> Some right-wing movements and religious figures who are attached to conservative gender roles have seen Butler as a threat to society. This is ironic, given Butler’s work has always maintained a commitment to justice, equality and non-violence.

Where's the irony? For some conservatives justice, equality and non-violence are all harmful to the society they espouse.

>I say what happened, then you say what happened. Then I decide who's right. That's why we call it "justice." Because it's "just us!"

I would argue that what conservatives seek to conserve is their grasp on power through preserving existing power structures that elevate themselves while excluding undesirables. It should come as no surprise that conservatives hate the effigy of Butler that they've built.

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I’ve personally found her theory about never getting over the lost of a loved one to be overblown. In most cases. Time and God does heal.
But that’s an individual by indivisible basis.

Butler saying that gender is performative is kind of a scream; it’d be like me telling my doctor — “you’re not really a doctor, medicine is performative”. Of a prisoner. — you’re not really a prisoner — Incarceration is performative.

Finally if her theory of intersectionality means that Beyoncé lacks something I have because despite being fabulously wealthy Beyoncé also intersects with being black. — that’s a bunch of non-sense.

At the end of the day, in America as in many social democracies, you intersect by far most with your socio-Economic status —anything else you just brush by these days

It’s not actually contradictory, either. You can think someone’s ideas have or could have a negative effect on society even if they don’t intend for that

have not yet read Butler but plan to check out. anyone know the best published fair critiques of their work?

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Maybe some concepts are just to understand not to go and start explaining it or describe it to those people

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It seems to be that some people here don't really agree with Judith on gender, to put it kindly..

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So progressives in power are conservatives?

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What?

No.

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>never getting over the lost of a loved one

The point Butler is making is not about a person never healing. The argument is that if the person who is lost (say person A) is a part of the identity of the person who has lost (say person B) then person B undergoes a change in identity. You're right to say that healing is to be considered on an individual basis, but if a person loses any part of their identity then they are by definition no longer exactly the same person.

>Butler saying that gender is performative is kind of a scream; it’d be like me telling my doctor — “you’re not really a doctor, medicine is performative”. Of a prisoner. — you’re not really a prisoner — Incarceration is performative

Butler doesn't contrast reality and performativity. Their theory of performativity only contrasts a certain kind of reality (that of original and stable reality) to performativity. A closer analogy would be saying "you are not essentially a doctor, but have become one through your training".

>Finally if her theory of intersectionality means that Beyoncé lacks something I have because despite being fabulously wealthy Beyoncé also intersects with being black. — that’s a bunch of non-sense

Intersectionality generally analyzes the way that various social statuses come to affect the way people are seen and treated. You're right that Beyonce is wealthy, but intersectionality would precisely address her wealth. What kind of social privileges do people get for being wealthy? How are black people perceived? How are black, wealthy people perceived and treated? One major misunderstanding that people have about intersectional analyses is that they tend to think "privilege" means "a property which makes a person's life always easy and good", and really all it means is "the lack of some kind of social barrier or source of detrimental treatment", which may be rather trivial or may be very important, but is always to be analyzed contextually.

The mischaracterizations going on in these comments are wild

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Thank you for responding to my post. I appreciate the nuance you provided with my first two arguments but we’re probably not going to see eye to eye on Beyoncé

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I hear you, but I should make it clear that I'm not making any claims about Beyonce in particular, only reporting how intersectional analyses would approach the situation. The details are much more fine-grained in those analyses, and the authors performing them often have some other justificatory arguments, and that just won't all fit into a reddit comment.

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The only one I can think of atm is Sally Haslanger, but IIRC Butler says that the critique botches some parts of their work. Someone else here might have read the critique more recently and can explain it better, but it's a place to start at least.

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When my partner came out as non-binary, Butler’s work on gender as a performance really spoke to me and helped me understand more about both my partner’s and my own relationship to gender.

There is such a thing as intolerance of the intolerant. I believe George Orwell talked about how that’s necessary.

If you had exactly as much money and exactly as much fame as Beyonce but you weren't the same skin color as Beyonce, would people treat you exactly the same as Beyonce?

I propose they wouldn't.

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The claims only work if the ideas separating the actual biology and social constructs are defined.

The fact we know that testosterone and estrogen do very specific things shows that there are behaviors (being heterosexual) and physical traits that naturally occur in the most naturally occurring genders/sexes. It’s precisely why transgender people take hormone replacement drugs. They want to fully embody what the feminine/masculine hormones do to the body.

I also find it odd that the word gender has been usurped to be defined as how one identifies instead of acknowledging that gender comes from the same root as generate/genitals/progeny. It’s all about the role one would take in procreation should they be so inclined. Gender ROLES, however, are most definitely societally constructed and can change. Women can hold the door open for men and men can be stay at home dads. I’m all aboard the gender-role busting train for the most part. My son likes pink and blue. By daughter plays in the mud while wearing her Elsa dress.

