i've entered a discussion with a biologist about butler's theory, and he keeps saying that butler "denies biology". he does seem to understand the difference between sex and gender, but is having a hard time understanding the idea that "sex is already gender from the start". any ideas?
(Gender performativity theory is the idea that gender is a performance. If you act "like a man" and are treated as a man, you are a man, and vice versa.)
Hi friends!! I'm linking my TED Talk here because I spent a long time writing it, and as a nonbinary scholar and artist, I cannot believe TED Official™ allowed it to be published.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jo_michael_rezes_a_playful_exploration_of_gender_performance
https://preview.redd.it/kqk0lboel0161.jpg?width=5120&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e219c9264e11392e61579bce6556584d34824b6b
To the best of my understanding, Butler claims that gender is a performance based on our surrounding culture so how does this deal with trans people who have something so innate that they behave as the other gender despite them being treated as the other.
I've recently bought both Gender Trouble and a book that collects a series of essays about Freak Theory. I took philosophy classes in high school, but we were thought with Sophie's World as our main textbook... So I haven't really got a solid background to tackle this books. Outside of this I've only dealt with feminist and queer theory pamphlets with basic information and read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. I'm quite new to philosophy and quickly realized I needed to read other authors and texts before getting to the ones I bought. Which ones should I be focusing on?
I am non-binary. Gender does not sit well with me - I almost don't "recognize it" in my view of the world/myself. I see gender as performative. I'm really interested in feminist theory, queer theory, the scapegoating of femininity, and I'm wondering how the gender binary is contributing or undermining structures of power.
I'm wondering how gender performativity sits with you all - whether you think it's true, false, helpful or hurtful as a philosophy. Non-binary and transgender perspectives are appreciated; thank you so much for sharing.
Here's a quote that really prompted my internal dialogue on this and why I want all the perspectives I can get:
"Transgender people often think about gender all the time, and because of that intensity we’re able to offer insights that often run counter to some prominent feminist theories. The whole notion that you’re socialised into gender – we are testimony that that is not the case. Society did its best socialising me as a male and it did not work. We know there’s something inside of us that is telling us the truth about our identity and we’re willing to risk everything to own that. It’s not simply that you become a woman because you’ve been socialised into it. Of course, the roles are defined a lot by sexualisation. But gender is a critical piece at the very core of who you are. We know that gender is real and we’re willing to give everything to get it." - Dr. Chloe Schwenke, speaking to Irish Times.
Chloe Schwenke is a transgender woman. She introduced a panel of transgender poets at AWP - a writer's conference I attended this year - AWP being an organization that she now runs. She seems super cool; she's done work in US government during the Obama administration, for LGBTQ policy. I personally don't feel as connected to gender as she does - but this quote really prompted some thinking for me.
Is there a unifying theory for transgender and non-binary identity and gender that you have found? It can agree with Judith Butler or counter Judith Butler, I'm open to all perspectives. Feel free to share below.
I made this account a couple weeks after discovering I am trans as an alternate to my other (former?) self, a way to clue in to who I want to be while I'm still piecing that together. I give this preface as an admittance that I am new here, and a request for understanding and patience if I'm phrasing my questions in an offensive way. I do mean to ask this in good faith towards the goal of understanding, not as a sneaky way of critiquing anyone.
I'm not going to talk specifics here, but recently I was clued in to a few different prominent trans creators and discovered that there is some pushback against one of them for being "problematic." Now, I'm an academic at heart and by trade-- I studied sociology with a fervor and focused quite a bit on gender and queer theory as an undergrad, so I don't feel I have a completely ignorant cishet perspective on gender, but what was jarring to me was that the most concrete content criticism I have been able to find so far is that she leans too heavily on performativity to describe gender. (Side note: there's plenty of perfectly valid contextual criticism that I am leaving aside; critiques that start with "she's right, but...").
