How does Judith Butler's gender performativity theory contend with the existence of trans people ?
To the best of my understanding, Butler claims that gender is a performance based on our surrounding culture so how does this deal with trans people who have something so innate that they behave as the other gender despite them being treated as the other.
Is Julia Serano's criticism of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity a misunderstanding of the idea itself?
Trans activist Julia Serano wrote in 'Excluded:' "After all, if gender and sexuality are entirely social artifacts, and we have no intrinsic desires or individual differences, this implies that every person can (and should) change their gender and sexual behaviors at the drop of a hat in order to accommodate their own (or perhaps other people’s) politics. This assumption denies human diversity and, as I have shown, often leads to the further marginalization of minority and marked groups." I understood that Butler was not saying there is no natural variance in desires etc., but more that the gendering of those behaviours is what is constructed and so 'unreal.' Or am I incorrect in my understanding? Butler has conceded that she needed to pay more attention to trans experiences, but I never got the impression that she was implying that a trans person's experience was any less 'real' than that of a cis person. She has been criticised a lot by trans writers though, so I'm wondering if anyone could weigh in on this.
Aside from the linguistic deconstruction of the terms 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual', does Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity also necessitate the impossibility of the biological/biochemical act of being attracted to only one type of chromosomal sex?
For instance, would her theory also suggest that no one could be intrinsically attracted to one type of body (bodies that carry penises versus bodies that carry vaginas versus bodies that carry intersex genitalia), and that everyone has the potential to be attracted to everyone? I'm just really confused by this and would appreciate some help--I'm sure there are faults in the question itself, I realize this, but I hope I am getting across my confusion.
What are the political repercussions of Judith Butler's notion gender performativity?
I have been reading Butler's Gender Trouble and there seems to be implicit political effects of her take on gender performativity as she deconstructs gender through the simultaneous deconstruction of other feminists and psychoanalysts. However these repercussions are, at best, implicit.
"Classical Liberal" muses---"UC Berkeley is home to Judith Butler, the inventor of Queer Studies & the idea that gender is a 'performance,'" and that's why there are riots.
reality, hyperreality (1) The Oxford English Dictionary defines reality foremost as "the quality of being real or having an actual existence" and supplements this with a definition of real as "having objective existence," and finally to exist as having "place in the domain of reality." These conventional definitions of reality represent a larger problem in the attempt to locate the real on the most basic level, for they are wholly circular, a set of signifiers reflecting back at each other lacking the grounding necessary to render meaning. This problem is not unique to the word ‘reality,’ indeed almost all words and signs are only able to refer back towards the internal exchange of other signs in order to produce a theoretical anchor. The slippage of reality, its elusiveness encountered even in a basic search for a definition, is an element of the hyperreal – a condition in which the distinction between the ‘real’ and the imaginary implodes. There is no static definition of hyperreality, and the interpretations employed by theorists vary on some of the most essential terms. That said, this article will attempt to extrapolate a common understanding of the hyperreal based on the work of several theorists. A general understanding of hyperreality is important for it is an issue at the crux of several critical debates within the study of media including semiotics, objects and space, the spectacle, performativity, the examination of mass media, Platonism, resistance, and the structure of reality. The concept most fundamental to hyperreality is the simulation and the simulacrum (see Simulation/Simulacra, (2)]. The simulation is characterized by a blending of ‘reality’ and representation, where there is no clear indication of where the former stops and the latter begins. The simulacrum is often defined as a copy with no original, or as Gilles Deleuze (1990) describes it, "the simulacrum is an image without resemblance" (p. 257). Jean Baudrillard (1994) maps the transformation from representation to simulacrum in four ‘successive phases of the image’ in which the last is that "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum" (SS p.6). (see mimesis, representation) Deleuze, Baudrillard, and several other theorists trace the proliferation and succession of simulacra to the rise of hyperreality and the advent of a world that is either partially, or entirely simulated. Frederic Jameson (1990) contends that one of the conditions of late capitalism is the mass reproduction of simulacra, creating a "world with an unreality and a free floating absence of "the referent"’ (p. 17). Although theorists highlight different historical developments to explain hyperreality, common themes include the explosion of new media technologies, the loss of the materiality of objects, the increase in information production, the rise of capitalism and consumerism, and the reliance upon god and/or ‘the center’ in Western thought. Essentially, certain historical contingencies allow for the wide scale reproduction of simulacra so that the simulations of reality replace the real, producing a giant simulacrum completely disconnected from an earlier reality; this simulacrum is hyperreality. One of the fundamental qualities of hyperreality is the implosion of Ferdinand Saussure’s (1959) model for the sign (see semiotics) (pg. 67). The mass simulacrum of signs become meaningless, functioning as groundless, hollow indicators that self-replicate in endless reproduction. Saussure outlines the nature of the sign as the signified (a concept of the real) and the signifier (a sound-image). Baudrillard (1981) claims the Saussurian model is made arbitrary by the advent of hyperreality wherein the two poles of the signified and signifier implode in upon eachother destroying meaning, causing all signs to be unhinged and point back to a non-existing reality (180). Another basic characteristic of the hyperreal is the dislocation of object materiality and concrete spatial relations (see objecthood). Some of these problems are explored in Paul Virilio’s The Lost Dimension, in which he argues that modern media technology have created a "crisis of representation" where the distinctions between near and far, object and image, have imploded (p. 112). Virilio locates the ‘vacuum of speed’ as the historical development which produces technology that overturn our original understanding of spatial relations by altering our perceptions. This machinery "gives way to the televised instantaneity of a prospective observation, of a glance that pierces through the appearances of the greatest distances and the widest expanses" (p. 31). These ethereal qualities of hyperreality mean drastic revision for media theory surrounding the spectacle. This theory was famously articulated by Guy Debord (1977) who argued through neo-Marxian criticism that the spectacle has become central to capitalist modes of reproduction (p. 24). Hans Enzensberger also attempted his own ‘socialist theory of the media’ and proposed theories of domination and potential resistance based on a liberal/Marxist critique (1996). Yet, the world of hyperreality overturns any hope of a Marxist understanding of mass media, for the entire web of human meaning-making activities has been transformed into the symbolic exchange of empty signs, the modes of production have been liquefied and leukemized into the giant political economy of exchanging signs. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner present the hyperrealist argument against Debord and his colleagues, "this is not to say that "representation" has simply become more indirect or oblique, as Debord would have it, but that in a world where the subject/object distance is erased […] and where signs no longer refer beyond themselves to an existing, knowable world, representation has been surpassed […] an independent object world is assimilated to and defined by artificial codes and simulation models" (DBT pg. web). The system of monetary exchange is an example of the hyperreal that should help to prevent any definitional confusion. Traditional explanations of the history of money will return to earlier societies in which people traded goods and tools that presumably had similar amounts of labor invested within their production/acquisition. At some point, a common good was substituted as a ground for exchange, and then later pecuniary units were produced in order to simulate the common exchange. At first, the monetary units had inherent value in that they were made of precious metals, but they were eventually replaced with worthless paper units, and many contemporary economies are now substituting these papers for credit information stored in computer databanks. During the process of countless successive copies, the essential reality of exchange has long since been lost, with commodities now completely disconnected from their use-value, their production cost, and even their function. Moreover, the foundational lie of exchange has long since been forgotten over the weight of countless simulacra: that there was never any trade grounded in reality, that symbolic exchange is precisely and only that which can only refer to other signs for meaning and definition. The next important intersection between the theory of hyperreality and media studies is performativity. Although the problem of performance is not one unique to modernity, it does seem as though it has been exacerbated in the hyperrealist environment with the proliferation of identities and recognizable performative actions. Social performance is a copy that instantaneously reproduces itself by being viewed thus disseminated to others who will potentially incorporate the performative action into their own technologies of self. Jeffrey T. Nealon in his book Alterity Politics interprets the work of Butler and Derrida to argue that basic performances underlie all social agency, "agency is necessarily a matter of response to already given codes" (p. 23). But where are the originals, the carved wooden blocks that produced so many performative copies? The ‘originals’ are constantly referenced through discursive performance, mostly as ‘human nature’ or some equivalent concept. Performances based on gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and a number of smaller modes of action consistently refer back to a fabricated biological essence, a ‘truth’ of the body. Yet as my own performance in this course revealed, gender (and by insinuation the entire structure of human nature) is entirely performative lacking any grounding in biological or otherwise human essence. My ability to simply change the gender of my everyday performance elucidated the lack of any biological grounding to gender or sex, and illuminated all social performance as media simulacrum. The role of performance within mass media must thus be studied in the two following ways: firstly as being reproduced among wide scale audiences, and secondly as a forged ‘unreality’ that implies the ‘realness’ of everyday performance. The first form of analysis is obvious, that commonly portrayed performances such as race or gender normalize those modes of behavior and train audiences to take on, improve, and master those performative identities thus replicating the simulacra. Umberto Eco (1983) touches on this aspect of simulations in his book Travels in Hyperreality, where he notes that the simulacrum not only produces illusion, but "stimulates demand for it" (p. 44). In the second instance of media criticism, Baudrillard’s metaphor of Disneyland should be employed, that the constructed realm of fantasy exists to imply that the rest of the world is real (1994, p. 12). The obviously unreal performances of characters in television and movies should be examined in light of their significant role for persuading populations that their own social performances are ‘real,’ and providing the most foundational ‘other’ to stabilize all identities. Deleuze helps to connect hyperreality to another strain of media theory originating in one of the oldest known media theorists, Plato. Suspicion of media technologies is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, indeed Plato advanced a critique of the written word through the dialog of Socrates in the Phaedrus (quite similar to that of Baudrillard in CPS). Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, purports the existence of truth in ideal forms, accessible not in reality but through the philosopher’s ideas and intellectual pursuit of the forms. Plato presents a clear understanding of simulations in the Caves; although he concedes that any artistic reproduction of ideal forms would constitute representation, he is clear that it entails the copy of an original, true form. Deleuze argues that Plato contrasts these legitimate copies to fearful simulacra, "Plato divides in two the domain of images-idols: on one hand there are copies-icons, on the other there are simulacra-phantasms" (p. 256). It is thus that Deleuze is able to claim that with the arrival of hyperreality Platonism has been reversed, for any original truth or ideal forms that provided the anchor for representation have since been permanently lost in the reproduction of simulacra and the construction of a hyperreality without any connection to the real. The role of resistance in relation to hyperreality differs greatly among theorists. Some thinkers are fairly optimistic, such as Marshall McLuhan’s portrayal of media technologies as a generally benign force, expanding and evolving toward a society with great communicative potential. This interpretation directly clashes with Baudrillard, who sees the mass media as inherently non-communicative, a quality that allows them to exert social control over mass populations. In his earlier work Baudrillard’s proposal for resistance is radical but clear: obliterate the transmitters, destroy the world of media technologies through revolutionary action and resume normal face to face conversation (1981: p. 170). Yet in his later work, Baudrillard borders more on nihilism, with the closest articulation of resistance being his advocacy of mass indifference to simulacra (IL 1994: 60-61). Eco is far more hopeful about the possibilities for resistance. Eco, in a move theoretically similar to Enzensberger, advocates what he calls the guerrilla solution, modeled off the metaphor of guerrilla resistance; he claims that revolutionaries and critical theorists can use the grassroots television programming to spread their subversive message (142-143). My own performance proposed a strategy of resistance adopted from the work of Judith Butler, to reverse certain performative signs in a subversive manner around the body so as to expose, reveal, and de-familiarize specific media technologies– to dress in drag in order to denaturalize simulated norms of sex and gender. The conceptual use of hyperreality is consistent enough within the literature to give space for a common working definition for media theory, but the contrasting term ‘reality’ is used in far too many divergent ways to arrive at a unified understanding. However, it may be helpful for readers to conclude this article with a few brief theories of reality as a starting point for further study. For Lacan, the term real is composed in opposition to that which is encompassed by the symbolic and the imaginary (see symbolic, real, imaginary). The real is what eludes representation, what cannot be either symbolized (in terms of Saussure’s notion of signifiers) or imagined and perceived within the images of the conscious and unconscious (Sheridan 1978: p. 280). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983) understand desire to be based upon the lack of the object, yet nonetheless a productive force that renders into reality the fantasy of that object. ‘Reality’ is thus nothing more than a "group fantasy" reified by ‘desiring machines, for "desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production" (p. 30). For a definition of reality in contrast to hyperreality, Baudrillard represents many of the hyperrealists with his claim that the real is "fictional," a phantasy generated by "doubling the signs of an unlocatable reality" (1994: p. 81). Baudrillard concludes on reality that it is nothing more than a fairy tale, it is "now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real" (1994: p. 21). Nicholas Oberly Winter 2003 The University of Chicago
Hi everyone. At the request of a reader, this post (made 4/5/2019) has been recovered (on 9/30/2020) from a now thankfully banned debate subreddit. I'm no great fan of my thinking from this period, but it's a healthy biographical marker in that it was the last time I ever tried to commune in good faith with women who hate me for being trans. The main point about queer theory sharing much of its thought with radical feminist theory remains compelling. The comments which were also lost were pretty much all cruel, hostile, and abusive, but if you know what you are doing you can recover them usingRedditSearch. Hello everyone. Effortpost incoming. I do not usually post here but have considered starting. After reading this post and its comments, it is clear to me that most users on this forum do not know what queer theory is. So this is an introduction to queer theory. I am covering basic concepts: use of language, beliefs about identity, and relationship to radical feminism. I am writing this to clear up what I believe are obvious misconceptions both trans-accepting and trans-denialist people seem to have, and to serve as a masterpost link to others making misstatements about queer theory in the future. I am a queer feminist. More relevant to this forum, I am transgender. I have read feminist theory and queer theory since I was a teenager. I am a queer advocate and a woman advocate. I say this is to make clear that I am partisan. However, I hope this is well-cited enough that all parties find it helpful. I have tried to speak as simply as possible.
What Is Queer Theory?
In this primer, I will repeatedly stress the following analogy: queer theory is to sex-gender nonconformity as feminist theory is to women. I say "sex-gender nonconformity" to express the full breadth of queer theory, which can range from intersex writers (Iain Moorland, Morgan Holmes), to studies in something as seemingly superficial as drag (The Drag King Book, Judith Butler), to racial intersections (Mia McKenzie, Tourmaline) & Che Gossett) and postcolonial third genders (Qwo-Li Driskill). Like feminist theory, queer theory is not one thing. It is a collection of diverse approaches to explaining the condition of sex-gender nonconformity in society, and, in the case of radical queers, improving that condition towards the radical end goal of the abolition of all sex-gender norms. Like feminist theory, queer theory is theory. Not all feminism is feminist theory. Not all queer advocacy is queer theory. Queer studies is not queer theory. Queer history is not queer theory. Queer praxis is not queer theory. Being queer is not queer theory.
Queer Theory & Language
Not all people who practice sex-gender nonconformity consider themselves queer. In fact, some consider the word exclusionary or pejorative. This is no more exceptional than the fact that some women do not consider themselves feminists, and consider the word exclusionary or pejorative. Just as some black women reject feminism as being white (Clenora Hudson-Weems), some black sex-gender nonconformers reject queerness as being white (Cleo Manago). And just as some women reject feminist theory as harmful to society (Esther Vilar), some sex-gender nonconforming people reject queer theory as harmful to society (Sheila Jeffreys). This problem, in which the purported subjects of a theory actively reject it, and even their positions as subjects within it, is no more destructive for queer advocacy than it is for feminism. The challenge has been answered affirmationally in various ways in both queer theory and feminist theory (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pgs. 115-117; Dworkin, Right Wing Women; Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto; Stone, A Posttranssexual Manifesto). However, because much more of queer theory takes its subject's status as queer to be uncontroversially entirely socially constructed, and its use of language to be therefore open to social change, queer theorists encounter this problem less often than feminist theorists. We usually acknowledge that, in forcing people to be queer or not queer, we are passively reinforcing the exact forms of oppression we seek to end through our analyses. Leslie Feinberg, who did not use the word queer as a political identity, noted in hir Transgender Liberation (1992):
Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes—a wonderful problem.
Today, Feinberg's "transgender[ed] people" is now most often used apolitically, for what was once called "transgenderists": the demographic of those who live or attempt to live, socially, as a sex-gender outside of that first placed on their birth certificate. "Queer" has come to have most of the solidarity-driven political meaning of Feinberg's "transgender." However, Feinberg's conception of "transgender" is not uncommon today. Insofar as queer advocacy permits its subjects to change, establishing their own voice, own vocabulary, own concerns, and own dissent, while feminism does not, the two must be antagonistic. Riki Wilchins addresses this tension directly in hir essay "Deconstructing Trans":
Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends.
However, Wilchins is wrong: this tension between feminist theory and queer theory is local to specific versions of queer advocacy and feminism, and is not inherent to either.
Queer Theory & Gender Identity
What the hecky, y'all? Queer theory rejects gender identity politics almost unconditionally. Get it right. There are very few things queer theorists universally agree on: this is one. In fact, queer theorists reject sexual identity politics almost unconditionally (e.g. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism). Queer theorists regularly assert that all identity formation (including identity formation as a man or woman, flat) and even the very concept of selfhood emerge as a regulatory apparatus of power, usually that of The State. These critiques in queer theory are developed out of postmodern critiques of identity and the self. Consider, for example, these quotes from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:
To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. There is no longer a Self (Moi) that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.
This denial of self is directly tied to Deleuze's concept of becoming-minority), and is constructed again and again and again in queer theoretic concepts: in anti-sociality, in death drive, in anal sublimation and butch abjection, just over and over and over again. Anyone who does not understand this general concept does not understand a single thing about queer theory, straight up. Among the transgender population specifically, it is extremely easy to find transgender people rejecting the concept of gender identity as something forced upon us by a cisgender establishment which has all the power. It's easy to find on writing. It's easy to find on video. It's easy to find on reddit. And most of us aren't even queer theorists. So, what is it queer theorists do, if not snort identity for breakfast? Well, generally, we sort through history, literature, science, language, the social psyche, most especially real-life experience, and whatever else we can ooze our brainjuices over to analyze and undo the structures of our oppression, the very means through which we become "queer." We argue that this oppression and our position as uniquely oppressed subjects within it is socially constructed, unnecessary, and morally outrageous. And, on most analyses, this is what many feminist theorists do with women, as well. Few have even argued that, in a culture that constructs manhood as its norm, there is a sense in which to be a "woman" is also to be "queer."
Queer Theory & Radical Feminism
It has never been clear what radical feminism is. In general, I understand people who call themselves or are called "radical feminists" to be one of the following:
Socialist feminists, who assert women are a class in some previously understood, usually Marxist sense, who must achieve liberation through techniques espoused in pre-existing theory, e.g. wages for housework.
Post-Marxist feminists, who assert women are a "sex-class," where "class" is some new, peculiarly feminist sense of the word, who must achieve liberation through some specifically feminist method yet to be decided, outside of Marxist, anarchist, or liberal methodologies. Its origins are often supposed to be Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Post-Marxist radical feminism is usually considered "true" radical feminism, or even just feminism, proper (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pg. 117).
Cultural feminists, who assert "man" and "woman" compose two competing cultures, and (more importantly) "feminism" as women's culture. Under this view, there can be no end to feminism because women cannot achieve equality, only the dominance of female culture. Men cannot be feminists because feminism is not a political position. Cultural feminists are ambivalent about their positioning on a left or right which are both seen as "male culture." Cultural feminists often call for a return to "the natural order," and approve of "biologism," the belief that one's cultural categorization is and should be derived from biology. Their purpose is to preserve women as feminists rather than achieve the radical goal which is the abolition of all classes. See Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology; Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Not all cultural feminists claim to be radical (or cultural); see écriture féminine.