But those are the performativities Butler spoke of.

I know my argument is semantic, but I feel like there are better words to describe what we’re talking about. Butler chose to be They/Them because of her assertions that being called girl/boy is usurping the individual from generating their own identity. But it’s okay to accept that until one can decipher whatever it is they’re feeling, being labeled as boy/girl — because that’s the most naturally occurring thing to happen in our species — isn’t harmful. As long as we’re supportive of people and respectful and kind, that should be what matters, I suppose.

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>there are behaviors (being heterosexual) and physical traits that naturally occur in the most naturally occurring genders/sexes.

The idea that there are naturally occurring genders/sexes (and so masculine/feminine hormones) is exactly what's being questioned in Butler's work.

>I also find it odd that the word gender has been usurped to be defined as how one identifies

It should be noted that this isn't how Butler understands gender, but is a more socially mainstream conception (one which has been noted in philosophy as admitting itself to circularity, and so not being a good definition of gender). Butler rather claims that gender is produced in a repetitive structure of acts which consolidate a certain type of understanding of bodies into a classification, which is then treated as merely reflecting a prior nature.

>But those are the performativities Butler spoke of.

Butler's theory of performativity doesn't have to do with gender roles in particular, but the way in which gender as a concept in a system of human classification is constructed. This includes layperson understandings as well as scientific discourses, legal discourses, political positions, medical discourses, etc.

>I know my argument is semantic, but I feel like there are better words to describe what we’re talking about. Butler chose to be They/Them because of her assertions that being called girl/boy is usurping the individual from generating their own identity

I don't think your argument is semantic, you seem to be bringing in points that are more substantial than how we should speak about things. Also, Butler says that they go by she/her and they/them, but prefer the latter because they never felt "at home" in the she/her. Butler is consistent with their theory of performativity on this count, as the theory doesn't claim that one should, or even can, generate their own identity. Rather the claim being made is that we are all determined to some extent by our culture and society, but not therein fully determined, and there is a relative space of freedom for self-creation, be it only partial.

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True, but I propose that:

If you had exactly as much money and exactly as much fame as Beyonce and you had the exact same skin color as Beyonce, and looked exactly like beyonce.

In fact even if you were a carbon copy of beyonce in all measurable aspects except that you aren't beyonce, you still wouldn't be treated exactly the same.

>I propose that even two people with the same skin color would be treated differently even if they were exact twins

How much different would that exact twin be treated if she had a different skin color?

Who knows? Could be more could be less

>nuh uh. It's racism to talk about race.

Butler's point about intersectionality is that everybody with that skin color knows.

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Like TRAs had absolutely no clue that their philosophy plus Hidden Predators inevitably leads the The Handmaid's Tale?

I dunno man that's hard to believe

I literally have no idea what this means

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I used to follow this sort of reasoning, but I've adjusted my position from "It's completely performative" to "A significant amount is performative."

My main issue with Butler's reasoning is that it, like a lot of philosophy, makes matters difficult for itself by being too ambitious. Much like the rationalists and empiricists argued that everything came from reason and experience respectively, arguing that every single matter of gender is performative puts an incredible burden on her case. Even a single compelling counter-example undermines the main claim. I want to emphasize, however, that this is an issue I find is broadly present in a lot of philosophy. Maybe it's just because people want to make bold and exciting claims. Or maybe you need to do that to get published. I'm not sure of the more practical considerations at play for these philosophers.

Anyway, as anyone who's not very dedicated to feminist ideology would see, my position here is very unambitious. I'm saying, essentially, that there are probably at least some aspects of gender/sex that aren't performative - learned from society, or so on.

What I would argue is pretty simple - because of some simple differences in men and women biologically, the greatest of which is childbirth, there has been a natural division of labour that's been present in nature since before we were even humans, and, over millennia that difference in division of labour has even caused us to evolve to have some biological differences (like how men tend to track motion better but women distinguish colour better. Differences in fat content and muscle mass, and so on).

I think that what likely happened is that these differences generally worked their way into our cultures and became exaggerated and stereotyped over time. I think the fundamental differences are more of a matter of convenience of division of labour that became exaggerated over time - and this is why you'll also see in certain society that gender roles can be quite different. There are some differences, but they're more subtle than most people who believe in them make them out to be. Societies are typically what exaggerate them.

Now if you want to get into semantics you could say that this practical division of labour is performative, but I would just say that I prefer to use the word practical because I think it's more indicative of what's really going on. Yes, people do perform to societal expectations, but people also make choices that are practical, and while that's less dramatic and interesting, I think it's at least part of the truth of the matter.

Overall I'm still quite amenable to the position that a significant amount of gendered behaviour is performative; I just think that saying that all of it is is getting overly ambitious.

