newyne t1_j7wa8dq wrote on February 9, 2023 at 9:20 PM

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

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?

WesternIron t1_j7we6ma wrote on February 9, 2023 at 9:45 PM

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)

newyne t1_j7wf6f6 wrote on February 9, 2023 at 9:51 PM

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.

InterminableAnalysis t1_j7wie4q wrote on February 9, 2023 at 10:12 PM

>(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).