On cultural feminism, radical feminist historian Alice Echols noted in The Taming of the Id (1984):
I believe that what we have come to identify as radical feminism represents such a fundamental departure from its radical feminist roots that it requires renaming.
Brooke Williams's Redstocking's piece The Retreat to Cultural Feminism (1975) begins:
Many women feel that the women’s movement is currently at an impasse. This paper takes the position that this is due to a deradicalizing and distortion of feminism which has resulted in, among other things,"cultural feminism.”
Inasmuch as cultural feminism asserts "man" and "woman" as essential and non-relative social categories in need of preservation, queer theory can have no truck with radical feminism, because radical feminism maintains a cultural institution which is usually seen as a major genesis of queer oppression. However, insofar as radical feminism is post-Marxist, it is often deeply aligned with queer theory. Queer theory is also usually post-Marxist, as postmodernism was developed partly in response to the failures of Marxism. Queer advocacy often adopts radical feminist methodology, particularly consciousness raising. Many radical feminists effectively advocate queerness, in what Andrea Dworkin calls a "political, ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system," as a necessary part of feminism. Please consider what radical feminists and queer advocates have historically said about the following topics common to both:
Family Reform: RadFem: "So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed." (De Beauvoir, Second Sex) "Patching up with band-aids the casualties of the aborted feminist revolution, it [Freudianism] succeeded in quieting the immense social unrest and role confusion that followed in the wake of the first attack on the rigid patriarchal family." (Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 70). Queer: "The family has become the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations. It falls to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply all the social images to the simulcra of the restricted family, with the result that, wherever one turns, one no longer finds anything but father-mother - this Oedipal filth that sticks to our skin." (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 269) Pansexuality: RadFem: "[Through feminist revolution] A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 11) Queer: "When queerness began to mean little more than 'pansexual activist', Bash Back! became a liberal social scene rather than a space from which to attack, which i think had been the whole point of bashing back all along." (Interview with Not Yr Cister Press, Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology, pg. 385) Degendered Gestation: RadFem: "Scientific advances which threaten to further weaken or sever altogether the connection between sex and reproduction have scarcely been realized culturally. That the scientific revolution has had virtually no effect on feminism only illustrates the political nature of the problem: the goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 31) Queer: "The gender of gestating is ambiguous. I am not talking about pregnancy’s deepening of one’s voice, its carpeting of one’s legs in bristly hair, or even about the ancient Greek belief that it was an analogue of men’s duty to die in battle if called upon. I am not even thinking of the heterogeneity of those who gestate. Rather, in a context where political economists are talking constantly of “the feminization of labor,” it seems to me that the economic gendering of the work itself—gestating is work, as Merve Emre says—is not as clear-cut as it would appear." (Sophie Lewis, All Reproduction is Assisted) Institutional Debinarization: RadFem: "[A]ll forms of sexual interaction which are directly rooted in the multisexual nature of people must be part of the fabric of human life, accepted into the lexicon of human possibility, integrated into the forms of human community. By redefining human sexuality, or by defining it correctly, we can transform human relationship and the institutions which seek to control that relationship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we know now. Sex as community between humans, our shared humanity, is the world we must build." (Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, pg. 183) Queer: "'Boy' and 'girl' do not tell the genital truth that Zippora knows. Quite the opposite: instead of describing her baby’s sex, these words socially enact the sex they name... Intersexuality robs 'boy' and 'girl' of referents, but it is unclear how far this intersexed scenario differs from any other gendered encounter... I suggest the claim that sex is performative must operate constatively in order to be politically effective. One has to say that performativity is the real, scientic truth of sex in order to argue that intersex surgery, which claims to treat sex as a constative, is futile constructivism." (Iain Morland, Is Intersexuality Real?)
I hope these few quotations are enough to demonstrate that queer theory and radical feminist theory are deeply interwoven, and the former is in many ways a continuation of the latter. I have noticed debate here seems quite one-sided, but I think that I could contribute something to fix what I see as a pretty egregious misrepresentation issue. I know this primer wasn't exactly structured for debate, but I can try to answer any questions below. If you read this all, thanks!
Is Judith Butler's theory about the subject compatible with free will?
I know Judith Butler has been criticized for having both a voluntaristic and deterministic understanding of the subject (which seems to mean something along the lines of a recognizable person). While I understand how her theory can be interpreted as deterministic, I'm having a hard time understanding how it can be considered voluntaristic? The critique I've seen that's about her theory being voluntaristic, seems to be based on neglecting to recognize that there is a difference between "performance" (which could mean a singular act) and "performativity" (a stylized repetition of acts). Are there any good reads that argue that her view is voluntaristic? And I'm especially wondering if there are any interesting interpretations of Butler that regards her theory of the subject as compatible with free will? Even though she doesn't regard autonomy as something that's within the individual alone, there seems to be some sort of free will at work, in regards to how we can change norms by repeatedly breaking them. You can reject an interpellation, you can do your gender differently etc.. But is any part of doing things differently based on an intentional choice you make? Or is the change we're experiencing more so based on something similar to genetic mutations in evolution theory? And by this I mean, if it's really just based on how people's actions and societal norms are different, and therefore unable to perfectly align with each other, leading to change? Please let me know if you have any ideas as to what I could read to get a bit less confused, as I'd really like a better comprehension of this. And if this isn't the right forum to ask, I'm sorry. I've just been having a really hard time getting in touch with someone with some more knowledge of Judith Butler and her theories, and since I've seen people posting about her here, I thought it might be worth a shot. (I've also posted this in u/askphilosopy, but I haven't gotten any responses there yet, although it's too early to tell if I'll get any or not).
Does most (continental) political / cultural theory/philosophy completely reject Evolutionary Cultural Theory ? (ie 'survival') and on what basis?
I am thinking here of Giorgio Agamben's work on disoperativity and anti-sovereignty, or Jacques Derrida's notions of autoimmunity. They kind of advocate for senses of communal living that reject 'survival' as a legitimate aim. Reproduction, 'survival' or 'continued existence' are denied legitimate consideration in political theory. But ... it seems that in a way, the kind of communities advocated by Agamben etc while 'possible' simply would cease to exist after a while. Similarly in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble she aims at critiquing the normative 'reproductive heterosexuality' that demands binary gender performances. This aims to de-naturalise hetero-sexuality and hence de-normatize it. To free up the 'moralisation' of sexuality, which is fine. But in a way, doesn't the recognition that reproduction is central to heterosexuality demand a consideration of the survivability of alternative social relation. Butler herself even writes in Gender Trouble, that
'all cultures seek to reproduce themselves'
This is an odd formulation, that anthropomorphizes 'cultures' themselves as having a desire for survival, when really from an evolutionary perspective, one might actually say, more accuratley, (and withouth judgement) that cultures that do not seek to reproduce themselves, often do not end up surviving. (ie they are more likely to die out). Has the spencerian and eugenic legacy of theories of cultural evolution left it as a personae non-grata in philosophy? Are there any attempts to deal with relationship between the desire to survive and the likelihood of survival for cultures?
Can I be a Non-Binary Trans Woman? Does that make sense?
Hi all, sorry for the wall of text, this is just complicated and confusing and any help would be appreciated c: So after three years on hormones I find myself at a weird possible intersection of identity. I've known I was transgender for years before starting hormones, and being on hormones has been emphatically the right decision for me. I don't regret starting them, nor do I regret the changes I've seen and felt. And for the longest time, I was fine with that, a trans woman, a binary trans woman. But this is where I might sound kinda silly. For a while now I've been questioning a couple of things. Finally being comfortable in my body has done wonders for me, but it's also opened me up to new, almost exploratory possibilities. After all, now that I'm comfortable with myself, so what if I want to change things up in a way I'm comfortable with? I feel free from old shackles that came with, for me, being pre-transition, and so I could and can finally roam. And that's when it hit me. I like the changes hormones have netted me and I prefer to pass as a woman as opposed to a man, but something still feels a little off. Can I say I'm a woman? It's not that I doubt my identity as trans, it's more that... I don't quite feel like I fit the gender identity as well as I thought. I fit it better than that of a man, for certain, though. And I recently read one of Judith Butler's essays on Gender Performativity and something struck a chord for me. Gender as a construct is theoretically boundless in expression and performance, and the body without it is simply a human body with sex characteristics generally, though not always, found typically this way or that. I find myself much more comfortable with a female body, but now that I have that comfort, I'm not afraid of some 'male' characteristics, either in the form of what is perceived as "male gender social roles" or "male sex characteristics". I just sometimes feel I don't fit this or that gender identity, or even at times, sex. I thought I was just tomboyish at first, but I don't know how well that fits me. So can I say I'm a woman? It's more that I'm not a man, and am more, personally, woman than man. And yet I think that if my body were effectively genderless, and if I had the choice to construct it, I'd, while sort of 'molding' it to be female, wouldn't construct either woman or man. Rather, I'd be comfortable, if that makes sense. I'm afraid this would invalidate my identity as a trans woman. I certainly feel like I'm trans, and I'm more comfortable as a woman than a man, but it's almost like I truly prefer neither, but instead, something else. A bit of both, 75% woman 25% man maybe. The idea of being a man is distressing to me but the idea of being a woman doesn't feel like a 100% fit. I don't feel like I've made the wrong move with hormones, but I'm scared that I'm missing something, I don't understand something, I'm invalid - I don't know. I'm scared I'm invalid. That's what worries me. Perhaps I misunderstand what it is to be non-binary. If so I apologize and would much appreciate an explanation as to what I misunderstand - hopefully so it might also help me clear this up. tl;dr can you be a non binary trans woman on hormones or does that not make sense? Thank you to all who might respond, love you all c: im really embarrassed to post this sorry if i offended anyone i really didn't mean to im just ignorant in places :c
Is Judith Butler's theory about the subject compatible with free will?
