The category can change
Judith Butler doing her tedious thing:
…what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.
Yes, of course: what it means changes, the category changes, and obviously securing greater freedoms entails that, not least because it’s the same thing. We change the meaning by gaining the freedoms. That doesn’t mean we “change” it by including men in it. That’s not change but reversal, not change but obliteration.
So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women.
Peak non sequitur. The “so” that could lift the Burj Khalifa off the ground with one finger.
It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender. The anti-gender ideology movement is not opposing a specific account of gender, but seeking to eradicate “gender” as a concept or discourse, a field of study, an approach to social power. Sometimes they claim that “sex” alone has scientific standing, but other times they appeal to divine mandates for masculine domination and difference. They don’t seem to mind contradicting themselves.
Well that’s a pack of lies. No it isn’t, no we don’t.
The Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling) in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of the coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.
Very scholarly, talking untrue shit about “the Terfs.”
Maybe we’ve all “rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science” because it’s full of false, hateful bullshit like this:
How a woman comes to hate other women as much as Judith Butler does is beyond me.
In other news today, I saw an interesting article in the Economist.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from-the-illiberal-left
I thought it got a bit muddled at the end, but I like it that it clearly expressed the idea of the “illiberal left,” and contrasted it with the classical liberal, which seems on point to me.
I’ve got to run – there’s a lot for me to catch up on in feminist philosophy of science.
It seems to me, and excuse the fact that I am not a trained philosopher other than taking a few courses in college, that the fascists and the gender ideologists are more in league with each other than Butler will admit. The very idea that biology should be modified through surgery and hormones to match the gender “identity” of an individual if they aren’t in synch, is a form of biological essentialism. If, for example, a woman identifies as a man then removes her breasts, then she is stating that gender and sex must match by whatever means available. That’s not GNC, that’s clearly Gender Confirmation through biology. The fascists are misogynistic in that women’s place is determined by their sexual functions, women’s place is gender stratification. It is not right wing to continue to push against gender, but as I’ve said, I don’t really think left and right are as easily sorted as they were even twenty years ago.
Butler is labeling in order to make vilification acceptable, because everyone knows it’s okay to punch Nazis. And turning “TERFs” into Nazis excuses violence against women.
‘How a woman comes to hate other women as much as Judith Butler does’ Didn’t you know, she’s declared herself nonbinary (not a woman).
@guest, I didn’t know that, because I’m so busy rejecting the important work in feminist philosophy of science. But it doesn’t surprise me that Butler turns her misogyny inward.
Speaking of changing categories, apparently Drake has declared himself a lesbian.
No, the category of “woman” does not change. Even the Europeans who considered aborigines sub-human could tell the men apart from the women (and rape the latter.) What changes is what might be called the category of “lady” — women who are especially submissive or especially cultured or especially “gender non-conforming or whatever a society of that time and place views as the best way to be a woman.
Saying that change = good then only works when referring to the possibility of what the speaker considers to be progress. A secular liberal and a religious conservative will disagree on what constitutes “progress.”
Butler tying membership in the actual category of woman/female to social change would seem to entail that a majority has the right to decide transwomen are men, because the belief makes it so. Not where I’d have thought she wanted to go.
I’m not sure I agree with the opening assertion. What it means to be a woman doesn’t change from decade to decade, or even century to century, or millennium to millennium. Same basic definition at all times and all places. The one thing I wish would change is what it means to be a human being.
I think there are different meanings of “means” in play there. The bare bones definition of “woman” doesn’t change but how women are seen and understood can, and has.
I’m having flashbacks to my dissertation days. To keep it short, the question about meaning is: do you subscribe to dictionary meaning or encyclopedia meaning? I prefer the latter, so in that sense I agree with Butler and Ophelia. But that change in meaning doesn’t mean that you throw out the biological basis for the category.
I’ve been a more or less sentient human for about six decades now, and the nuances of “meaning” aside, I have not seen any decadal changes in the category of persons called “women”.