Ep. 235: Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some folks who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 235 is something like are gender and sex socially constructed? And if so, how? We read portions of Gender, Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler from 1990. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer performing my X and Y chromosomes in the key of G in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:29 Seth: This is Seth Paskin pre discursively sitting in Austin, Texas.

0:34 Wes: This is Wes Alwan just trying to survive in the masculinist economy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:41 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, having chosen the blue pill to enter my matrix of intelligibility.

0:45 Jenny: This is Jenny Hansen, either troubled or troubling my gender today. Trouble, bi or troubling my gender.

0:55 Mark: Welcome back, Jennifer.

0:57 Jenny: Thank you.

0:58 Mark: We were trying to figure out who to have as a guest for this or whether to have a guest.

1:02 Jenny: And I volunteered.

1:03 Mark: You came to the rescue. So we can say continuity with our Beauvoir discussions. That's a plus. Do you want to start just in terms of what made you so enthusiastic to do this with us as well as Beauvoir?

1:15 Jenny: Nowadays, my love is William James, but in graduate school it was Luce Irigaray. And the way to put it is now because James is the person that I find myself most at home with. The person I'm always arguing with in my head is Daniel Dennett, or what of Herbert Spencer for. For James. And when I was in graduate school, the person I was arguing with in my head was Butler. I read de Beauvoir and Irigaray and just particularly Irigaray found myself very sympathetic. And then I read Butler and I was just like, I would say my entire last couple years was focused on how to defeat her arguments. And so I wanted to see how I felt about that by going back. And I have a much more nuanced approach. But there are things that I find even more problematic this time.

2:01 Mark: That's fine. Other people want to sort of give opening statements.

2:04 Wes: I will say up front that it's weird because I come to something like this with two sets of prejudices. One is the pro psychoanalytic prejudice that makes me interested in this type of thinking. And it's a language that I'm starting to understand. So it's not as infuriating as it would have just been like even two years ago to try to read a book like this. And then the other prejudice runs in the Opposite direction. And it's against unclear, obscurantist writing and it's skeptical of concepts like social construction. And I think what I would want to say right up front for listeners is that whatever your politics or whatever your philosophical propensities, continental or analytic, I think this is a book worth reading. She's gotten a lot of flack, of course, for her style, but I want to say she's not a bullshit artist. Like, there's interesting, important stuff in here.

2:58 Mark: Not Derrida.

2:59 Wes: Yes. Well, I don't even know. I don't know. I'm not going to judgment about Derrida. And so we need still need to do him. But bizarrely enough, I really enjoyed this and I did not expect.

3:10 Dylan: I was prepared for a, at best, negative experience the way I had with Lacan, who I'd also had never heard of. And then I went and read Lacan and I was infuriated. I read this book and I didn't find it any problem at all. It's incredibly interesting. And there's a direction she starts going and you start thinking, you know, this is just going to be, you know, a kind of standard, even post structuralist kind of thing. It's very nuanced, very thoughtful. And the one thing about her style that stood out to me that I actually really, really liked is her rhetorical method of asking questions as a way of framing a problem.

That technique adds a kind of activity to statement making that just makes it very interesting. It makes it so that she's saying something in a statement form. But the questions aren't sarcastic. They're not provocative to be merely provocative. They questions that actually open up the thing that she's trying to examine. So regularly she goes through a series of questions that get you to those points. I found it very interesting and helpful, and I would concur with Wes that it's well worth reading.

4:23 Wes: I will say it's funny you mentioning that, because Mark will refer to this, I'm sure in the post, but a critique by Nussbaum of her, and that's one of the things that she rakes Butler over the coals for, is the way she. Instead of saying things, we'll put it in the form of a series of questions.

4:39 Dylan: We should talk about their rhetorical style because at least for me, it worked really well and I really liked it. But maybe I'm a. I don't know what I am, but I shouldn't be thinking about what I am anyway, because we're talking about Judith Butler. I should be thinking about What I am, I am amming or something.