I know Judith Butler has been criticized for having both a voluntaristic and deterministic understanding of the subject (which seems to mean something along the lines of a recognizable person). While I understand how her theory can be interpreted as deterministic, I'm having a hard time understanding how it can be considered voluntaristic? The critique I've seen that's about her theory being voluntaristic, seems to be based on neglecting to recognize that there is a difference between "performance" (which could mean a singular act) and "performativity" (a stylized repetition of acts). Are there any good reads that argue that her view is voluntaristic? And I'm especially wondering if there are any interesting interpretations of Butler that regards her theory of the subject as compatible with free will? Even though she doesn't regard autonomy as something that's within the individual alone, there seems to be some sort of free will at work, in regards to how we can change norms by repeatedly breaking them. You can reject an interpellation, you can do your gender differently etc.. But is any part of doing things differently based on an intentional choice you make? Or is the change we're experiencing more so based on something similar to genetic mutations in evolution theory? And by this I mean, if it's really just based on how people's actions and societal norms are different, and therefore unable to perfectly align with each other, leading to change? Please let me know if you have any ideas as to what I could read to get a bit less confused, as I'd really like a better comprehension of this.
Hey friends. I’m a 38yo AFAB and recently realized I’m NB. But I also feel this intense sense of imposter syndrome...like this little voice in my head saying “dude, you’ve been watching too many Tiktoks”. Context: I’ve always known I wasn’t “like the other girls”. At 11 I told my mom (Polish catholic) that I was attracted to women and she promptly said it was a “disease” I’d grow out of and started dressing me in wool and lace Laura Ashley dresses. My mom was an abusive, alcoholic narcissist but the only time I ever stood up to her was when I had finally had enough of the dresses and threw a fit. For me growing up “lesbian”, I was mostly exposed to either butch or femmes. But I really never found my place in either presentation. Sometimes I like to let down my long hair and prance around in my Victoria secret Brazilians, but other times I relish being called sir at the grocery store. At uni, I was a big fan of Judith Butler and gained an understanding of gender as a social construct and performance. It was the first time I felt that I was getting closer to something deep inside of me. Recently I’ve started reading more about the non-binary experience and it just feels like it clicks....like it’s that missing puzzle piece. When I experiment using they/them or even he/they pronouns I get a distinct feeling of excitement and joy. It just feels like YES. In the past, I understood the non-binary identity was one ONLY for androgynous people. But recently I have come to understand that it truly is about fluidity. a beautiful analogy I heard on Tiktok was that gender is like murmuring birds....which made me weep. This is exactly the feeling I’ve always had. But, you know, I’m 38 and part of me is like “you’re just having a midlife crisis”, “you just want to stay relevant, you old fart”. I guess I’m reaching out here for some support to help me quell those voices, that insidious imposter syndrome that makes me so nervous to finally wear my identity with pride. Thanks 💛🤍💜🖤
Edit: thank you all so so much for your comments and support. Y’all made me cry a little. It really means a lot.
This is an essay a friend and I wrote together in order to put our thoughts to paper. Its quite long and personal, but I'd really like to know what you think.
I I face the first difficulty of writing this document as I am trying to introduce a thing of thought which doesn’t necessarily ever begin or end. For me to be able to communicate this thing of thought to you I must phrase it as though it belongs in time; for me to do so I must first see and then try to convey how my thoughts are presented to me as best I can. Through both courses of Modern Philosophy and Phenomenology with Professor Seltzer, the main understanding of philosophy that was being communicated to me was that Philosophy is thought for the sake of itself, pure thought. The main problem that arises for me is that now Philosophy (Thought for-itself) is now disturbed by things such as class, grades, vocabulary, class standing, age, gender, etc to the extent that that it ‘feels’ completely outside of itself. As much as the topics were impactful for my thought in both courses, as much as there were topics in other courses that were able to guide my thought in a similar manner. Ultimately, what I’m trying to convey is how a series of both random (taken for any reason outside of personal interest) and intentional courses, were things that allowed me to both shape and convey my thought by “validating” my own intuition. What I mean by validating my own intuition, is feeling like I already had a prior understanding of the concepts named and defined in a class setting. I have been put in multiple situations where typologizing my relationships with other people obstructed both my and the person’s view, whether it be a (friend, parent, brother, teacher) of the present. The Stanford Prison Experiment, which I learnt in a prerequisite Psychology class, is one of the instances where a random course not only added to my prior understanding of “social roles,” that I perform but also gave me stronger insight on how much I abide by these roles unconsciously. The conclusion of this particular experiment was that people will readily conform to the social roles they play due to situational factors rather than dispositional ones. In one of the courses I took out of intent, namely Introduction to Sociology, I learned of an example that showed me the extent of which some of these roles I play remained unconscious. “When Simone de Beauvoir claims, "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman," she is appropriating and reinterpreting this doctrine of constituting acts from the phenomenological tradition.1 In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of act,” a quote from Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” A very simple explanation of performative versus performed is that contrary to that of the performed, the performative is as much of an act as the performed, but the only difference is that in the performed you have an awareness of your own performance. Journey I was raised in what I would describe as a loving coptic orthodox household in Egypt. My parents once told m e that I came back from the nursery crying because one of the other kids told me that I was going to go to hell because I was Christian. From that experience I was forced to deduce, because of my situational factor (religion), a perceived role that I played in a social aggregate. Because my parents knew how the christian minority is treated in Egypt, they taught me that I could become a victim of that mistreatment and further taught me various ways in which I can protect my faith when faced with situations like these. Early experiences of competition, particularly those of a religious manner (Muslim vs Christian), resulted in my carrying of anxiety(vulnerability) in the world. The world being in a highly competitive state (for example the school setting which was filled with ideas of which kids are coolest, smartest,etc) was a highly stressful place for me to be in, and for me to be able to cope I isolated myself as much as possible from situations in which I could be defined by my roles. I had no understanding that my going to school was a matter of choice, until I travelled to study abroad where some of my friends would drop out without actually receiving any of the crazy consequences I would’ve imagined for myself in that situation. I went to school in California State University, Long Beach as an Economics major believing that money was “the” main indicator of success. What I lived, however, showed me a side that wasn’t predicated on money and success . I started living my life through that side, and put myself and my thought ahead of monetary motivators. Therefore, my university performance fell and I started not caring about my education as much. I, however, was also bearing the guilt of lying to my parents about my standing, fearing that it could jeopardize my being there. I was later disqualified from school, and my visa was revoked. I came back to my parents in Egypt faced with the idea of being a failure. Initially, that put me in a severe state of depression being faced with things I wouldn’t have been able to say that I could face then, I felt like I still had much more learning to do and wasn’t ready to move back to Egypt, but in order to continue the same learning I thought I needed to return to California. For me to do so, I set a goal for myself to try to balance my life out in Egypt in order to get another chance at continuing my journey over there. I couldn’t do so, without putting aside some of the things I learned over there in the first place. I tried to mediate between both what I learned over there and what I needed to do in order to go back. My coming back from California signified a failure for me, which kept getting stronger with my inability to keep up with my work the way I set out to do. I tried to go about my studying in a way where I appreciated greatly what I was given, I looked at it as a gift from God that I would be undermining if I was to misuse it. LIGHT OF NATURE I will use the sentence “Light of nature,” throughout the rest of my writing and I mean it in a way where I received an unanticipated response to a question that I had within, and I will give examples that further reflect that. That same Psychology course mentioned above, I took 2 semesters ago for the intention of getting an easy A grade. I was going into that course with a very solid view of myself as a failure and “the light of nature” turned my eyes towards two defining concepts that are very relevant to my entire journey. The first concept was that of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, this is the way that it was both explained by the professor and the way in which I can recall it: I was told that if I wanted to do something for the sake of me being interested in it and an extrinsic motivator(money,grades,etc) is involved then I would be less likely to perform. I made sense of it with an image of a man riding atop a horse dangling a carrot in front of its eyes in order to motivate the horse to move. However, according to the extrinsic versus intrinsic concept, if the horse was internally motivated to run then the carrot’s mere existence would stop it from doing so effectively. I will give an example of my experience as a basketball player and how I made sense of my experience with my newly learned terms. I started playing basketball with my brother when we were kids and a love for the game arose. I kept playing throughout my childhood when one of the other kids’ parents in school saw me and suggested to my father that I play and train for a club. And surely, at the age of 11 I started training with a team (Gezira Sporting Club). That’s when basketball for me started morphing from a thing that I did for the genuine fun of it with my brother, to a thing of competition, performance, comparison, being the “star” of the team, and basically everything but the fun of basketball itself. My parents taught me to be respectful and well-mannered, and that specific basketball environment was directed in a way that was a little too vulgar for me to remain comfortable. My teammates would cat-call the girls in the club, our coach used to verbally insult us, and they used to be physical as well. All of that added to my anxiety of being there, and what started as a love for the game developed into a state of intense anxiety and self-doubt. I started off one of the best on the team, and ended up pretending to sleep during the games as I was too scared for the coach to call me into a game. My fear of the competitive context was another instance in which I felt like a failure. I attributed my performance to a fault within myself, rather than see it explained through the intrinsic and extrinsic model. Another “light of nature” instance was learning the “Self-fulfilling Prophecy” in the same Psychology course. The Self-fulfilling Prophecy is the socio psychological phenomenon of someone "predicting" or expecting something, and this "prediction" or expectation coming true simply because the