the broad project of deconstructive linguistic theory that is central to queer theory in — that argues that no one is “in fact” this social and linguistic category of “woman.”

"How different are today’s medical regimes of “gender confirmation” from those diagnoses, or other forms of doctoring aimed at altering individuals to conform to — and thus reinforce — holistic norms of gender?"

And this scorcher:
"Our perspective leads us to challenge the deployment of pronouns as a marker of any kind of stable gender identity. We are particularly skeptical of the specialist-approved “they/them” as a marker — a euphemism really — for gender fluidity. Pausing to note the oxymoron of a stable category of fluidity, we observe that this one does more to unsettle distinctions between singular and plural than between masculine and feminine."

"Further, we reject the rituals of social interaction that require a confession of stable gender identity as a precondition of speech (my name is such-and-such and my pronouns are blah, blah, and blah)."

"Ultimately, if we truly value diversity, we have to be allowed our differences." [And that includes difference based on sex. Amen.]

away - don’t read that as a dig at you :/

I just loathe how this is used. Maybe there’s an original usage that was useful or benign. Maybe it has real world applications I’m not aware of.

For the way it fucks with grammar alone it should be told off though. This is why our Olympians were medalling. Gah.

It's the march through the institutions ...

No offence taken, Bowl - maybe you're right and it's time to bin it all. But it's the orthodoxy.

What’s your take on it away? Do you think it’s been twisted from what it was meant to be?

materialist sorry. That is actually what they said... I’ve often wondered if it’s true.

I'm too tired to read either the article or the thread tonight so I don't know if anyone has posted this yet - You can get a free download of Sheila Jeffreys Unpacking Queer Politics here. It's a great book if you want to understand why and how these batshit ideas have taken hold.

Oh Pencils I tried to hard but couldn't get that download onto my kindle

I think postmodern thought and queer theory are sometimes lumped together here. We're talking about a huge body of thought, with many internal debates, and not all of it can be dismissed. I think it is useful to think about how categories (or the way humans make sense of the world) have been produced over time. Some humanities scholars merely 'sprinkle' some queer theory on their very empiricist work to make it look trendy. Others dive in. I find what the authors in the linked OP say quite useful - they've spent decades working on authors/historical actors who have playfully subverted rigid gender norms, only to have younger scholars now policing them ("I was an effeminate man until I realised I really was a woman"). The piece that the authors are responding to is worth reading, too, for context.

Something that bothers me is that we recognised social constructionism well before postmodernism, but Pomo theorists act as if before Foucault and Butler we had some weird essentialist and ahistorical view of the world. We really didn't.

It's from 2003 vaginafetishist so possibly not compatible. The PDF works I think.

And historically it is true that the biological categories of men and women did not always match with the social categories of men and women

This is from the first page of the thread. Please can you tell me when you are referring to? I get the understandings of the biology of men and women have changed, and attitudes about the social categories, ditto, but when have social categories not matched to biological categories? Even if you go before our modern day understanding of binary, opposite sexes, you still have women defined differently for religious and cultural reasons because they reproduce, menstruate, have female unknowable bodies.

There are historical examples of individual biological men/women who have lived as women/men, or something in between. But there is a very heated debate about what "living as a woman" meant in the past and whether it is legitimate to "trans the dead" (see the recent controversy around the plaque for Anne Lister - whether she was lesbian or 'gender-nonconforming').

I recently saw a historian say "we have deconstructed sex into gender and sexuality" - a position which I find very questionable (especially if you do any kind of social history).

Katara in Albania, traditionally, when a family had only girls, one girl could assume a male role, dressed as a male and was accepted as a male by society in all matters. Only marriage was off limits. So, this is not unheard of, though exceedingly rare.

Away, yeah, I‘ll probably never make it into the diplomatic corps. But Queer Theory and Pomo are really scorched earth for me. From Derrik Jensen‘s Queer theory- paedophilia bingo to the idea that being raped isn‘t intrinsically a bad thing - ‚after all the Sabines obviously didn’t mind’ (someone seems to miss that history is generally written by the victors and surely never by the raped collateral damage (Rape victim impact statements weren‘t a thing in Ancient Rome, I hear) it is hard not to conclude that it is, ultimately, an ideology ‚of the master‘ even though it pretends to be the opposite.

I will add that much of economics isn‘t less detached from reality. When debt need not be explicitly modelled, when resources are assumed to be infinite, when damages of +10•C avg. global temperature by 2100 are calculated in $ - as if any mammal bigger than a hen would survive that... and then write a cheque - we are in territory that denies material realities with a vengeance. No wonder these finance guys also believe that Pippa Bunce is a woman. Occasionally.

I did some linkages in my head earlier. Still not threshed out but:

1. There was a lot of het male philosophy spouted in the 1960's - 70s about how matriarchy was a cage for men created by women, and the natural state of a heterosexual union should be men running out with multiple partners but coming home to the nest while the enlightened woman looked the other way.

1. I saw Foucault speak in the late 1970's at my college. His accent was so thick you could have cut it and spread it on toast, but what I remember was that I thought his position was a throwback to the 1st theory.

And that's before AIDS cut a path, but the sexual liberation of the 1950's as written by Hugh Hefner seems to have influence parts of queer theory.

Delighted to see these academics sticking their heads above the parapet, really hope a tide is turning. This discussion absolutely needs to be had within academia, which (sorry, not an academic) seems to be just as affected by fashion as any other industry is, but is possibly much more reliant than other industries are, on very narrow range of sources of income.

Surely if enough academics in different disciplines can start questioning, the funders will have to fund to support research around this and slowly everyone will start being able to treat the TRA dogma for what it is, a political belief system that has flaws and contradictions and is optional to believe in or not, just like all the other religious or political belief systems there are.

