My initial reaction to Butler's Gender Trouble was that of most dense philosophical tracts. I lay the book open on my desk, pinched the bridge of my nose and then shrugged my shoulders. However, upon a methodical reading it isn't hard to parse out exactly what she means in a analytical, and often merely semantic, way. In the very first sentence she relates the skepticism that she has for the grounding of feminist theory, without denying the veracity of feminism in and of itself. She uses the word "assumed" to indicate that the aforementioned "identity" that consists of the category of "woman" is an illusion (Butler 2). Butler seems to imply that there is a feminist theory-- and therefore femininity-- however, the basis (woman) is altogether a synthetic construct. It isn't often a thing that is called to attention, but every theory, especially mathematical, must have a basis. This is basically what the Theory of Relativity did to physics, it established a base principle. And to some miniscule degree even the cosmological constant required some assumption.
This basis is then the challenge that Butler goes into with the first few sections. I found the musing towards the necessity that Butler sees in some forms of feminism to establish a "universal patriarchy" as a way of legitimizing their own goals funny (Butler 5). She clearly has some disdain for this lack of regard for cultural relativism when she claims these feminists are blaming societies of "non-Western barbarism" (5). As if to say, how dare they not feel oppressed, the savages! After settling her idea that this 'workers (women?) of the world unite' is frivolous, Butler begins to coalesce the concepts of gender and society or politics as inseparable. She states that "gender intersects with race, class, ethnic and sexual" influences as well (4). This is to say gender roles, and thus the role of woman, are inherently connected and manufactured by the means of society. And as she noted before, that can mean many different things. What it means for her, in a Western, "masculine hegemony," is that there is in fact a suppression of genders NOT masculine, of which she insists there are multiple (46).
What I take this to mean, and what the statement closing chapter one blatantly insists, is that gender is created by the mechanisms of society and thus can be changed by the very same means. The gender roles of 1950s businessman and his obedient housewife were oppressive then and intolerable now. In beginning to identify this role of the combination of sex, biology and gender in individuals, Butler and the other reading by Grosz bring out the concept of the difference between the mind and the body. The concept that the mind and body are separate is not new.
This is where I started to see some tie ins with my philosophy background. Descartes basically came up with the idea that the mind is the source of all subjectivity and reason and exists within a 'spirit realm' while the body lives in the 'empirical world' as a mass of dumb matter. Kant comes along and uses this in his morality. He uses the physical body and the concept of emotions, impulses, urges and other 'unwholesome' things to stand in opposition to the idea that one must, in every moral decision, act in a way that one would want to be expressed as natural law from then on out. Basically, don't lie or else you allow the world to be full of liars. The phenomenologists came along, followed by the French Existentialists and made a different distinction. They relied in part on the concept of humanism and a little on this speech Nietzsche made where he basically said that nothing in some ridiculous spirit world could have any causal effect on a physical body. For some, this debunked the mind-body dualism. It was taken further by a dude named Merleau-Ponty (a friend of Simone de Beauvoir's) who said that is is in fact the situation (i.e. history, presence, existence, personality, choices) of a person that lies their 'soul'. He insists that the body and the mind are one in that we perceive things with both our reflective mind and active body all at once. Basically.
So what this means for gender, is that, crudely, take the example of a transvestite like Izzard. His body has male physiology. He is attracted to women (male lesbian), yet he enjoys wearing high heels and make-up. His mind is not some separate entity that wishes to wear make up while his male body is biologically programmed for heterosexuality it is one consistent entity with fallacious contradictions construed upon it.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith Butler. Gender Trouble, Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity.
Routledge Classics, 2006. Print
Clyve,
ReplyDeleteThis is a thoughtful, thorough meditation upon Butler’s key emphasis on the social construction of gender categories. I particularly like the way in which you methodically work through various moments of her prose and parse the useful bits for yourself; I’m also pleased to see you’re finding connections to your previous philosophical work.
I wonder, though—what do YOU think of what she has to say? Do you agree w/ her early disdain for forms of feminism that rely on universalizing and essentializing strategies for their political viability? Do you find the way in which she allows you to think of Izzard to be useful? To be freeing? Or to be problematic? (or, most likely, all three!).
A few smaller questions I have: in your third paragraph, you note that she claims gender is created by mechanisms of society and can thus be changed by social mechanisms. Any sense of what such mechanisms are? And to what extent does any one of us—or any group of us—have control (according to B or to you) over our ability to insist on or encourage change? And, more to play devil’s advocate than anything else, do you think that there’s any risk we run if we stop caring about Cartesian dualism? I mean, Descartes was a smart (and rhetorically persuasive) dude, and there are clearly still folks who DO care about mind/body splits (and care TO split them). Besides mere stuck-in-the past narrow-minded adherence to tradition (which does still hold sway, I think), why else might this idea still prove attractive to people? What happens, I guess, when mind is body and when sex is gender that might seem undesirable to folks and thus continue to dredge up C.D. over and over and over?
Great work here, Clyve, and lots of fodder for thought. Keep it up!