Is that a defining feature of contemporary progressives vis-a-vis conservatives though?

>arguing that every single matter of gender is performative puts an incredible burden on her case.

The simplest explanation is that she believes humans are born as blank slates, nature plays zero role in "gender", and that it's all performative. It's all goofy nonsense. It literally rejects all that we know about biology.

It's also operating on a naive mind/body dualism funny enough. It seems to assume that biology would play no role in our personalities which is just wrong. Butler should have done more reading on biology and less on sociology.

But she and her adherents do literally zero testing of their theories ("feminists release groundbreaking new study" is a headline you'll never hear), and tend to make very bold very ambitious claims that are also hopelessly vague. Rather than proving their theories, they go about attacking and shaming people for not believing them. It allows them to never have to interact with reality.

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>The claims only work if the ideas separating the actual biology and social constructs are defined.

Funny you're getting downvoted for some rather common sense critiques. She's lumping like 20 different things into one word - gender - entirely so that she can dismiss it. The background seems to be that she doesn't trust ANY attempt to quantify or define anything relating to sex and sexuality because it's been used as a tool of oppression in the past. Thus it should be all vague as hell, and ultimately left to the individual based on their feelings.

Yes, there's some very silly cultural fluffy elements of gender. But there's fluffy elements of anything that we consider culturally important. But there's also hard biology that she is doing her damndest to sweep away.

It's hilariously anti-science - effectively saying humans are born as blank slates, that biology plays zero role in our personalities, and that nature does not follow any rules. She also does not engage in any kind of scientific testing of her grand pronouncements since she doesn't come from a science background, so writing giant opinion pieces is all she's good at.

>The idea that there are naturally occurring genders/sexes (and so masculine/feminine hormones) is exactly what's being questioned in Butler's work.

Yes, which is why it's ultimately science denying and the equivalent of gender creationism.

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Nope! It doesn't deny science, what it denies is a particular philosophical commitment within a particular scientific discourse, but not science at large. Moreover, it is in no way a form of gender creationism, since Butler's main point is that in gender performativity the structure of repetition of acts is based on prior conventions and understandings of gender.

>because of some simple differences in men and women biologically, the greatest of which is chlidbirth, there has been a natural division of labour that's been present in nature since before we were even humans, and, over millenia that difference in division of labour has even caused us to evolve to have some biological differences

To be fair, Butler doesn't deny anything about the distribution of physical traits on bodies, but rather approaches the issue in terms of how an understanding and establishment of the concept of gender and sex are constituted within a culture.

>Yes, people do perform to societal expectations, but people also make choices that are practical, and while that's less dramatic and interesting, I think it's at least part of the truth of the matter.

The performative is not contrasted with the practical, and is also not equivalent to a performance. The operative word, "performative", comes from linguistics and denotes a speech act which, instead of describing something, instead causes an effect or makes some change in the world. An example Butler uses is that of a judge: a judge passes a sentence in a court of law by combining the authority given to them as having power over certain legal procedures with their linguistic capacity to communicate such a sentence, and thereby produces a performative utterance. But just as we wouldn't say that the judge thereby created their own authority or even the law, but are citing cultural conventions, so in the various acts constitutive of cultural conceptions of gender, one "cites" those conventions of gender. That's why, oddly enough, Butler's theory of performativity actually seems to agree with you when you say that we shouldn't go for the position that "it's all just performativity". The kind of freedom that Butler talks about in this regard is to realize that while we may be determined to some extent by our culture and its conventions, we aren't thereby fully determined.

>Overall I'm still quite amenable to the position that a significant amount of gendered behaviour is performative; I just think that saying that all of is is getting overly ambitious

I think the ambitiousness in Butler's work on gender has to do with its approach as, not just a sort of incremental/social theory of gender (which we can find similarly in de Beauvoir, for example), but its particular position on how various acts concerning an understanding and establishment of gender are necessarily tied to the past in a way in which gender, a social classification, comes to be seen as merely natural and original. Though I admit that some of the more mainstream misunderstandings of Butler's work are the overly ambitious kind that you mention.

>It doesn't deny science, what it denies is a particular philosophical commitment within a particular scientific discourse, but not science at large.

Creationists literally say the same thing. ie they're not anti-science, they're against the fake evolution science.

Think: Butler never did a study and never thought about even testing her ideas. That's literally the bedrock of science! Even thinking "how would you even test any of this?" is kind of confusing, since these theories are somewhat vague. You'd have to create a testable hypothesis. Then test it. Which would ultimately make this much stronger, since it would then become a self-correcting science and more tied to reality.

But that would almost certainly mean that people like Butler would have to NOT make extremely big pronouncements about how the universe operates, and instead make smaller testable claims, then build up from there. And people like Butler don't want to do that. They want big theories of everything.