4:54 Wes: What you're signifying on the surface of your body.

4:57 Dylan: Well, I don't know if I want to get that discussion with you guys,

4:59 Jenny: but I was wondering if we were going to go there.

5:05 Seth: I concur with. I mean, Dylan said it much more eloquently than I would have. And I agree with both he and Wes. I will say that I had heard of Judith Butler for a long time. I've known of her and this has been one of those books that I felt like I should have read or should be reading and hadn't. So it's good to have the opportunity to approach it. And it was great to have the same experience as Wes. I felt like, okay, I have to read this, but I'm not going to like it and it's going to be hard and I would call it challenging, but it's not obscurantis by any stretch of the imagination.

I think there are some very well formed, if not traditional explicit arguments just with that questioning style that Dylan mentioned. She, I think, raises the issue of saying makes you question what we'll talk about, but it really forces you to confront it. If anything else, it forces you as a thinker and a reader to confront the issue and in a very serious way. And I thought it was terrific. I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to reading the next book.

6:06 Mark: Yeah, I was surprised at how directly she took on some fundamental metaphysical issues in a way that I don't know that I can judge very well until we read some more post structuralism, postmodernism. Because she's more asking again these questions, is sexuality entirely constructed? I think she's making a positive claim that sexual features of the body versus gender versus sexual orientation. That yes, we have very strong customs that put those three together. And it's not enough for her just to say that she wants to say that these identities where these things come apart are literally unthinkable.

And so getting into this whole world of what she means by discourse and why those things would be unthinkable. And so. So part of what her goal here is to make those things thinkable, which seems like a pretty modest goal compared to politically changing the world. But you know, that's. It's a first step. She says we don't need to necessarily embrace every form of deviance, but we at least need to understand them. We at least need to be able to talk about them in order to judge them. And so that all seems very, very sensible. I liked it as she really takes her.

Beauvoir is one of her jumping off points where Beauvoir says, one is not born a woman but becomes a woman. What could that actually mean? And she really gets into the nitty gritty, into. You know, some of the sections that we're not going to talk about today are getting very deeply into the psychoanalytic potential Sources like where do desires come from in the first place? One of the parts we are going to talk about is identity, sex and the metaphysics of substance. So just connecting gender identity to personal identity in general, and explicitly bringing up Nietzsche as criticizing the idea that behind every deed there is a doer.

So this should be very, very familiar. The general idea from our discussions of Nietzsche, from our discussions of Hegel, from all these folks that were reacting against Descartes and the idea of a transcendental subject. And she's just adding the idea that really, if you take that critique seriously, maybe you should also take the critique seriously that she's claiming that to understand somebody as an individual at all is to understand them as gendered. And so if we think that, like a Buddhist, that there's something artificial, there's something post hoc about the self, then there's got to be something post hoc about gender as well.

It's a much more foundational critique than merely saying, as we do now when talking about trans folks, well, person's external, their body parts might not match their inner core. You're born with female body parts, but you've always known since you were little that you're male. And we should respect that because nobody else can see your inner core. Well, she denies that there is an inner core. She actually wants to get at the mechanisms by which what is actually external, what is political, becomes mythically through language, becomes cast as internal.

So, you know, whatever your ultimate decision is regarding these issues, it's a fascinating way of looking at things. And her take on action theory and gender as a performative, I just found all that really fascinating.

9:21 Wes: For those of us who are new to it, it's kind of surprising the way this book begins, because she is going to challenge the idea that there's the body and there's sex, and then you get gender as something that's culturally constructed on top of that. Instead, she's going to say that sex itself is something. Sex itself is going to turn out to be something constructed in the sense that it's not pre discursive. And we can say something more about what that means. There's not just this natural or metaphysical pre gendered core that exists outside of discourse, and then that discourse or culture constructs on top of as its foundation. It's constructed, everything's constructed all the way down.

