Gendoo is poofowmative
Sarah Ditum takes a chainsaw to Judith Butler’s new book:
Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative” — that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.)
The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion”. The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity”.
Welp, now we’ve found out, and it turns out they suck. The political possibilities are men grabbing everything that belongs to women and bullying women who object and destroying feminism. Happy now?
All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”.
You what now? How did that last clause get in there? Same way all the rest of it gets in there: sheer arbitrary will.
In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much.
It’s mutual, babes.
So she’s managed to cram a sideswipe against standpoint epistemology in amongst her usual drivel; that’s interesting.
Well, other people’s standpoint epistemology maybe.
Less a criticism of SE than yet another restriction on whose standpoint matters. This while she accuses others of sexism and racism.
And of course this is all a big punch in the face to same-sex attracted people too, because it makes us bigots for our stubborn insistence that we can’t see past other people’s sex when choosing sexual and romantic partners. By now every single gay dating app has implemented the Prime Directive that you’re never allowed to express an attraction to one sex only. You can talk about likes and dislikes all you want except for sex. It’s an instant lifelong ban if you let it slip that you only date males or females, because in our queerified times, to own the label homosexual is to be pathologically disturbed and stuck in the backwards past. And one of the results of this is more and more vulnerable, confused young women trying to mingle in gay men’s spaces, and more and more predatory straight men coming in after them.
Thanks, Judith.
“All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler…” Blah blah blah.
If Judith wasn’t such a nincompoop, she would know that being gender critical means knowing the primacy of biology. Willful ignorance of biology leads to all sorts of meaningless, postmodern, linguistic gobbledygook.
“All critics of gender ideology” know you’re full of it, Judith.
All critics of theism, according to Prominent Theologian, desire “the implementation of a Satanic dream-order where animal species evolved; humans are one of these species; humans, conceived of as “animals,” reject morality, virtue, and anything other than their own selfish desires; and Christians are to be rounded up and slaughtered.”
Once you frame a “dream order” in terms of The Restoration of Patriarchy or The Implementation of the Devil’s Agenda, doesn’t matter where you start out — it’s going to escalate.
I’m still waiting for her to show her work that sex is only an “identity” and humans can change biological sex. Unless you’re writing fiction, I’ve always thought that an ideas’s usefullness has to do with some kind of connection with reality. Humans are animals. We live in and depend upon a material reality that feeds us, clothes us, shelters us, and if we’re not careful, fully capable of killing us. These needs and capacities are not “narratives,” they cannot be avoided by wordplay, sophistry, or “identifying” out of them. At some point you have to put food on the table. Not a picture of food, or a narrartive that “represents” food. Honest to goodness, real food-you-can-eat food. How many people would be satisfied with a restaurant that did nothing but present menus, that “served” only descriptions of food and not any actual meal? In the spirit of playful reciprocity, you might “pay” with a description of money, or by playing a recording of rustling blls and clinking change. But eventually, you’d have to eat. You can’t eat “performance,” however clever, subversive, or transgressive. How long would such an establishment stay in business? How long could you stay alive? I get it that philosophers are caught up in the power of words and ideas, playing with their arbitrariness and absurdity. But even philosophers have to eat, and they probably look both ways before playfully transgressing the strip of asphalt that “represents” the idea of something called a “street,” otherwise they don’t get to philiosophize for very long. Ideas and wordplay only take you so far, and they might not get you to places you actually need to get to due to your irreducible animal nature.
If Butler thinks that the surgical butchery used to carve uncooperative bodies into a crude, non-functioning “representation” of the organs and tissues of the sex they are not, then she is going to go hungry in a lot of restaurants because she’s going to think that a picture of food is a meal. She will fooled herself with her own cargo-cult of “representation” and “performance.” The crude approximations of sex organs offered by “gender affirming surgery” have as much chance of proper bilogical function as the cargo-cult “airplanes” made of reeds and fronds used by Pacific islanders to decoy the real aircraft of John Frum have of taking off from their ersatz airstrips. They’re still just twigs and branches; yhey will not take anyone to anywhere. The cargo cultists knew this; their constructions were to attract return visits of American troops with material goods. None of them were booking tickets for flights they could never take. But Butler would be sitting in her seat, waiting for a takeoff that would never come. In the meantime, she could check out the in flight menu.
@7 decades ago a friend and I went to breakfast at a very hip breakfast place. She ordered, among other things, ‘Zen tea’. Some of you may know this is an actual brand of tea, but she didn’t. The waiter set an empty cup in front of her, then disappeared. ‘Oh wow,’ she said ‘I get it – this is Zen tea!’ She gleefully mimed drinking from the empty cup, exclaiming how wonderful the tea was; meanwhile the waiter, holding her teapot, stood behind her looking a bit baffled.
#4 Artymorty
“we can’t see past other people’s sex when choosing sexual and romantic partners”
In principle that could be applied to men who only want to date women, or women who only want to date men. Perhaps trans-activists realize trying to bully the vast majority of people is more likely to backfire.
guest – that’s hilarious!
@7
Renee Magritte’s The Treachery of Images