person believes it will, and the person's resulting behaviors align to fulfill the belief. I had the realization finally through that that I wasn’t necessarily a failure, but that essentially the situational factors were preventing me from doing the thing for itself. Another instance of “light of nature,” was me being chosen to present on Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones that Walk Away from the Omelas” in my Sociology course. The story takes place in a city that was portrayed in the most beautiful of ways, depicted as a place with no pain and only happiness and self-actualization with no ifs and buts. Later after Le Guin describes every corner in the city and the joy radiating from there, she pans and zooms to a house with a basement. In that basement there are no windows, a barely working light bulb, and an extremely malnourished and abused child. She explains that when the children of the Omelas “come of age” they must come to see how their city remains prospering and happy. She further stresses that without this abused child that the Omelas would tarnish; some are sickened by it, some let out rage, some cry, and finally some leave. She explains that everyone living in the Omelas is aware of the suffering child and have come to accept the child’s pain as their only way to attain such a life. The gist of my presentation at that time revolved around explaining that this is somewhat the world we live in in many ways. The child in Omelas could stand for the people in sweatshops in East Asia, that get paid extremely insufficiently for a corporation that makes and has billions. The story expresses the exploitation that is currently going about in the world, and on an even deeper level the child that one sacrifices within themselves to be able to (survive) in this world. The child in that sense can be a representation of the individual and the individual’s sacrifice of themselves for the greater good (society). I made more sense of this story and its interpretations when “Alienation” by Karl Marx was introduced to me by three different classes in the same semester, namely: Modern Philosophy, Arabic World Literature, and Introduction to Sociology. The concept of Alienation was first explained to me as the potter being disconnected or separated from his craft. “Marx believed that the capitalist system encouraged mechanical and repetitive work patterns that do not create any intrinsic value for the workers. The power of workers is transformed into a commodity which is manifested in the form of wages (Carver, 78). “Marx argued that capitalism eventually confines labor to the position of a commercial commodity. This means that social relationships are ignored while human beings under the system strive to attain endurance or betterment. The competitive nature of capitalism eventually creates conflicts and disputes. This can cause high levels of alienation and resentment among the masses (Carver, 80).” The reason I mentioned the quotes and the story of Omelas is to draw parallel with my experiences with basketball, religion, and education. (My experience with religion and God are subjected to the same type of cycles, perpetuated by school and basketball; God became a thing that I learned about from other people (church leaders, parents, pastors) rather than through my own being, became bits and pieces of information that I spew rather than an understanding built from within. I fell into the same pattern of healing myself of this (leaving the church setting, leaving the basketball court, leaving my studying), for it was the only way I could come back and truly learn. The “light of nature” showed me the Banking method.The Banking Method: depositing where the educator is the depositor and students are the depositories. Instead of communication the banking method involves students waiting, receiving and memorizing information, then restating this information back. This is the same model that was used to teach me of God, of course it had to fail!) This idea of Alienation played a rather pivotal role in my understanding of how the world works now, where people’s actions are more motivated by gaining forms of capital. Pierre Bourdieu’s “Forms of Capital,” was one of the topics introduced in my Sociology course where he posits three different forms of capital: Social, Cultural, and Economic Capital. Cultural Capital specifically, represents the “Instruments for the appropriation of symbolic wealth socially designated as worthy of being sought and possessed.” Symbolic elements such as education, knowledge, and skills are examples of cultural capital passed down that grant social advantages. Bourdieu further explains how the passing down of cultural capital is one of the major sources of inequality. I feel like education in this setting, which is a form of cultural capital, perpetuates the cycle of conflicts and disputes that Marx mentions because of it being a tool for endurance and betterment, rather than education for itself. When the topic of “Forms of Capital” was introduced to me it highlighted to me who I was in the world and why, the reason I get to ‘be’ the way I ‘am’ and the reason another person isn’t even given a chance to live . Neoliberalism is one of the final concepts shown to me by the “light of nature,” this quote regarding Neoliberalism, I felt is the most relevant to the overall picture I am trying to paint, “We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.” The last thing shown to be by the “Light of Nature,” the thing that finally pushed me to take the step of reaching out was when my Sociology professor confirmed this semester that, “Competition is a by product of Neoliberal policy,” and further explained how competition didn't even exist in nature but we saw it there because of the place we put ourselves in. (Ilka Eickhof) Paralysis The issue at hand is that of a paralysis, not physical, but an overall incapacitation. The current Neoliberal direction of the world has taught us to compete for resources, and on a deeper level we begin to compete within ourselves. We have become ultra-aware of where we stand in the social aggregate to the extent that we are chronically disturbed by our own standing. The fundamentally ‘unequal’ state of the modern world stems from society’s competitive drive and causes the individual to internalize their own adequacy or inadequacy. The self-consciousness/awareness experienced through the social aggregate in turn drives individuals to either fulfill their perceived evaluation or struggle against it. The fulfillment of perceived evaluation is reminiscent of the concept of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, while the struggle against is a form of Self-Negating Prophecy. Ultimately this places humans in a position that prompts us to behave through a mostly external drive. This external seeking is a product of our entangled lifestyles and is the driving force behind modern capitalism/Neoliberalism. Drawn closer to each other due to countless media, we begin to learn about ourselves in the eyes of others and evaluate ourselves even closer. The famous behavioral Psychologist, B.F. Skinner, states that is undignified to get caught working for a reward. Another pair of Psychologists, Goffman and Johnstone, further explain that it is undignified because it is something children can’t avoid, and adults receive status-enhancement when they don’t. We have learned that material wealth means a bit less than it used to, and identified that it is not the cause of happiness/satisfaction but rather a promise of satisfaction. A promise that I believe fails us, suppresses our soul, and even more prominently, is killing our planet. Individuals learn that there is value in aligning personal energis with societal demand, in other words: finding intrinsic motivation. However, a distinction must be made between the finding of intrinsic motivation that is aimed at status-enhancement from a deeper form of intrinsic motivation. Status-enhancing behavior is one that presents itself in civility and fine manners (etiquette), which contributes to the acquisition of social capital, an extrinsic cause. A deeper understanding of intrinsic motivation can be illuminated by Freud’s theory of Ego formation. Freud posits that the Ego (the self) is formed as a mediator between two hostile forces, them being the ID (the primal-animalistic drive) and the Superego (the ideal self, the eyes of society). If we are to equate the Superego’s effect on our lives to the evaluative consciousness that was mentioned in the first paragraph, then the ID presents itself in this context as the counterpart to the externalizing pressures of society. True intrinsic motivation is actually child-like, the reversal of the Ego formation process is thus conceptualized as a solution to this problem. However, it will remain that a level of civility and restraint is needed. We must therefore come to be aware of our motivators and attempt to realize which of them are being suppressed in fashion that is detrimental to us while on the other hand realizing which ones are being expressed in a similarly detrimental fashion. Here manifests the issue of paralysis. We have come to realize the extent to which our motives are detrimental to nature, while simultaneously having to ‘endure’/survive. Death follows life everywhere, with every step one ends the ‘lives’ of millions of microorganisms without feeling an ounce of guilt. That is because the human footstep, in this case, bears no consciousness of what it induces. Therefore, the paralysis comes from our consciousness of malignant intention and simultaneous reluctance to follow through with it given our knowledge of the consequences. The Historical
The Historical, as handled by Heidegger, is to be freed from its object conception, from its common-sense quality of moving in time. The Historical is experienced immediately in the present in a vivacious manner. Being conscious of the Historical is something that determines our culture by disturbing it in two ways: Primarily by providing a foothold in the diversity of cultural forms, and second by burdening us with that same diversity. Heidegger claims that humans attempt to secure themselves against Historical consciousness by participating in the panarchy of understanding or opposing the ‘obstructive’ quality of it. It dawned on me that the Historical could be understood in parallel to the section on paralysis, as the self-awareness mandated by the social aggregate and Neoliberal considerations. Heidegger states that if a new spiritual culture is insisted upon, one that attempts to quell the disturbance, then we must openly struggle against History.
Open Struggle
To openly struggle against the chains of Neoliberalism, which in the context of this message has been derived from the understanding of Heidegger’s Historical, is what we are willing to explore. We want to address the paralysis, and ultimately escape it. Religion My struggle with religion came in the form of unrelenting skepticism. I would not accept anything I could not fathom, and spent a large portion of my adolescent and adult life on a ‘mission’ to disprove its credibility. I believe this stemmed from my initial conception of religion as a man-made fairytale, and even more so an opioid for the masses. Also, my experience of religion being used as a tool of othering and the perpetuation of hatred was defining. The place that presumably resembled God did not resemble God for me, I experienced extreme dissonance due to that realization. The skepticism did not fare well with me initially, it turned me to nihilism and became confused that the ‘truth’ did not set me ‘free’. I would openly discuss religion with many individuals and always end up feeling more skeptical than before. ‘The Light of Nature’ had a huge role in the transformation of my view on religion, I had come to think of God as an everythingness rather than a patriarch. An everythingness meaning literally the total sum of all experience. in the world and beyond. That was established through an Apophatic approach, which entailed a way of speaking about God via what it is not (negation). A narrowed down understanding of God comes in the fantasy-like and utilizing realization of it, which I had been exposed to throughout my life. The narrowing down is much like the narrowed down understandings of language, consciousness and Historical that were addressed in the selected topics for the Phenomenology course. The narrowed down understanding of God is the one I associate with the saying “religion is opium for the masses”. Similar to the Heideggerian method of understanding phenomena, I attempt to approach God through factical life experience, freed from an object-conception.