The thesis is so goofy - saying that humans are blank slates - it's like, do I need to really explain this? Like explain how hormones and biology affect our brains? Really? It's such blatant science rejection it's like arguing for creationism.

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>Think: Butler never did a study and never thought about even testing her ideas. That's literally the bedrock of science!

I agree entirely, but there's a difference between denying science and writing a book that isn't even claiming to do science.

>But that would almost certainly mean that people like Butler would have to NOT make extremely big pronouncements about how the universe operates, and instead make smaller testable claims, then build up from there. And people like Butler don't want to do that. They want big theories of everything.

It should be noted that Butler's arguments on gender doesn't claim "this is necessarily what gender is". Butler rather approaches gender as a specific cultural and historical phenomenon, and talks about the conceptions of gender that we already have, however contingent they might be, and what it is about their production that causes them to arise with the particular ontological structure they have. That's why,

>The thesis is so goofy - saying that humans are blank slates

Butler does not claim this. A significant premise of Butler's thesis is that performativity only works by citing past cultural conventions, and that these conventions are not fully able to take account of all of the possible variations that, A)it can actually admit of, and B)can be produced outside of the possibilities it can admit of.

>I agree entirely, but there's a difference between denying science and writing a book that isn't even claiming to do science.

You can't have it both ways. She's making VERY grand pronouncements about human nature, human biology, and such. This is clearly the realm of science which is the best means for figuring out reality. her approach is more akin to Greek philosophy - very armchair but no experiments.

Good news: I'm pretty sure her vague theories are also 100% unfalsifiable, so there will NEVER be a study which contradicts it.

So rejects all known facts, replacing them with vague unfalsifiable theories, and does zero experimentation. This is what we mean by saying her theories are anti-science, it's literally doing the opposite of what scientists do.

>Butler does not claim this.

She 100% implies it, or implies that biology is so small a role it can be ignored. Which is goofy nonsense. We know biology plays a MAJOR role in men and women. She separates sex and gender as wholy separate entirely to make "sex" as small a role as possible.

Since she and her adherants haven't even bothered to do the basics, I can thus pretty much reject their theories wholecloth. If they want to be taken seriously, actually create testable hypotheses and test them!

>This is clearly the realm of science which is the best means for figuring out reality

It's not, it's in the realm of ontology, which is a category of philosophy.

>Good news: I'm pretty sure her vague theories are also 100% unfalsifiable, so there will NEVER be a study which contradicts it.

They are definitely falsifiable, but you can't just do experiments do falsify them. They are able to be falsified on exactly the basis that philosopher critics of Butler's work take: that the phenomena Butler describes aren't played out in exactly the way they claim, or that Butler's reasoning ignores certain crucial aspects or phenomena that contradict their conclusions, etc.

>So rejects all known facts, replacing them with vague unfalsifiable theories, and does zero experimentation.

Notably, Butler doesn't "reject all known facts", what Butler rejects is a certain notion of gender as inhering in the identity of a person, and supports their claim with a consideration of cultural practices in which the understanding and meaning of gender is produced.

>She 100% implies it, or implies that biology is so small a role it can be ignored. Which is goofy nonsense. We know biology plays a MAJOR role in men and women. She separates sex and gender as wholy separate entirely to make "sex" as small a role as possible.

No, what Butler implies (in fact argues for, as do most other feminist philosophers of gender) is that biology does not determine one's gender (and also that the sex/gender distinction is itself unintelligible, as our scientific conception of sex is based off bodies we already categorize as "man" and "woman").

>If they want to be taken seriously, actually create testable hypotheses and test them!

Again, Butler isn't doing science and never claimed to. This work on gender is ontological and political.

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

>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.

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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

The distinction between sex and gender as indistinguishable is exactly why people criticise her for smuggling in tabula rasa for her theory to work.

>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.

I can see why they say that, it's just not right. Take, for example, what Judith Butler says in an interview with the guardian: "Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level."

There is no presumption here that the body is merely a blank surface for signification to come onto after the fact. I insist on the fact that Butler ties their theory of performativity precisely to already-established conventions, but says that these conventions are not fully constraining. I mean, in a certain sense that even seems to be a truism. Cultural conventions have an impact but are not immutable.

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>For Butler, it makes no sense to talk about biological “sex” existing outside of its social meanings.

Can someone elaborate on this. Isn't biological sex based on biology that doesn't rely on social meanings?

But why? We don't even have a unified global idea of masculinity today, nevermind the span of history.

Why is it that middle eastern cultures see men holding hands to demonstrate platonic affection, whereas the same act would be distinctly unmasculine in most western cultures?

Why do most modern western cultures view weeping as distinctly unmasculine, but in ancient Greece it was considered unmasculine to not weep when faced with sorrow?

If different cultures, across different time periods, can see masculinity recognized and performed in different ways, then is it not clear that there is a separation between sex and gender?