Thank you for answering my question

away I think examples of individuals living as the other sex exist, yes, for example women to get access to education and to be treated as the other sex, but that to me more emphasises that biological and social categories do map (as the only way to get beyond them is to present oneself as the opposite sex)

deepwatersolo this is more what I meant and that is an interesting example, but still to take advantage, if you like, of the opportunities available to males.

I am being picky, I know, but I think it is important because biology is the root of women’s oppression and that is a material construct. There may be no such thing as a ‘real woman’ in how we live our lives discursively and linguistically but everyone knows what one is biologically.

Please can you tell me when you are referring to? I get the understandings of the biology of men and women have changed, and attitudes about the social categories, ditto, but when have social categories not matched to biological categories?

I understood it to mean that actual humans don't always conform to the social definitions of male/female. For example, were men in ancient Rome who did not conform to the social definition of masculinity actually female - some suggested they were. In fact, off the top of my head, I think Cicero basically accused Mark Anthony of 'femininity' due to his failure to conform to the norms of Roman masculinity.

All in all, it fits in well with the TRA argument that masculinity and femininity are innate and indicative of biological sex.

This discussion absolutely needs to be had within academia, which (sorry, not an academic) seems to be just as affected by fashion as any other industry is, but is possibly much more reliant than other industries are, on very narrow range of sources of income.

This is a very good point. I don’t know about humanities funding but science funding is very competitive and definitely prone to funding the ‘hot topic’ stuff.

People presenting/acting as the opposite sex has historically almost always been driven by need, a desire to do something forbidden to that sex or by fetish.

The ‘Male died, need a hunter’ mode I think was present in several cultures including high arctic. It is always one way - no flip flopping and always no marriage. In effect it was a sacrifice made to ensure food supply.

Then there’s the ones driven by banned activity - women wanting to be pirates/soldiers etc.

And fetishism - cross dressing etc.

Also some cultures have the ‘third gender’ mode but again that’s never been ‘you are literally female.’

I don’t think what we call transgender has been a thing historically. Humans haven’t ever thought they were the opposite sex - reproductive biology has been obvious since the dawn of time - they’ve fought against stereotypes when the need or desire to has arisen

And our understanding of what a Male or female is hasn’t changed - we’ve increased our understanding a bit but nothing has substantially changed

I think that is what I am trying to say Babel - that when people present as or are assumed to be the opposite sex, it is because there are rigid social norms which necessitate that to achieve something, or they are doing it as the exception which proves the rule - ?

In terms of funding, I think the UKRI have just released the Global Challenges priorities and one is transgender/intersectional, but I have not checked the details so do not quote me on that. I am hoping there is also a stream on maternal mortality and infant health as these are massive issues in the developing world and even in northern western countries - maternal mortality amongst black women in the US for example is shockingly high - maybe this comes under intersectional but it is a female issue (although men lose wives, partners and children, it is women who die or have life changing problems).

All of which is going off topic, but none of these problems go away and you cannot identify out of maternal mortality, for example, or being black.

There is an emerging body of historical research on transgender/transsexual people in the past. For an overview see here: Beemyn, Genny. "A Presence in the Past: A Transgender Historiography." Journal of Women's History, vol. 25 no. 4, 2013, pp. 113-121. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jowh.2013.0062
(this is written by a scholar-activist with interesting pronouns)

What I take from this is that there were two broad motivations behind cross-gender behaviour, e.g. women who presented as male for various reasons (cross dressers, passing women, female husbands, etc.) and women who apparently identified and lived as men, which included presenting as male.

For the modern concept of transsexualism, there's Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002). If I remember correctly, this goes into some detail on the 1950s origin of the concept of 'gender identity'.

Whether people in the past always adopted the social role of the other sex merely to have material benefits and more opportunities in life - I don't know about that, I think that's a bit too general. The best we can do is to look at the available evidence and draw our conclusions without ahistorically labelling people in the past. Which I think is happening in the current climate.

Humans in the past have had the strangest ideas about bodies and reproduction (e.g. that women are just incubators and babies are really made from the man's semen), and there are historical examples of e.g. women who were sexually attracted to other women and then concluded that they must really be men with an undiagnosed medical problem. (Internalised lesbophobia or trans - who knows?)

But still, all of this is about how humans have seen the world in the past. Evolutionary theory is a much better guide to the very long history of sexual dimorphism in the animals we call humans.

Going right back to the second comment, thank you vaginafetishist! All this theory for theory's sake makes my eyes cross.

Actual evidence for the motivations of cross-dressing and presenting people in the past must be incredibly sparse, though. Not only would little have been written down and preserved, given both the rareness and the transgressory nature of the phenomenon, it's also the kind of material that would often end up being destroyed either by the author or recipient themselves, or by their friends and relations after their death.

Some people did leave quite a bit of evidence. However, those individuals are rare (and privileged in some way - either materially or in terms of self-confidence, only people who think they are special keep autobiographical material in large quantities), and the question is to what extent can we generalise - and that's where I think the problems start.

There are people who identified as the other sex for a limited amount of time, then went back to identifying as their own sex, so the motivation of their family to destroy everything was not there. Some people make sure their family is cut off.

In any case, what does transgender history actually prove? It doesn't prove that today, in 2018, Karen White has the right to go to a women's prison, in my opinion. If you seriously want to use history to make claims for the rights of men who identify as women, you also have to take into account women's history and the many ways in which women have been oppressed and objectified by men. This, sadly, is the blind spot, and it actually makes me very cross, especially when it comes from female scholars.