Time Time is yet another narrowed down and commonsensical concept that we believe we fully understand . We are tool-using creatures, what we portray must have meaning and familial use. Our object conception of phenomena stems from our tool using character, thus we begin to believe in the concept of time (also God, consciousness and etc.) as being the one at our disposal. A short while ago, I remember hearing about an event that took place in France and involved a dog being used as a witness for a court case. The dog’s recognition of a suspect was deemed as evidence, and was used to conclude the murder case. This raised several questions, since the murder happened two years prior to the case. Do dogs perceive time? The answer is dependent on what one perceives as time. If time is the linear-spatial conception that humans use to structure their existence then one cannot say that dogs perceive time, however if one were to free time from its linear-spatial conception, they can begin to realize that dogs experience time as a motive rather than a numerical system. This reminded me of when my father used to answer my questions about God by saying that God is outside of time and space, which would only fuel my confusion. The Everythingness The concept of the everythingness of God, and its permeation of existence had led me to the following thought: Religion did not mystically fall into the hands of humans the way one would imagine the events of the movie “The Lord of the Rings” taking place, rather it rose out of humans being inseparable from the everythingness of existence. It rose out of Religious consciousness. The Abrahimc religions are openly known to have been compiled literature, albeit the ‘word’ of God, but nonetheless there is an undeniable human involvement in the process. The word “Bible” for example means something akin to a library, the authors were identified through their writing styles. Religious text is aggregated wisdom that attempts to address a separation humans are experiencing, the word Re-ligion itself means to re-bond. Adam and Eve
The Abrahmic narrative of Adam and Eve is prominently dealing with the idea of separation on many levels. Firstly, the separation of man and woman. It is stated that Eve was born from Adam and Adam from God. This opens up many modern day questions about the sexist implications of religion, however, I believe that the separation of Adam preceded conception of man and woman. It only became man and woman after the separation took place in what could’ve possibly been a hermaphroditic Adam. Adam and Eve lived in paradise, a word that translates to “enclosed garden” from its Hellenistic Greek translations. Paradise being an enclosed garden might indicate “nature but with structure”. The events proceed to the indulgence in the fruit from the tree of knowledge which was the result of Eve being tempted by a serpentine (in some renditions it is Satan himself) creature. The serpent is a widely used symbol of slyness and subtlety, and the use of intellect for self-interest. Eve is tempted and Adam follows, they both become fallen from paradise to Earth, and become aware of their own “nakedness”. The creationism narrative is thus one that essentially deals with a degree of self-consciousness being the ‘punishment’ that humans receive by disobeying God. The facticity of the events to me is irrelevant, given that religion is a consciousness, the events could indicate a deeply embedded psychological angst that one experiences in a state of separateness. Even some of the widely practised eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, essentially deal with the issue of self-consciousness and Ego as being the root of suffering. Naming and Separation Once again we briefly return to the Freudian concept of “Ego”, which translates to “I”, in order to establish a link between self-awareness and a separateness from God. According to Freud children are not born with a conception of the self, and I believe we can all attest to that. Egos are formulated in response to societal values and pressures. One of the primary forms of Ego formation is that of receiving a name. Naming serves to distinguish something from everything, the Ego and one’s name go together in stressing one’s individuality and separateness. Naming is a form of typology that one becomes convinced is the reality, it is a primal form of rationality. One puts together multitudes of information to gather from them a common theme in order to make meanings that allow us to endure (survive), that is dangerous since the common theme becomes more real than the experience itself. The Anti-Christ Prophets of God prophesied, and God is not limited to its temporal-historical understanding here. Therefore prophecy is not an expectation of the future. The Arabic word for prophecy means to tell someone something they did not know, rather than predict the future. Thus it could be that prophets prophesied to that which is extra-temporal, to God and its wisdom, which is occurring eternally. This understanding allows me to remove the concepts of the Anti-Christ, heaven, hell, etc. from their obstructive understanding as things that will only happen in some magical form in the future. These phenomena are occurring extra-temporally and find their way in our lives in varying forms.
The world has become dominantly controlled by time and money, the temporal and mathematical (the rational), and thus our understanding of God has taken up a distanced form. All prophets of the Abrahamic religions had their respective miracles. Moses would speak to God, Muhammad was the book of God and Jesus was God in human form. Miracles are thus instances in which humans and divine prominently intersect. In this sense, Christ, for example, is the coming together of God and Human. Thus the idea of Christ being the son of God. The Anti-Christ could mean the distance between God and Human. I believe that the case can be made that the ‘advancement’ of the modern world has also been distancing Humans from God. The fact that the ‘leading’ countries of the world have the highest reported suicide rates speaks miles that ‘advancement’ is not necessarily betterment. The system is beginning to ‘eat’ itself The Anti-Christ is within us. St. Paul’s Letter
Given that the fall from paradise and the ‘nakedness’ that took place is what the creationism narrative is fundamentally addressing, I think that the grounds of human advancement, that we have been distanced from, is motivated by an attempt to reconcile with God and return to what paradise means: “an enclosed garden”, abundant nature with structure. St. Paul’s letter was addressing those who
misunderstand what is meant by “the day of the lord comes like a thief in the night”, those who sit around and chat everyday waiting for the cataclysm to come upon us. On the other hand, he addresses those who obstinately (stubbornly) wait as they are face to face with the lord. This first struck me as the foundation of the current morale of the western world, one that attempts to reconcile with God through work, but ultimately one whose work distanced them from God. This is not to say that the effort is vice, but rather to point out that the effort has become misdirected and that we are coming to notice the misdirection gradually. Science and Rationale
This entire effort is one that is based in rationale and science. If one were to deduce from the creationism story and the renditition of the Antichrist that rationale and science are the root of the current state of the world, then they would be ignorant to the reasons that these factions were developed in such a way in the first place. The human can become so caught up with the afterlife that they cease to make in effort in what they perceive as a temporary life. I believe this is what St.Paul is addressing through the letter. The separation between current life and afterlife is a problem of division of experience that is possibly causing the current rift between God and Human. During the time of the plague (Black Death), for example, people would flock together in places of worship and ultimately spread the disease even further in the name of religion and God. This prompted individuals to realize that religious congregations, which must be differentiated from religion itself, were shrouded with ignorance. Religion would answer people’s questions about death, now however the world has shifted to science because it visibly ‘healed’ people more than religion. People have stopped being consciously concerned with what happens to us when we die. For example, neither a feminist nor a communist are concerned with the afterlife, they are concerned with the ‘quality’ of life (which is why people turned away from religious congregation in the first place). Here is a quote from the progenitor of protestantism during the times of the plague, Martin Luther, who was famous for opposing the catholic in it church for its abuse of power:“I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I’m not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor fool-hardy and does not tempt God.” The Luther quote marks what I believe is a pure motive of science, the betterment of quality of life.
Relation St. Paul's letter speaks of an anguish which those who have been 'called' experience and others who are 'blinded' by Satan cannot attest for. The Abrahamic religions preach a working productive life with God that will ultimately grant us our lost place in 'paradise' and relieve us from our 'nakedness' (vulnerability), however the human must become aware that the working/productive/capitalistic ethic of Neoliberal policy has become increasingly reductive and typologizing (scientific/rational) to the extent that it perpetuates cycles of frustration and hatred and in our case a paralysis. The Anti-Christ, an ever-occurring phenomenon, finds its abode in this schism between Human and God. The coming of Christ, another eternally occurring phenomenon, is the gradual realization of our separateness from the everythingness of God which is from my point of view beginning to take place on a large scale. One cannot change the world, the world is already ever-changing and evolving, one can only realize how they change with the world and from that realization openly struggle against History. We wrote this document in light of everything going on in the world right now and also in light of where our free thought took us over the span of the last 4-5 years. References: (n.d.). Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation-in-education-definition-examples.html#lesson (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hegelphilhist/summary/ Bourdieu, P. (n.d.). The Forms of Capital. Readings in Economic Sociology, 280–291. doi: 10.1002/9780470755679.ch15 Butler. (n.d.). Being Performative. Performativity, 112–138. doi: 10.4324/9780203391280_chapter_6 Chua, E. J. (2016, November 29). Disenchantment. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/disenchantment-sociology Jackson, M. (1996). Things as they are: new directions in phenomenological anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, M. (2001). Knowledge of the body. Marxism & Alienation. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/subject/alienation/index.htm Mcleod, S. (n.d.). The Stanford Prison Experiment. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. (2016, April 15). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ap15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot OliviaN13. (1970, January 1). Banking vs. Problem Posing Education. Retrieved from http://theoretical-lens.blogspot.com/2012/03/reflection-3-banking-vs-problem-posing.html K., L. G. U. (1993). The ones who walk away from Omelas. Mankato, MN: Creative Education.
According to Butlerian philosophy, what is gender, how is a gender created, and is Butler saying that gender is "illusory" as some of the critics of her theory claim?
I just want to quickly point out that this entire post of mine was originally posted by me on /Poststructuralism, but due to my not getting any answers to my question despite it's being on there for some 1 or 2 days I thought I'd see if I could find somewhere else on Reddit where I could post it and hopefully get an answer to it. Thank God I found /CriticalTheory. Judith Butler's Theory of Gender Performativity is often purported to support the claim that if a person lives as a certain gender that they thereby are causally made into that gender, regardless of the reason(s) for why they decided to be that gender. For me, even with my very, very lay understanding of Butler's theory, which is something to which I have only very recently just been introduced, Butler seems not to be supporting this view. She is not, as far as I can tell, saying that if a person lives as, say, a man that they are in actuality a man per se, as there could be many a reason why that person has decided to live as a man, whether they be cisgender or transgender: it could be because of some perceived advantage to their being a member of the masculine gender; it could be because they are a fetishist and have, for whatever reason, fetishized the masculine gender or something else to do with thereof, etc. I've also heard some people say that Butler says that all gender is is just drag, something which I do not believe she actually supports or endorses in any way as her view or as a coherent view of understanding what gender actually is. Can somebody please clarify what gender is in Butlerian terms? Can you please explain to me how one becomes a gender according to Butlerian gender theory, how gender is created according to her terms and theory, how it is upheld, and can you please address the criticism that Butler and other social constructionists who believe that gender is a social construction face which is that if gender is a social construction then it is just a falsity, something artificial, a fake, something that is wholly illusory and totally independent of anything to do with biology and nature, the latter of which social constructionists are often accused of being ignorant or in denial according to their many critics of whom I have read? Edit: Sorry if I don't respond to your comments in too quick a fashion. I promise, however, that I will get to it as soon as I can.