I’m not sure you understand biology.

Lol, groundbreaking feminist studies are published everyday, you kinda showed your cards with that statement.

It's obvious that you don't know what you're talking about, and that you just have some weird issue with women.

Judith Butler represents one iteration of feminist theory. Grind your axe somewhere else.

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Considering progressives seek to eliminate existing power structures, your comment fundamentally makes no sense

Lol, you're circling around your own semantics.

Sorry, you're just wrong, no matter how often you repeat yourself. No matter how many buzzwords you throw in there.

She literally doesn't say any of that.

If you're going to make a claim of her, cite it.

Otherwise you're being really manipulative.

The issue is that the establishment of the concept of biological sex is not divorced from social meanings, so that any physical trait as signifying a sex characteristic is socially established (what counts as a sex characteristic? Why? Who decides, and on what basis?)

Some people take this to mean that Butler thinks that hormones and such aren't real or have no effect on bodies, but all it means is that sex is a social classification and so established as meaningful socially

“Butler reminds us that vulnerability is not all bad; it is what makes life possible. All bodies must be in some way open to the world and to others. They must be able to take in and give out: to eat, breathe, speak, be intimate. A body unable to do this could not be alive. Ultimately, Butler reminds us, often poetically, that to be fully ourselves, we need each other.”

This is Butler’s most important point. We are human beings dependent on each other for our very existence. Levinas and other existentialists make the same point, some maintaining that being in the sense of self-consciousness began with the encounter with the other. Given that we are an infinite mystery to each other, and to ourselves, the process of “being” never ends. All of our social constructs begin from there. Arguably even our sense of time and space is such a current social construct. One might even say that it is the ability to overcome our biology and choose new ways of being that makes us human.

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people need to read some biology textbooks. two sexes. behaviors are influenced by sexual dimorphism and natural selection over time. "gender" is a weird semantic construct that is rooted in dimorphic sex characteristics. Saying that "it makes no sense to talk about biological sex existing outside of its social meaning" is scientific denialism and total bullshit. We are mammals. Every mammal has two sexes with different behaviors in each sex that evolved over time for the purpose of efficient reproduction. This is partly where gender stereotypes emerge, some of them are rooted somewhat in reality. E.g., females are more associated with caregiving because evolutionarily, it is costlier to produce eggs and females must be invested in raising their offspring for it to be worthwhile. I say this as a woman. It's the reality of how our species has evolved. Doesn't mean that women have to fullfill this role, just it makes sense that it's associated with us. it's not that deep lol

>Saying that "it makes no sense to talk about biological sex existing outside of its social meaning" is scientific denialism and total bullshit

Nope. Sex is a social classification. It doesn't mean that the things we use to make the classification don't exist, just that the way they become established as part of a classification is a social effort.

>Every mammal has two sexes with different behaviors in each sex that evolved over time for the purpose of efficient reproduction.

Even basic biology admits of more than 2 sexes. Intersex classification has been talked to death. Claiming that there are only two sexes: A) misses the point of this discussion, and B) is itself science denial.

One, that makes no sense. Sex is a classification because it is part of material, empirical reality.

Two, intersex is NOT an example of more than two sexes. I am literally studying biology in university. That's like saying that because some people have a birth defect that gives them six fingers on each hand, that humans as a species don't have five fingers on each hand.

Our concepts of gender have evolved over the years due to the roles that people who were able to have children had vs those of the people who can’t have children. Our ideas of what makes a woman is steeped in the history of what has been forced on birth givers, our ideas of what makes a man is steeped in the history of what has been forced on people with penises. They are intrinsically linked but many theories on gender state that just because they’re linked doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.

Butler is saying that there’s no point in making a distinction between the two because ultimately, gender only exists because of sex. They obviously don’t think sex and gender are the same thing, because they are nonbinary. But in discussions of sex vs gender the idea is that they’re linked enough that we don’t need to make any distinctions.

At least that’s what I made of it. As always, I could be completely wrong and if I am, hopefully someone will set us both right!

I think that’s what they’re saying. That there’s no point in talking about sex vs gender because they’re intrinsically linked enough due to the fact that our concepts of gender evolved from the roles we place on people throughout history due to their sex.

What mischaracterization? What gives Judith butler the authority to claim the entire human species is performing their gender? She also claims biological sex is not "real," and by real, I mean that she is implying that humanity is separate from mammals, which is bizarre. Her writing style is filled with prose, postmodernism jargon and undefined terms. She claims this is a form of resistance. OK fine. Lastly going back to my first point of biological sex, she was asked in an interview why she ignores pregnancy. Being that the reality of every human being in the world came from the womb of a woman with the correct gametes, xx chromosomes and the much needed organs to bring a child to term. Which men do not possess. Her response was to ignore this question and go on to talk poetically about the social construct of biological sex. All claims have a source if you want them.

