Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

WesternIron t1_j7ud2v6 wrote

Reply to comment by InterminableAnalysis in Judith Butler: their philosophy of gender explained by Necessary_Tadpole692

Not surprising, her work is kinda hard to read, so most people will get the work explained to them. And that explaining often will miss small crucial details that tie her theory together.

Her logic is like walking in a tight rope, it has to be perfectly balanced otherwise you fall off and miss the point

15

InterminableAnalysis t1_j7udw0a wrote

>Her logic is like walking in a tight rope, it has to be perfectly balanced otherwise you fall off and miss the point

I think you're right about that, and I think that's a general point about following philosophical arguments. But what's wild to me is that we literally have an interview linked and people are still here saying that Butler claims X when that position is either not at all present, or is clarified in the interview -- the one linked!!

I tend to hold to this general rule: r/badphilosophy brings us the gems, but the worst philosophy takes are overwhelmingly in the comments section of this sub.

27

WesternIron t1_j7ufcuh wrote

Yesss exactly, because many people point to butler as the godmother of wokeism.

And if I remember correctly, her philosophy often was more descriptive and and deconstructionist. Just point out how gender is perceived and who it works in Western society.

I think the only recommendations she gives is more exploratory. About how we can look individuals that don’t act in the binary and try understand their gender role

8

InterminableAnalysis t1_j7ug43k wrote

>her philosophy often was more descriptive and and deconstructionist

Yeah that's roughly my understanding as well. I don't really remember Butler saying anything along the lines of "you should all act your gender like this!", though there is a kind of prescriptivism at the heart of any descriptive enterprise (i.e., what I'm describing is true and should be seen as such, or something like this).

>About how we can look individuals that don’t act in the binary and try understand their gender role

Not only that, but also about how to understand oneself when one is unable to identify with some such classification. It really is a work that moves in the direction of some limited kind of liberation.

1

newyne t1_j7wa8dq wrote

My main contention is that I feel like they're too focused on habit developed through reward and punishment. Of course I think it plays a role, but like... Well, I think it makes sense to relate it to something "performative" in the more colloquial sense of the word, which is dance. I don't think there's such a thing as a dance that is not socially constructed in some way, that is not imitive. But I don't think that is the driving force of dance: the driving force of dance is the affectual experience of music. Actually, I'm in the process of developing this concept of passion that draws from Deleuze and Guattari's writing on desire. Anyway!

Repetition can make dance feel less natural: you can lose the feeling of it and start going through the motions. I know it's different: I do think one thing Butler is talking about is how we "go through the motions" with gendered behavior; we don't even think about what we're doing, and that's why they feel natural. Even so, I feel like perhaps hormones and center of gravity play a bigger role than Butler gives them credit for.

All that having been said, I haven't read as much Butler as much as I could have. You seem to be very familiar with them, though; what do you think?

1

WesternIron t1_j7we6ma wrote

I wouldn’t call it learned through habit, more like social conditioning that once served an evolutionary purpose.

To add a more modern analogy, it’s like how we develop machine learning AI, you feed it a BUNCH of data and try to make it sort it. That sorting is done by pre-defined algorithms, which means, that there are going to be expected parameters.

Humans are born, though thousands of years of genetics, with pre-defined algorithms on how we should interpret gender. Those gender roles may have had a use in the past but, they don’t now.

Butler basically would say, we need to have new data sets throw at our programming to break the pre-defined algorithms.

Also, I don’t think butler would say that gender roles are bad, just limiting(the major feminist criticism of her work comes from how to deal with trans people, as her model kinda ignores them)

4

newyne t1_j7wf6f6 wrote

Well, I say "habit," but I'm speaking more in terms of individual experience. What I'm getting at is that it seems to me that Butler places more of an emphasis on environment than biology. I mean, that whole binary deconstructs when you really look at it, anyway, but I still think it's fair to say that the latter changes more slowly; my analogy has always been water dripping on a rock, where water stands in for environment and the rock for biology.

Anyway, trans people is a good point of contention for what I'm talking about: can her theory account for why trans people don't feel "right" in the role they've been conditioned into? To the extent that some find it impossible to adequately live up to that role and are Queered into the discourse? If not... I mean, I think that throws a huge wrench into the idea that that which feels "natural" is that which has been socially conditioned.

1

InterminableAnalysis t1_j7wie4q wrote

>(the major feminist criticism of her work comes from how to deal with trans people, as her model kinda ignores them)

I just want to add a small detail to this: Butler has been explicit about their approach here. The point of the theory of performativity was to show how the (let's say) standard model of sex/gender classification fails to take into account the various other possibilities that are possible (i.e., trans identities).

1