Sunday, November 20, 2011

Butler is Confusing...

I had a lot of trouble understanding the Butler article, I think because it was sort of providing a view of sex and gender that was much more complex than what I had previously been led to believe. However, there was one area that I think I understood...Butler states, "The urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism's own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorical or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce women's common subjugated experience" (5). It seems that Butler is saying that feminists place themselves in a sort of identity box as a byproduct of the way that they place their adversaries in a box so that they can present a united front against them, if that makes sense. Thus, the whole idea of "woman" and the united identity that this is supposed to entail might be little more than the attempt to create an identity that will challenge the presumably singular identity of the patriarchy.

It seems that what Butler is doing here, then, is providing a discussion of how this singular identity, or any identity based on gender or sex, is not viable if we conceive of gender/sex as uniquely cultural or biological. Rather, culture informs the way that we formulate ideas about our biology, and therefore sex cannot exist without a cultural conception of sex (what we call gender). She states that, "gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which 'sexed nature'...is produced and established as 'prediscursive,' prior to culture..." (10). So it seems here that gender is something that acts, rather than something that simply is. Rather than being a category, gender is a "set of relations" (13) that acts upon the body in culture to create its sex. This is similar to the way that Miller conceives of genre, as a relationship between texts in different historical moments...So, I guess this rambling is all leaving me wondering what the relationship between gender and historical context is. If texts change throughout time, and create a genre system that is dynamic, what does this say about how people change over time? Or is this not even a valid question?

3 comments:

  1. Miranda -

    I think that how gender changes over time is an extremely valid question. You state that gender is something that acts, rather than something that one is. Butler states, “Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?” (7). Interestingly, Butler seems to claim that an unstable notion of gender (this implies that gender was previously perceived as stable) might serve feminist politics well, and that a stable gender of “women” was in fact detrimental (7). If the term “women” is not the stable subject of feminism, what is? Perhaps the idea of “identification” could help here. To be a woman is not necessarily to identify with other women purely because both are female. I think that stating someone identifies with someone else because both share the same sex might be reductive. Thus, deciding that feminists identify with each other because they are women is a problem. (Most of the time) one cannot choose to be a woman or not to be a woman. However, it is possible to choose whether or not to be a feminist. Feminists might identify with each other because they felt somehow disempowered or discriminated against, or they experienced injustice and believe that the cause of the injustice was a male-dominated political/social sphere. Although these negative experiences happened because of their sex, their sex is not what causes them to seek out and identify with feminists – it is this common experience of disempowerment/discrimination/injustice over which they bond. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the subject of feminism is power relationships. Shifting the subject of feminist politics from this idea of representing women, to representing power relationships might help solve the problems presented when the static female gender is the subject of feminism. Consider also that notions of gender differ from culture to culture as well as over time, and so static, mono-cultural female gender also limits how much (if at all), Western feminist practices could be helpful in other areas of the world. Essentially, “woman” as the subject of feminism is reductive and mis-represents both feminism and women. Gender isn’t stable over time or place. I am not sure that feminists so much place themselves in a box – I think it is a case of reductive identification practices.

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  2. Miranda,

    As far as I can tell, Butler discusses historical context and gender as, "prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts" (10). Culture changes with historical context, so it follows that gender changes as well.

    "The distinction between sex and gender," writes Butler, "serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex" (8). Historically, the opposite would have been upheld; a person's sexual organs defined them culturally, but just as societal views alter over time, so could suppositions about people and gender.

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  3. Miranda, I appreciate that you commented on how Butler said that gender was a “performative” because I think this idea is crucial to the argument of sex/nature and gender/culture Butler speaks about. The question of gender as a performative reminds me of Austin’s category of perlocutionary act and how words can perform actions without being physical. It seems like Butler says gender can be perlocutionary as well, for if a person knows your gender, it informs that person on how to act according to your gender. I think Butler was also trying to say that the idea of sex and gender are not so distinct from each other because it seems as if sex can be performative too. Butler writes “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender,” (9) since, like gender, sex informs a person on how to behave and how people in a culture behave informs a person on how to view sex and express gender.

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