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>Butler is saying that there’s no point in making a distinction between the two because ultimately, gender only exists because of sex.

That's where I'm confused, isn't the quote from the article is the other way round. In that sex comes from the the "social meanings"/gender?

Also isn't that the right's position, in that gender comes from sex or that they are highly linked.

This is true in the sense that science, or even more broadly the process of categorizing things, is done in a social context. Meaning that no one individual decides what any one thing is on the whole, rather it's done collectively.

However, I'm confused as to the point of this point. Technically, we collectively classified and decided that we are all existing on a giant rock with certain properties, and we called it earth. You can do this for literally anything because of how humans communicate, and because of how knowledge is generated.

But in what sense does it mean that it is a social classification? Isn't it much more accurate to say that things like Earth, or sex, exist independent of social classification, and that the terms themselves are things that are social constructions so that we can talk about and refer to something that exists out there in material reality?

I had this discussion with my evolution professor in school, who suggested to me that where we draw lines between species is a social construction. And my response was basically "well yeah. Humans categorize things in order to understand them. But it's not completely arbitrary, it's based on observations of reality that are independent of human thought. There is a difference between a lion and a tiger, regardless of what we call them or where we decide to draw the line, right?"

Edit: missed a word

Edit 2: I see that you responded to the other commenter while I was typing my questions out, so I want to be more specific here because this is always where I get stuck when going through this discussion. You made the same point in another comment thread above and seem very familiar with the topic, so I'd love to hear more from you. I majored in biology and minored in philosophy, so I am constantly torn on these types of points.

It seems we agree that there is an independent reality outside of human observation, and that the categorization or classification as such is the part that is a social classification (construction I think is also commonly used.)

Is this only to point out the fact that boundaries drawn and characteristics chosen in these distinctions are human-created (aka socially constructed?) Because this seems fairly self-evident, but I don't know what work it does. If an independent reality exists, and human understanding is dependent on categorization, and we do have some level of access to that independent reality, then aren't we progressively attempting to describe something that we are not creating, just observing? That is, we are continuously updating our understanding of an independent reality which has characteristics, can be known to us, and requires labeling in order for us to communicate about it?

Please feel free to DM me if you'd rather continue there, but I had this conversation A LOT during my undergrad and never got satisfying answers for it. Thanks ahead of time.

> Isn't biological sex based on biology

Butler takes the post modernist stance that "biology" as a group of rules and ideas is inherently made up and therefore meaningless.

They do not believe that because we observed reality and constructed these rules and ideas from these observations, that it means there is any validity to these rules.

The central tenant of post modernism is that the human subjective makes any sort of objectivism impossible (some even go further and claim that objectiveness is impossible itself)

Of course, this is why these kinds of ideas are limited to philosophy and other related fields - scientific theory is predicated on the idea that objectiveness does exist and is achievable to some degree.

>What gives Judith butler the authority to claim the entire human species is performing their gender?

Butler talks about a specific cultural phenomenon of gender as it's established on performative acts, not on performance. The two terms are different. Also, it's clear that you're trying to fault Butler with the charge of being presumptuous, but that's not an objection to the content of their argument, so I'll leave it there.

>She also claims biological sex is not "real," and by real, I mean that she is implying that humanity is separate from mammals, which is bizarre

Butler doesn't do this. The argument about biological sex is that it's a social classification (a group of scientists deciding on a definition is social classification), but that doesn't mean there's no reality behind it.

>Her writing style is filled with prose, postmodernism jargon and undefined terms.

Butler explains the terms they use for their own arguments, but not the ones they borrow from other authors/discourses. Also, postmodernism isn't really a thing in philosophy, so there's no "postmodernism jargon".

>Her response was to ignore this question and go on to talk poetically about the social construct of biological sex. All claims have a source if you want them.

I already know about such claims. Butler has emphasized many times that pregnancy isn't a defining characteristic of a woman, since there are women who can't give birth (which obviously extends to females, if we want to frame it that way), so responding with a point about the social construction of sex is actually an appropriate and consistent response.

>One, that makes no sense. Sex is a classification because it is part of material, empirical reality.

You are fighting a losing war here. Bulter is a post modernist, they don't just disagree with your conclusions, they disagree with the entirety of how you got there. To a post modernist the statement,

" it is part of material, empirical reality."

Is already were they are disagreeing with you. Material, empirical reality either does not exist or is impossible to discover according to them.

>Sex is a classification because it is part of material, empirical reality

There is no such thing as a classification outside of the abilities of a sense-making being. It doesn't mean that, if humans don't exist then there are no such things as, say, apples. What it means is that a classification is explicitly the work of sense-making beings (e.g. humans).

>That's like saying that because some people have a birth defect that gives them six fingers on each hand, that humans as a species don't have five fingers on each hand.