As a student, broadly speaking, performativity was the theory de jour. We were given historical contexts of course, how the conversation about and around gender had shifted from various flavors of gender essentialism (which is to say, birth sex caused gender and social roles) to treating sex and gender as societally linked, but individually quite distinct, with the general prescriptive direction of society being one in which ones gender is merely identity, wholly unrelated to accidents of birth.
But as we are, today, gender is fundamentally a social construct and to a certain extent is performance. It gets complicated, of course, because how much of the performance are you putting on for yourself vs. how much is for the sake of a hypothetical audience, but at the same if what you want is in fact the approval of that hypothetical audience isn't appeasing them also appeasing yourself? etc. Bit of a rough summary, I know, it's been a while since college for me.
The salient point though is that we used the theoretical structure of Butler as a metaphor for the complex way in which all identity is linked, at least partially, to societal expectations and perceptions. Social identities don't exist in the platonic form, they need other people to be, and thus the mess of internal vs. ext
... keep reading on reddit ➡Edit: To clarify, Im talking about West and Zimmerman's Doing Gender and Judith Butler's performativity of gender. They look pretty similar to me.
Look I'm going to speak for myself here but I really don't understand why some TERFs can't seem to realize that trans people are the ones with gender ideology being pushed on them not the other way around. It's called "gender dysphoria" because of how the academic lingo around it has developed but what you really feel is an incongruity around what your sexual characteristics are like and what you feel how they should be. It's a lot like a never ending feeling of needing to remove a splinter from your finger. It just constantly on your mind in a low level static and you need to resolve the situation through medical intervention. Through which the research on the differences of brain structures between trans women, cis women, cis men, and trans men seems to be triggered by some level of difference between gray and white matter density.
The often times intense gendered presentation of many trans women is not the result of our biologies saying we need to carry out some sort of prescribed gender role but rather something we HAVE to do to be taken seriously by society. If you are a trans woman and you are feeing this incongruity between how your body feels and how it is at that moment. You will be incapable of receiving treatment unless you act in whatever arbitrary level of female performance you need to for your medical doctor to prescribe you transition related care. Likewise your friends, family, and colleagues will not take you serious unless you meet some level of gender performativity they deem acceptable. And the less you pass the more extreme this performance tends to need to be. I as someone who transitioned as a teenager and pass really well more or less am a sporty tomboy. However, I can guarantee you that a trans woman who didn't pass nearly as well would be treated liked dirt for the same presentation
I'm wondering, are there any other prominent theories on gender that have become popular within academia besides Judith Butler's? From what I hear all the time on the internet, a lot of people believe there are numerous different genders one can be, and one chooses this gender that reflects themselves authentically. Today I heard that the app Tindr added approximately thirty-seven gender options available. I was really drawn to Butler's theory after reading Gender Trouble, but I become frustrated that every conversation I have with someone revolves around how there are X many genders and they are all equal. I take this to be contrary to Butler's theory as she rejects the 'metaphysics of substance' from which the qualities of the gender follow, instead arguing that these gender qualities constitute the self. I'm wondering if these ideas of numerous genders are based off of any particular gender theory or if they're simply the result of people on Tumblr. What I got from Butler was that gender is simply a 'free-floating artifice' and there is no good reason to discriminate against genders, but it seems to me that using labels like 'demigender', 'greygender' and 'agender' pretty much reinforce the idea of gender essentialism. So is this an actual theory that I should read into and respect, or is this just an attempt to gain recognition and stand out?
very exciting
I am trying to fully understand Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and I would like some help.
Trans activist Julia Serano wrote in 'Excluded:'
"After all, if gender and sexuality are entirely social artifacts, and we have no intrinsic desires or individual differences, this implies that every person can (and should) change their gender and sexual behaviors at the drop of a hat in order to accommodate their own (or perhaps other people’s) politics. This assumption denies human diversity and, as I have shown, often leads to the further marginalization of minority and marked groups."
