Judith Butler explains gender!

[ArthurbellaScott]

At last, gang! It's the answers we've all been asking for!

<sits down with large cup of tea>

Thanks for the rec, I'll seek out that book. I loved Nussbaum's lucidity in that essay.

I concluded a long time ago that any academic who uses a lot of complicated words strung together with complicated prose is almost certainly talking utter twaddle.

I'd translated enough articles into ordinary English by then to be fairly confident of my assessment.

Can I just say, your username nearly made me choke giggling - very amusing 💐

If I recall correctly shoulder pads and power dressing were very popular in the 80s to help women stage a more masculine 'performance' at work. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it did much to close the gender pay gap.

Butler's argument completely misses the point that gender is not just done 'by' you as a performance it is done 'to' you by others as a constraint, depending on whether you are male or female - ie depending on your sex - via structures such as the family, the workplace, popular culture etc etc.

All this gender performance nonsense is just shoulder pads on steroids. A complete blind alley of wishful thinking. Makes you realise why these theories are mainly taken up by the young or by very privileged people.

From what I read recently, the 'gender pay gap' is almost entirely that women take time off work to have and raise children.

Once we can identify out of being mothers, that'll surely fix it.

Here to learn.

Just noting that I very much enjoyed the Martha Nussbaum article but that I couldn't help noticing the absence of abortion as an issue of material politics that feminists addressed. It's nowhere in the piece. Why?

Not sure, Permanent. She has written on it:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1799190

Probably when they / them realised that you can't talk authoritatively about "gender" without being gender expansive oneself.

I’ve just watched the Butler video. The background music, and the carefully selected images designed to contrast ‘traditional stereotypes’ with ‘progressive freedom’, all gave it the feel of a lengthy advert for Butler’s views, or of a propaganda exercise. As if the intention was to sneak subversive ideas past our rational defences. I don’t think a transcript would have the same effect at all, because the actual arguments would be laid bare as insubstantial musings, especially if the little laughs (that show how daring she is to have such radical views) were somehow written down. It’s all in need of the ideas being challenged and some depth being demonstrated, instead of the shallow thinking put forward in the video.

It was full of poorly developed arguments and non sequiturs put forward with a sugar coating of music and images, like the sugar coating on the bitter tasting pill. Swallow it quickly, and the possibly poisonous message isn’t noticed before it is absorbed. Dissolve it slowly in the mouth, and you might spit it out as its unpleasantness becomes clear. So is the underlying message necessary medicine, or something damaging? We need to be careful what we swallow.

At least we were spared the Butlerian academic obfuscation of obscure jargon put together in convoluted sentences as if that style demonstrated substance. The little Butler writing that I have endured seems to have three purposes: to hide a lack of clarity of thought in language too complex for plebs like me, to demonstrate how clever the author is by making it very difficult to follow the trains of thought, and to demonstrate the author’s in depth knowledge of the obscure academic literature that enables the whole edifice to appear substantial.

'We all have a theory of gender.'

Oh no! Where's mine gone?

Transcript is here if anyone is hungry for more.

https://bigthink.com/series/legends/gender-theory/

Oh god it's all just such metaphysical tripe, isn't it?

Would it be more accurate perhaps to say that we all have experience of other people trying to impose social constructions of 'gender' upon us that are sensitively dependent upon the initial conditions of our sexed body?

(I am using 'sensitively dependent' in the data analysis sense, not the feelz sense.)

written in 1999, but still relevant: https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

Thanks @yasnayapolyana for the Martha Nussbaum article from 1999 (!) - she called it long ago.

It is a long read but it really sums up at the end the desolate vison of Butler and co - no point taking action to make the world a better place for women, just do a bit of subversive 'performing' here and there to make yourself feel better about your pessimist worldview.

Yes, thanks for that article. I liked the explanation of parts of Butler's work.

By behaving as if there were male and female “natures,” we co-create the social fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there. At the same time, by carrying out these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little.

Thus the one place for agency in a world constrained by hierarchy is in the small opportunities we have to oppose gender roles every time they take shape. When I find myself doing femaleness, I can turn it around, poke fun at it, do it a little bit differently. Such reactive and parodic performances, in Butler’s view, never destabilize the larger system. She doesn’t envisage mass movements of resistance or campaigns for political reform; only personal acts carried out by a small number of knowing actors. Just as actors with a bad script can subvert it by delivering the bad lines oddly, so too with gender: the script remains bad, but the actors have a tiny bit of freedom. Thus we have the basis for what, in Excitable Speech, Butler calls “an ironic hopefulness.”

Although this might be a bit of a mouthful...

Said the actress to the bishop.

That is an awesome article by Nussbaum. She destroys Butler with absolute clarity and precision.

Having a not like other girls complex (re. “They”) in middle age is very embarrassing.