10:13 Dylan: There isn't something that becomes gendered. Things exist that have gender, but that's part of the way of discussing them. There isn't some core that then is

10:23 Wes: acted upon where gender becomes one of its attributes.

10:27 Jenny: Well, as she puts it, as gender's not expressive, as some interior. It's performed. So I mean, the most provocative claim of this book was that it's not that sex is prior to gender and gender is some kind of cultural overlay on this materiality that is clearly these distinct anatomical sexes. For her, it is gender that becomes the force that shapes materiality into substance. But she goes even further in Bodies that Matter. I mean, in this book there's still the sense that there's a kind of stuff there. I mean, she's very questioning of materiality.

She's very idealist in her next book because it's as if that matrix of intelligibility is what produces materiality itself. It makes things matter, it puts them into a material form. In this book, it's not quite as strong of a claim. I'm just realizing now it's very idealist because it's the ideas or it's the concepts, or she's using all these Foucaultian terms like discourse that are what give shape and structure and organize. But it's also another way to put this is it's very Kantian, but in that post structuralist way or postmodernist way. Because it's not that the world is there for us to discover, it's that we construct the world with our.

Kant would say minds. But as a post structuralist, Butler is saying, we construct it with these sort of practices that have been congealed because people did them over and over. And then they started shaping the material world around us.

11:58 Mark: Can we just remind the audience what poststructuralism is? In other words, what structuralism is? What elements of structuralism is she actually carrying over? And then what the post adds to

12:08 Jenny: that the structuralist would be like the Levi Strauss or Lacan and is sort of arguing against a essentialism that they think is rooted in the nature of things, right? That the world is already so constituted that these things need to be discovered and they all have some kind of internal coherence. Again, I see this as very rooted in the Kantian turn, right? That our language, our linguistic practices, our concepts themselves give shape and Structure, and to use James's word, like that booming, buzzing confusion that would otherwise. Or, you know, Kant.

Like when I'm teaching Kant, I always talk about it as putting on a pair of glasses. Without the glasses on, you can't make distinctions between things. But the glasses are sort of like the synthetic a priori that allow us to see where one boundary ends and another begins. That kind of structuring happens through linguistic practices that, if you're a structuralist, are universal, just like in the Kantian sense, those time and space are universal structuring principles of consciousness, but it just becomes language instead for the structuralists.

And then the post structuralists blow up that idea that it's universal and that it becomes much more about genealogy, study in the specific history, institutions and practices that are unique and that unfold in time and place that then structure the world. So it becomes even more specific, I guess, as a post structuralist. Whereas, you know, with Lacan. And I think just to add, you know, one of the reasons why feminists often wanted to argue against Lacan, especially someone like Irigaray, is because there felt no way to fight the structuralist view of the world.

It was like, well, that. I mean, so it's not biologically inherent that things are this way, but it doesn't matter because culture is as powerful and as universal as biology. So it didn't feel very liberating, I guess.

13:52 Dylan: Well, that's the key insight, Right, with a post structuralist, is that the framework is its own thing. You would take it as far as saying the framework is the thing. Right. And I don't mean the sense of something abiding or universal, but it is what's there. And that framework is contingent. And then that's what we're talking about here.

14:14 Wes: Yeah, we're going to hear a lot

14:15 Jenny: about discourse and discursive, and those are very specifically used.

14:20 Wes: Yeah. It is kind of analogous to, say, concepts, except that post structuralists like to think of these things in terms of language. For Kant, we're grasping the world through these fundamental concepts that are part of our cognitive apparatus. And then at some point you socialize that. Right. So Hegel begins that process where the way our psyche is constituted has something to do with this mutual recognition dialectic. There's something fundamentally social about it. And then you could get to the point where you say, you know, it's not just space and time, but there are also these social concepts that go into the way we grasp the world.