I understood that Butler was not saying there is no natural variance in desires etc., but more that the gendering of those behaviours is what is constructed and so 'unreal.' Or am I incorrect in my understanding? Butler has conceded that she needed to pay more attention to trans experiences, but I never got the impression that she was implying that a trans person's experience was any less 'real' than that of a cis person. She has been criticised a lot by trans writers though, so I'm wondering if anyone could weigh in on this.
I'm trying to keep up /u/1gracie1 's concept of themed days for this sub- and I apologize if I am starting to post too much (I actually try to hold my post count down because I don't want to contribute too much to the feminist/MRA imbalance on this sub).
However, I thought it would be fantastic if we could talk a little about queer theory on trans tuesday- because I think queer theory is an interesting region of theory in which the MRMisms and Feminisms represented on this sub probably have a lot of common ground. Unfortunately- out of all the submitters to this sub, I'm far from the most qualified to talk about it- I think /u/TryptamineX is probably our subject matter expert on this particular topic. I am not well read on this subject, much of queer theory has developed after I attended college, and I find the post-structuralist writing style to be extremely frustrating to decipher, even while I acknowledge that this is, in part, a practical manifestation of the theory behind post-structuralism.
Queer theory is an interesting subsection of feminism for this sub because it 1) is a feminism, and 2) argues against some reductions of other feminisms that the MRM struggles with.
By viewing gender as a complicated field, rather than a binary- many arguments based on collective identities are weakened. Feminist Standpoint Theory being a classical example. We've talked about this on this sub before.
Beyond the simple utility of queer theory advancing the agenda of one movement or another, it MAKES SENSE to me- at least to the extent of gender identity which is socially constructed.
All of which leads me to the point of this post: There is a notion of gender performativity contained within gender theory, and I have found an attempt to explain it with cats.
Do you agree with the concept of there being no "interior truth" to gender? If so, isn't that an argument that gender is entirely a social construct? And if that is the case, how do we reconcile that with the experience of the transgendered, and the studies which support gender identity?
... keep reading on reddit ➡i dont know how to explain it simply and shortly in a title, but what happens often is that i get a feeling or something that makes me feel completely utterly unfemale, to the point that the denial and doubt just hit me like a brick wall, and i completely shift from embracing my feminine female identity and shift back into performing these rigid restrictive and numb-feeling stereotypes of masculinity that has been the norm for so many years. and its seriously so severe that everything about being female just feels like something completely other (using philosophical definition of other here) than what i am. and it fucking sucks and i feel unable to change. i make gradual changes towards feminine sense of self and its unstable fragile as fuck (of course stereotypes of femininity are fragility, ironically and probably more than just coincidentally) and that shatters and im back to believing im nothing but male.
honestly when it happens it makes me wonder if im not bigender, or genderfluid, and just unable or unwilling to embrace the male part of me that keeps reasserting itself, or gets triggered, i dont know. but trying to 'learn' or 'accept' that male part also feels a bit like conversion therapy, so i just dont know my identity.
edit: plus things that i thought i liked, i get a recurring aversion and disgust towards. for instance, fairies and stuff. sometimes i fucking love them, sometimes i fuckign hate them. the love i think is a freedom to like it and a desire to embrace those traits, but the disgust is the hate that i do not embody those traits and that those traits emphasize weakness and manipulation through physical beauty and grace and i start despising all women for what they are...i end up fuckign totally misogynistic when im like this, but really its misanthropic because i dont like men's traits either, even if im fucking clinging to them.
I just started my first relationship with a woman. I wanted to sound of about how I am really enjoying the lack of assigned and rigid gender roles. I don't mean who's the butch and who's the femme in the appearance kind of way. (FWIW we're both kind of somewhere in the middle) I mean, how we interact with each other during this courtship.