Good summaries/complements/alternatives to Judith Butler?
I'm interested in what I've heard of Judith Butler's theory of performativity, but I've tried to read some of the books by her I've seen recommended (namely, Gender Trouble), but I've found it really dense and difficult to understand (I didn't pick up on some of her main points in the first chapter until my third or so read of it). Is there any other writings that talk about her theories (or related theories) which are more accessible?
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Gender is not a "role" and we need people to push back against the ideologues who claim that it is, Judith Butler especially.
Edit: Judith Butler is the most influential living feminist theorist on Earth. The recent trans-acceptance movement comes directly from her work. This is just a point to let you know that she's the most consequential feminist theorist there is. All academic feminists are at least somewhat aware of her. Every mammal species has significant differences between the behavior of the sexes, which vary depending on biological sex. These behaviors are not "roles" imposed on the individual animals by the herd, but actual instinctive, untrained actions. "Gender" is the behavioral component of biological sex (Dr Heather Heying). DNA is subject to random mutation so there's always going to be some variation at the edges. The supreme dishonesty of Judith Butler's false conception of typical male and female behaviors being a "role" is clear when you examine the word (sorry if you are not a native speaker). What defines a "role" from a "non-role"? Authenticity. Sean Connery is not a trained killer who performs dangerous infiltration missions, but we have all seen him acting like one. Because the role is James Bond. Connery didn't decide "I will start acting like a sexy spy" one day. He was an actor desperate for work, and a producer had bought the rights to a series of books and needed a person to embody the main character from those books. In a way, society pressured Connery (by offering him money and fame) to adopt a set of behaviors on camera which he otherwise wouldn't have done. The "role" of a Catholic priest, for example is another inauthentic set of behaviors imposed by a pope on men who would otherwise be married. Psychiatrists, politicians, diplomats etc all "play roles" where they pretend to have feelings that they don't really experience. But when a cis person performs a "gendered" behavior, 99% of the time it's not like the behaviors of an actor or a diplomat. They're not conforming to a set of required behaviors imposed by a formal contract or informal expectations. They're just doing what comes naturally. There are some superficial things that you might consider to be inauthentic, like the idea that women ought to shave their body hair, and have long hair, wear skirts instead of pants, wear burqas. In every liberal society, almost all people understand by age 10 that these things are completely optional. But other behavior differences, the ones that matter, are innate and instinctive and, more than 99% of the time, align with biological sex. Traits such as males being less interested in dolls and fascinated by tool-like objects. Females being significantly more likely to chatter and engage in non-competitive play is people acting in line with their natural, unbidden instincts. If you have a mixed group of 100 people, and there's a call for volunteers to babysit a child, it's not because of "gender roles" that almost all of the volunteers are biological females. It's authentic, instinctive behavior. But Judith Butler's stupid theory states that this demonstrably real, automatic, behavior is in reality just as arbitrary as the fact that in our society, it's women who typically wear tights. This claim falls to pieces when you actually gather the evidence and notice things like that all societies everywhere in history have childcare as overwhelmingly a woman's primary responsibility. That's an innate feature of being a primate species, and is not imposed on individuals (99% of the time). People act like other members of their biological sex because almost all members of the same biological sex have the same instinctive desire to act that way. Not because others are imposing a role contrary to their personal impulses.
So I hold a bachelor in Philosophy myself and have a friend who have recently asked me a bunch about Judith Butlers theory of gender performance. I am happy to explain but I would also like to be able to recommend some reading material. I thought it was fun to read the passages in the book where she comments on eg Hegel, Lacan or Kristeva but I don't think my friend is very interested in this. Therefore I am interested in hearing if any of you guys know of any introductions or easy digest editions of Gender Trouble that don't dumb the book down too much but also is accessible without a formal education or spending absurd amounts of time researching her sources. TLDR; do you have any recommendations for introductions to Gender Trouble that are accessible for people who aren't very into Philosophy in general?
Hi, girls Hey! A lot of posts are getting mired in discussion about the the characters themselves, how close they are to Natalie's views, and people taking sides with the two characters. A lot of people are upset with this, but I think it's great. With a few exceptions, most of the discourse going on is wonderful. I feel like there is some really interesting philosophy to talk about that is getting swept under the rug, though! To get the other stuff out of the way so we can get to this philosophy:
I think neither character was right and we are supposed to find a middle ground.
I'm gonna dig into Natalie's twitter for context, but this is not an attack on her beliefs or her motivations for making this video the way she did.
I'm going to correct these character's philosophy literacy, but I think these character's purposefully have shaky philosophy, and I'm not trying to attack Contra's literacy. I think she is more well read than me by a lot.
I don't think this video is about anything other than binary MTF transwomen, but that doesn't give us more of a right to talk about it.
I don't take this video personally at all because I think that it is specifically about being a public figure, and is told by two voices in Natalie's head. More over when we attack these fictional characters, we are saying, "you should feel ashamed for these thoughts" which are very normal thoughts for trans girls to go through. It feels more personal to many. Let's be nice
Okay, some context. I'm a trans girl (well intersex, but I identify as trans), I used to run a trans beauty blog that addressed the issue of passing a fair amount, and I have an undergrad degree in Aesthetic Philosophy, so needless to say this is my favorite Contra video yet, and I'm excited. Let's get to it. You like philosophy so much, haven't you read Judith Butler? This is the biggie. This is the idea of the video. "Gender is performance." Judith Butler famously moved away from our sexuality and Lacanian gaze based views of womanhood and what it means to be a woman, and proposed that gender is something we do. Justine is saying that trans women have to perform womanhood, otherwise, are they really women? If nobody sees them as women, are they women? She's saying at least, if not passing, people have to see that they are trying. We hear this idea a lot nowadays, that gender is a social construct. Justine says "haven't you read Judith Butler?" But has Justine? Not very well. Justine get's Judith Butler totally wrong. Next sentence out of her mouth? "Gender is performance." Okay, define that... "We're all born naked and the rest is literally drag." No, this is totally wrong. Butler uses the idea that Gender acts as a sort of performance to start her discourse, but quickly clarifies what that means. She means gender is a series of actions we take. Butler goes on to clarify that she used performance as a shortcut word, but introduces a new word "performativity." It is not performed, as in our real self faking it, but performative, as in it is something that we actively do, and that action makes it become a part of our real self. Justine gets halfway there. "I don't mean performance in the sense of pretending to be something you're not. I mean performance in the sense of everything you do, the way you style yourself, your posture, the way you speak." Okay, but Justine never explains the difference. She goes on to act as if the way you speak, style yourself, and your posture are something you should move to be more "womanly" and in doing so, a clear distinction between pretending and "everything you do" is unclear. The step that Justine is lacking is that she seems to advocate consciously doing these actions. If you do these actions consciously, they are no longer "performativity," they are just "performance." The difference is that in performativity, the actions that you are doing contribute to who you are as a person, and in performance, they do not. A key difference is that performativity is not something you control. Maybe Justine is aware of this, following it up with "An authentic performance is just a habitual performance." If you do it enough on purpose, it will just become real. But still it's a conscious choice being made. I think that this is adding a bit to Butler. Characterizing this as purely Butlerian is disingenuine on Justine's part. A Wittgenstein Gal Sorry Natalie, but I'm diving into your personal views because you say something really useful for my analysis.
Well like all philosophical questions "What is womanhood?" has no definitive answer. But I'll tell you my thoughts. Remember, I'm a Wittgenstein gal: I don't think the answer can involve "identifying" because meaning is public & practical, not private & psychological.
(Let me take a moment to remind you that I absolutely do not think that Natalie and Justine agree, and this tweet is in no way proof that their opinions align; I have taken it out of context). This tweet gives us something really interesting to go on. Justine would absolutely agree with Natalie on this point. But can she agree with Natalie/Wittgenstein and with Butler at the same time? Butler's stance is being characterized by Justine to basically be the same stance as this Wittgensteinian "meaning is public" thing. It's close. It's really close. But at the end of the day it's almost more in line with Buddhist philosophy. Buddhist philosophy basically states that we are only the sum of our actions, and that every action contributes to who we are. But, and this is a big but, it also holds that this sense of being and identity is not solely public. In Buddhism, we are the sum of every action we take, public and private, and peoples interpretation of those actions is not what matters, but the actions themselves, because they are tied to intention at some level. Let's finally get back to some trans stuff so I can use a metaphor to explain what I mean. To Wittgenstein, if you dress like a woman, put on makeup, grow your hair out, and absolutely never pass and everybody treats you like a man anyways, you are not a woman. To Buddhist philosophy, if you dress like a woman, put on makeup, grow your hair out, and absolutely never pass and everybody treats you like a man anyways, you are still just as much of a woman. It is about the actions you take, not how people see them. It doesn't depend on other people's opinions. Back to Butler, note that I said almost. I don't think Butler would totally agree with either camp. But, despite talking about how society has largely shaped our conception of these categories, Butler never really says that society gets to be the judge. To Butler, society just sets up the target, they don't judge the shot. She emphasizes the action itself as the final word. The only other contributing factor she even focuses on is intent, distinguishing women from drag queens by their intention. I could go on about how intention is tied to identity, and since society isn't the judge, we get to create our own vision of what a woman is and then perform those actions, and how Butler is probably more in line with Tabby than Justine, but a bit moderated, accepting that some of the broad strokes are defined by society. I'm not going to though because that argument would be longer than this whole post. Just know that I think this is the case. So in Tabby's absurd example, and it is a rather absurd example, of a cis man going through transition for no reason, Justine decides that that person is a woman. Butler would entirely disagree. I think Butler, would also disagree with the characterization of society as a judge and arbitrator in general. To use real examples, I think it would be hard for anyone to make an actual philosophical argument that Joan of Arc or Hua Mulan was a man. Justine takes Butler's ideas and only says the first half without the very important second half. She says "performance" instead of "performativity" the entire time, which is hugely disingenuous, she sets up society as the arbitrator instead of letting the action be it's own arbitrator, and completely contradicts Butler's view of intent. She claims to have built her viewpoint on the foundation of feminist theory, deriding Tabby for not being familiar enough with it, but actually has it all wrong. In the end she is not actually proposing a philosophical position of any sort, though she seems to want all this philosophy to back her up. Tabby isn't in a place to defend herself from what is essentially pop-feminism mumbo jumbo, and so Justine uses it to prop up her position, which is not philosophical at all, but is political and practical Reality plays no role in politics Now it's my turn to do some analysis about the video itself, and not just break apart the philosophy discussed in the video. Early on, I think Justine is very honest about her goals. She is presenting a very political, liberal not leftist, optics centered argument about one specific person, Tabby. She has a point, the bat thing was bad optics. Moreover, at first, Justine is treating this as a political issue, then expands on it, saying that the world is a world of spectacle and a world of aesthetics, it's not just politics. Time to quote Natalie again. (Once again, I do not want to tie all of Natalie's opinions to all of Justine's. They just provide context).