No, the appropriate analogy would be to question "birth defects". What makes a person with six fingers "defective"? Establishing a norm requires looking at variation and deciding what the norm is for. If the norm just means "statistical average", then that's fine, but it doesn't mean that a person with six fingers doesn't have a hand, it just means that it's a hand differently composed than the statistical average. Intersex classification is differently composed from the statistical average of male/female and so cannot be subsumed as either one.

I mean, they are linked. I think the right’s position is that they’re the same. That there are two sexes so there are two genders.

“ For Butler, it makes no sense to talk about biological “sex” existing outside of its social meanings. If there is such a thing, we can’t encounter it, because we are born into a world that already has a particular understanding of gender, and that world then retrospectively tells us the meaning of our anatomy.”

We literally can not exist outside of gender and sex because of the way society forces it on us. From a young age we are dressed and treated a certain way based on our genitals. To say that sex and gender aren’t linked is to ignore this fact. They’re not saying sex and gender are the same thing but that they belong in the same conversation. Because our sex affects our gender whether they’re the same or not. Because our experiences form our perspectives in our society.

It’s like how race is made up and a social construct, but that doesn’t mean that race doesn’t affect our lives and perspectives.

I hope I’m making sense.

Reproductive organs exist and separate the behaviors and life cycles of the members of a species... whether or not human culture exists to assign them significance.

So if the argument is that sex characteristics, of which reproductive organs most certainly are one, have no meaning or power outside of that which society places on them, then it's obviously false. Because we see throughout the animal world that sexual characteristics drive and define behavior even in species with nothing we would recognize as a society.

There is significance to sex and sex organs/characteristics outside of what society places upon them. Because sex is how (many) species reproduce, and most individuals have a strong biological drive to reproduce (or at least to take part in the sex act which would normally risk reproduction). Whatever else society does or doesn't pile on top of this, this significance predates both it, and society itself.

>We literally can not exist outside of gender and sex because of the way society forces it on us.

Let's say aliens that are asexual came to earth and studies humans or other manuals.

Do you think these aliens would come up with similar/same ideas as sex as us?

I think they would, which would suggest it's something more innate to the biology rather than something society has told us.

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The argument about biological sex is that it's a social classification

I don’t understand. What does asexuality have to do with gender? That’s a sexuality.

I think they’d observe the same ideas we have about sex in regard to humans, yes, but they wouldn’t adopt the ideals because they’re not human.

Overall I’m really confused about your comment

>>In these works, Butler sets out to challenge “essentialist” understandings of gender: in other words, assumptions that masculinity and femininity are naturally or biologically given, that masculinity should be performed by male bodies and femininity by female bodies, and that these bodies naturally desire their “opposite”.

This is the essence of why these ideas are seen as dangerous to society.

There is a practical need for male bodies and female bodies to come together in order to make babies, because society needs new people to replace the ones that die in order to continue. Gender norms are largely about making it more likely this happens, and to encourage the parents to stay together and raise the resulting children.

That's the "essential" truth that matters. We already have a working model of how to solve an existential question. And the likelihood that rethinking it from the ground up is going to lead to a significantly different, but adequately effective, and generally more satisfying for the average member of society solution is isn't great enough to justify the existential risk. Maybe we can redefine masculinity as preferring homosexual sex (male bodies desiring similar bodies), but what do we, as a society, actually gain from doing so?... Less heterosexual relationships, leading to less babies, leading to a dying society?... Where is the value in that?

What buzzwords would that be?

““grievable life”, which draws attention to the ways in which some lives are not publicly mourned, because they were never publicly acknowledged as being properly alive in the first place.” So does changing pronouns fix this? I don’t understand how the movement that gender is fluid fixes hate on a minority.

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Karen Barad draws from them but also critiques them. I mean, that's not the whole point of the book, but... Well, "Meeting the Universe Halfway" is a fantastic book! The argument is that the relationship between the social and material is not one of unidirectional restraint

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?

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)

The article really doesn't put a good segue on this point so I can see why it seems jumbled. I'll give a shot at an explanation that will hopefully be a little clearer and more accurate

Butler approaches this problem of grievable life on the basis of performativity, not gender, but the approach has to do with their claim about how gender is maintained and produced as a system of classification of identities. Through a structure of repetitive acts that are socially established from many directions, some people are not really acknowledged as fully people, or as having the full value of humanity that allows their loss to be grievable. So the theory of performativity applies equally to how we view people as people (with all the ethical and axiological connotations this concept holds), and not just as man, woman, etc.

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.

>(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).

>The argument about biological sex is that it's a social classification (a group of scientists deciding on a definition is social classification), but that doesn't mean there's no reality behind it.

If they're not trying to deny the reality behind it why dismiss it as A social classification that can be replaced with a different social classification? Especially when they go on to dismiss everything that an underlying reality to that classification would lead to ? The entire point of science is to get your description of reality so close that there's functionally no difference. We don't have a description of a theoretical model of the solar system we have a description of where the planets are.