I'm more familiar with the male/female dynamic where there are a lot of assumptions about how to act and what to do because of gender roles. In my experience, the male is/wants to be the provider (pays for dinner, wins her a teddy bear at the carnival, gets her flowers/chocolates for valentines, etc.). Likewise, in my experience, the female is to be coy, compassionate and attentive, but basically sit there and look pretty and decide if he's worth your time. I feel like (very often at least) the man has to do the wooing and the woman has the power of accepting or denying him.
In my experience thus far in a homosexual relationship, we are both courting each other in ways that could be seen as masculine and feminine. I'm really interested to see how this progresses as we move beyond the courtship phase.
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on gender roles and gender performativity within different stages of homosexual relationships!
I have been reading Butler's Gender Trouble and there seems to be implicit political effects of her take on gender performativity as she deconstructs gender through the simultaneous deconstruction of other feminists and psychoanalysts. However these repercussions are, at best, implicit.
Or am I thinking about this all wrong because it "resists calculation"?
For instance, would her theory also suggest that no one could be intrinsically attracted to one type of body (bodies that carry penises versus bodies that carry vaginas versus bodies that carry intersex genitalia), and that everyone has the potential to be attracted to everyone? I'm just really confused by this and would appreciate some help--I'm sure there are faults in the question itself, I realize this, but I hope I am getting across my confusion.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that gender is performative. It's not a being but a doing. If that's the case, what about race? Is race also not a being but a doing? Analogous to embodying one gender instead of another through acting in accordance with the societal expectations of that gender, can you embody one race instead of another through acting in accordance with the societal expectation of that race?
Butler actually mentioned in the most recent preface to the book that the book's insights on gender shouldn't be unthinkingly applied to race, under the blind assumption that understanding of gender can be mapped straight onto understanding of race. But that's why I'm asking here. To what degree do Butler's arguments about gender map onto race? And if they don't map properly, what's the difference which causes the analogy to fall apart?
In other words, was Butler's idea not intellectually new, just new in application? Why'd it take off then?
https://illwill.com/rethink-the-category-of-woman
This is the interview redacted from the guardian last year I think..
The opening quote is slightly misleading. Her point seems to be more than that gender categories are constantly changing and adapting, and being performed in culturally contingent ways. Makes a hell of a lot more sense as a take on trans gender than I've seen in many places. Both positive and accepting but critical of the theory. Curious what you tards would think
I am non-binary. Gender does not sit well with me - I almost don't "recognize it" in my view of the world/myself. I see gender as performative. I'm really interested in feminist theory, queer theory, the scapegoating of femininity, and I'm wondering how the gender binary is contributing or undermining structures of power.
I'm wondering how gender performativity sits with you all - whether you think it's true, false, helpful or hurtful as a philosophy. Non-binary and transgender perspectives are appreciated; thank you so much for sharing.
Here's a quote that really prompted my internal dialogue on this and why I want all the perspectives I can get:
"Transgender people often think about gender all the time, and because of that intensity we’re able to offer insights that often run counter to some prominent feminist theories. The whole notion that you’re socialised into gender – we are testimony that that is not the case. Society did its best socialising me as a male and it did not work. We know there’s something inside of us that is telling us the truth about our identity and we’re willing to risk everything to own that. It’s not simply that you become a woman because you’ve been socialised into it. Of course, the roles are defined a lot by sexualisation. But gender is a critical piece at the very core of who you are. We know that gender is real and we’re willing to give everything to get it." - Dr. Chloe Schwenke, speaking to Irish Times.
Chloe Schwenke is a transgender woman. She introduced a panel of transgender poets at AWP - a writer's conference I attended this year - AWP being an organization that she now runs. She seems super cool; she's done work in US government during the Obama administration, for LGBTQ policy. I personally don't feel as connected to gender as she does - but this quote really prompted some thinking for me.
Is there a unifying theory for transgender and non-binary identity and gender that you have found? It can agree with Judith Butler or counter Judith Butler, I'm open to all perspectives. Feel free to share below.