The way I think of it, the purpose of my transition is to become a woman for most intents and purposes. That's a very public, social goal that primarily involves the interactions I have with people around me. But pedantically speaking, before I transitioned, I was a man for most intents and purposes. I was socially and publicly a man.
This is Natalie's take on herself before and after transition. This happens to also be my exact take on myself. This is basically the place where Justine's argument begins. It's very reasonable and hard to disagree with. There is something important here though. "For most intents and purposes." This disclaimer says to me, and I don't want to speak for Natalie, but it says to me that it isn't just public perception that makes you a gender. Justine does not take that extra step Natalie does. She doesn't acknowledge that identity plays a part in it at all. As Justine goes one, she starts acting as if she has the philosophical high ground, and that it isn't merely a political position. Perhaps this is where people get a bit confused about this video, because they don't realize Justine's feminist philosophy is complete bunk. I said I'd do some analysis, and here it is: Justine, as a character, is on the defensive. She has the weak point and she knows it. She goes from saying it's a political optics thing, to saying its just the way the world works, to saying that she has philosophically sound and feminist stance. She just can't defend any of her points and has to move more and more broad. If that sounds familiar, it's basically how Jordan Peterson wins debates. It's impossible to debate against. When the fact that she's going broad is attacked ("Life is not a show.") Justine goes narrow again ("politics is a show."), just to go back to saying it applies to everything in life two sentences later. How do you attack that? As she progresses she talks about being pretty and the "trans girl black pill" and how Contra lost the debate to Blair because of optics (which at the end of the day, no moderates were swayed by or even watched, the Blair followers agreed with Blair, but it was Contra's channel who grew, so it seems like it raised more awareness for Contra's side. Isn't that winning?). Justine is an embodiment of deep insecurities in the mind of every trans girl. And she just grows more extreme. As she gets more extreme, her philosophy grows more and more incorrect. I feel like people would be far less upset at this video if they realized that she is completely wrong with all the philosophy that she quotes. (If there was one thing I would change in this video, it's to have Tabby be literate enough to call out this bad philosophy so the audience doesn't actually believe this is Butler's stance). (Also, I know people are upset for other reasons, too). I know you're a woman To finish off my point, Justine doesn't seem to even believe what she is saying. She recognizes Tabby as a woman. When Tabby stands up for herself and says she's a woman, Justine says, "I know." Clearly she knows that she doesn't actually have the philosophical or moral high ground, just as, say, Jordan Peterson knows he doesn't either. Both of them just think their political aims are worth pretending that they do. (Or maybe it's just because Justine is one of two voices in Contra's head, and so she only exists in apologetics, not in real opinions). I think that we are always supposed to find a middle ground between the two sides with Contra's dialectic videos. For this video, we have some help in that we can actually read Natalie's real opinions on this in her twitter thread I keep quoting from, as well as by actually reading Judith Butler's very nuanced view on this situation. As a tangent about this twitter thread, I actually think, judging by my interpretation of Justine as a Natalie parody who takes from Jordan Peterson and Blair White, that Natalie is much closer to Tabby's view now than she was when she wrote this twitter thread. And I think her view as stated in this twitter thread gave more credence to the idea of gender being more than social than her video on AGP did. It's seemed like a change over time to me. I don't mean to ascribe a position to the video, it's probably my own biases. But I thought that the way the video seemed to stand up for Tabby at the end signaled a clear time where philosophy (especially bad philosophy) can't win out over something that you just know to be true. The video ends with Justine conceding this point, saying that Tabby is right. She essentially rolls back every argument except for her initial one that the violence was bad optics. To me it seems like a concession that she was exceedingly going broader as a poor defense mechanism, and with the association Contra's audience has between this technique and figures like Jordan Peterson, It seems by association to be a concession that her philosophy was wrong. I think the final argument about meekness and violence is in a way the only valid argument in the material. It's not hard to figure out that there is a middle ground that is the right answer between their stances on the nature of femininity and presentation. But at the end, this question of meekness and violence lingers. I don't think Blaire is doing our community any favors by playing the acquiescent conservative stepping stone. I don't think Zoey Tur is doing us any favors by threatening to beat Ben Shapiro up on TV. Which of these evils is greater? (cough, it's Blaire, cough) Does it matter? The video doesn't take a center position of meeting halfway between these two extremes. Rather it poses these two characters, Tabby and Justine and less extreme than Zoey and Blaire, but more extreme than "trans centrists." It shows that anybody in the trans community, regardless of their opinions on this sort of thing, can work together, that we don't have to regress to the center, but we can also keep each other from going to the harmful Zoey and Blaire extremes by being on the same team. Ugh I didn't mean for that to be so long. I guess my thoughts were way more complicated than I realized. I just thought the point about Justine not knowing her Butler totally changed the video and nobody has mentioned it yet that I've seen, but it's hard to mention briefly, you kind of have to dive in. I don't mean to be didactic about it, I just wanted to introduce discussion about the philosophy presented in the video into the conversation. Thoughts?
Butler writes of three uses for performativity: 1) it “seeks to counter a certain kind of positivism,” which might be with regard to gender or the state, 2) it may “counter a certain metaphysical presumption about culturally constructed categories and to draw our attention to the diverse mechanisms of that construction” and 3) it is also useful in beginning to articulate the processes that produce ontological effects, or the naturalized assumptions of what constitutes reality. 21 3. Performativity of gender is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of the dominant conventions of gender. Butler argues that “the act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Gender Trouble). “Gender is an impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). 4. In fact, Judith Butler, who is often identified as an early and formative player in the creation of queer theory, cites both theorists as influential to her work on performativity. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble , originally published in 1990, introduces the term performativity to suggest gender identity is not natural and does not emanate from an essential truth that can be located on or in the body. Just how this happens is complicated—we don’t invent these roles, they are invented for us, as Judith Butler argues in her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Gender identity “is a performative accomplishment,” she writes, “compelled by social sanction and taboo…. Die Theorie der Geschlechterperformativität der amerikanischen Philosophin Judith Butler wurde in den 1990er Jahren im Kontext zeitgenössischer feministischer Theorien und Bewegungen vorgeschlagen.. Durch diese Theorie hinterfragt er in bedeutender Weise die offensichtliche Natürlichkeit des binären Gender / Gender-Systems und analysiert seine Auswirkungen in Bezug auf die Macht. Performativity of gender is a stylized repetition of acts, an imitation or miming of the dominant conventions of gender. Butler argues that “the act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Gender Trouble). “Gender is an impersonation . . . becoming gendered involves impersonating an ideal that nobody actually inhabits” (interview with Liz Kotz in Artforum). Die Theorie der Geschlechterperformativität der amerikanischen Philosophin Judith Butler wurde in den 1990er Jahren im Kontext zeitgenössischer feministischer Theorien und Bewegungen vorgeschlagen. Durch diese Theorie hinterfragt er in bedeutender Weise die offensichtliche Natürlichkeit des binären Gender / Gender-Systems und analysiert seine Auswirkungen in Bezug auf die Macht. In the second paragraph of her introduction, Judith Butler summarizes her argument of performativity and gender. Butler’s core argument is that gender is not, as is assumed, a stable identity, but that it is created through the “stylized repetition” of certain acts (gestures, movements, enactments) over time. Judith Butler explains ‘gender performativity’, a term that refers to the ways in which gender norms are established, policed and resisted. While her academic writing is dense, Butler has a wonderful and engaging way of talking. Below is the transcript. Question: What does it mean that gender is performative? Judith Butler - gender performativity theory. What is the theory? Gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are. What is the more advanced understanding? Feminism reinforces a binary view of gender relations in which human beings are divided into two clear-cut groups, women and men.…
Judith Butler's Gender Trouble Feminist Media Studies ...
Discussion of Butler's work gender Trouble and what is gender Performativity. #Gender# Trouble # Performativity A video lecture about Judith Butler's theory of "gender performativity" as it's outlined in the section "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" near ... Den Beitrag »Judith Butler · Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter« gibt's, in überarbeiteter Fassung, mit einer Erklärung von Kernthese und Kapiteln, zum Nachlesen... Judith Butler’s conference entitled“Why Bodies Matter”on June 2nd 2015in the context of the celebrations of“Gender Trouble”’s25th anniversary inTeatro Maria ... In this video, we look at Judith Butler's feminist theory about Gender Trouble and her ideas about gender performativity - looking at how masculinity and fem... Here is the short description of Performativity by Butler. I have mainly portrayed about the gender sexuality.