Biology is not perfectly predictive for every individual and hasn't tried to since at least Darwin. It would be far easier to push for the idea that there are individual exceptions to the trends where we can clearly see the exception than to deny the trend which is even more obvious. Boy and girl are imperfectly descriptive of an existing underlying reality, they do not create a platonic reality separate from this one.

The social justice oddity is when presented with a true thing followed by a BS argument that leads to a bad thing it to try some way of arguing the true thing is false rather than attacking the BS argument.

Boys like football. Girls don't. Jane is a girl. Therefore she shouldn't be playing football.

Why not just argue hey, fallacy of composition. A trend isn't deterministic for every individual, Jane's different than the other girls ... and would probably be the first one to tell you that.

When social justice circles try to argue things they can see are clearly false (boys are girls aren't born different, its all in how you raise them) it makes it MUCH harder to argue cases where they have a point.

We aren't just observing reality we are also interacting with it. The concepts we use to describe the world influence the way we interact with it.

The tools we build, the stories we tell, the institutions we create and the relationships we form are all influenced by our understanding of the world.

Thereby when describing the world we are also creating it. Not from nothing but in an ever evolving loop.

This interconnection between reality, our understanding of it and the way we shape it is deeply historically ingrained.

As long as there is a human history it was there and further than that is just not something Butler cares about.

I mean this is all true, but changes nothing about the fact of an independent reality. We can lie to ourselves, we can play word games, communicate however we want to. We aren't creating anything other than a new story by doing so, and certainly nothing on par with what is true about reality outside of our minds.

I think they mean asexual reproduction. For the hypothetical to make sense, the person you responded to is trying to imagine an utterly alien observer whose judgement of human sexuality would not be influenced by their own alien sexual biology.

My reply to this train of thought is that I would emphasize that I think that practical considerations are not always cultural / performative. Butler uses the example with the judge because her argument leans on the idea of social norms; that is not what I am talking about in my examples.

My line of argumentation is simply that one group of people is better suited to tasks than another for entirely practical, biological reasons.

At the most basic initial level this is in no way performative. It is very much the same as how someone with bigger muscle mass will end up lifting the heavy things and the short person will crawl into difficult to get into spaces. There is nothing of a performance in any sense of the word, merely people doing what they are naturally good at.

I want to re-emphasize that I am not arguing that she doesn't have a point in general. I think that small differences exist in nature and culture, which develops over time comes to emphasize those differences, and what Butler sees may be largely performative, but it is not entirely and solely performative, which is an incredibly difficult kind of case (the "all" structure of her argument, which I think may just be to seem controversial. She may not even truly believe it) to make for even the most modest of claims.

While I think it's easy to provide at least one example to undermine her argument, it is equally easy to provide examples to undermine all / mostly nature arguments. It isn't that the idea of culture/performance is bad, it's the idea that literally every single thing is that I find to be overly tenuous.

I don't agree with the commenter's approach here, but I've also taken a feminist philosophy class, well before the current age where people are much more willing to defend minor disagreements to the death and even then I got the sense that too many difficult or pointed questions were not overly welcome.

I've also noted that feminists who fall out of line with some of the more popular pillars of modern feminist thought/who are critical of it get ostracized for their differences.

This isn't my main area of study, but I find that it is the area of study where people are the most sensitive and questions are the least welcome, which is particularly unusual in philosophy. I can see why some people are frustrated with the state of things even if they express themselves in a way that makes it difficult to take them seriously.

The people who would make more reasonable, moderate level-headed criticisms are likely too afraid to.

I think you are simultaneously overestimating the scope of what Butler and other social constructivists claim and underestimating the scope of the meaning of what they actually claim.

I think you would profit the most when further engaging with these Ideas when focusing on this question you asked:

"Is this only to point out the fact that boundaries drawn and characteristics chosen in these distinctions are human-created (aka socially constructed?) Because this seems fairly self-evident, but I don't know what work it does."

Also think about the loop I tried to describe. By interacting with the world we also shape it and our influence is especially important for things close to us e.g. our own bodies, relationships, institutions, tools...

So, basically, it's an expression of the Persona? The individual forms a Persona that may blend/contrast with the local group Persona?

Coming in here late, but here's what they're saying:

Ideas of gender arose from sex differences in the past. There COULD be a natural difference in how those sexes act, but because we live in a world that is already constantly defining and redefining gender roles from a cultural perspective, you are very unlikely to find it. It's like talking about "true human nature". You will never find what that means outside of the context of the world today because every human alive is influenced by countless generations of culture that have shaped how they see the very idea of "human being".

They aren't saying sex plays absolutely no part in how one feels they should express their gender, they are saying it is a pointless question that can't be answered at the end of the day.