And then you, if you're Hegel, you undo the or Hegelian, you undo the. This distinction between world and concept. The movement to discourse is a movement to. People should listen to our Saussure episodes in our episode Nur Lacan episode. But you've heard us talk a lot about concepts, but now we talk about language systems of signification, where the value of signifiers or the semantics of signifiers is determined not by pointing them at certain reference out there in the world, but by their overall relation to all the other signifiers that within the signifying system, within discourse, and those structural relations are sort of the things that the discursive is sort of what corresponds to this conceptual scheme by which we grasp the world.

15:49 Jenny: I would just add, and I think this is only because of my sort of background in continental feminist theory, but I would say that the linguistic sense of discourse, or the idea that when she's using the term discourse, it's referring to that kind of Saussurean or even Lacanian idea that signification practices occur in the differentiation of, say, sound like fort/da… Saussure. Like the word sounds like this one, but it's not that one. So then we start distinguishing these things. Or with Lacan, as you said, like, it's kind of like to make an analogy, I guess, like to the change in mathematics, 19th century.

It's no longer Euclidean. It's now these axiomatic systems. And now you're within a system and the reference, everything in that system, what distinguishes concepts. But I think when she starts using discourse and discursive, she's also got a lot of that Foucault in there. So it's not merely that way that language functions, but it's also, you know, the way that Foucault always understands something is he'll start with a historical event and a practice and an institution even, or the way an institution comes into being, like the psychiatric institution or the

16:56 Wes: power relations basically manifest themselves.

17:00 Jenny: And it's a sort of organization of those things. Maybe for urgent reasons, like a plague or, you know, these things come into existence, and then they come to regulate and then create a new understanding of the world. So that when she says discursive, she doesn't mean just in language, something that can be articulated in language, but it also means the product of these institutional arrangements and the practices that come out of them that then shape the very world we live in and pay attention to and how we navigate it.

17:30 Wes: It's fundamentally social. Instead of saying, hey, these cognitive categories that are simply part of the mind, this puts their origin in something that's fundamentally social and that also involves power relations. So that, for instance, and Nietzsche, of course, was the first to start doing this sort of thing with genealogy. But the way discourse is structured, it can be very subtle, and it may even seem like it's a matter of grammar, like, how can a word legitimately be used? Well, that's a normative question, and it has implications under this theory for norms in general and how people behave. So there are always implications for these signifying systems for the control of human beings and what they do and, you know, what they're supposed to do, what they'll get punished if they don't do, all that stuff.

18:19 Jenny: It's really important to Butler, and this is where people misread her, that for Foucault, power is not merely repressive, but it's productive. So it produces things, and the institutions that come into existence and the practices that are sort of created in those institutions produce new entities in the world.

18:39 Wes: To be a subject is to be the product of prohibition. And so the way Nietzsche puts that right is just that there are these instinctual forces that get pushed back by, and Freud as well, by civilizing forces. And that's what sort of hollows out the soul within us. We develop a conscience. We develop all these things that we associate with being persons and having souls by prohibitions on impulses and instincts. And then Lacan expands on that idea and those sorts of ideas in a very fancy way, where to be a subject of any sort in language is to obey a law, is to have accepted, you know, some fundamental prohibitions against the incest taboo and other taboos. That's the fundamental, productive thing about those sorts of relations.

19:23 Jenny: You just helped me think of a couple of really practical ideas, which is what I always need to make sense of this. Let's just take the notion of ADHD in some senses, that may, as a diagnosis, be the effect of a set of institutional arrangements and ways of organizing what seem like symptoms or signs into something that seems like it's a real inherent thing that was discovered and now we understand it. But if you take the Foucaultian view, it's not that it's not real now, but it came into existence because of a certain way of deciding to look at the world and explain things and certain frames of reference and what you consider normal cognition and not.

And that now concept, adhd, has both possibilities and problems associated with it. Like we may say, well, you know, even if it is something that is socially constructed, it's still been useful, pragmatically useful, to say, this is a thing in the world because we happen to have found ways of managing it so that people could function better in a society that expects certain things from them. So it has some possibilities to it. But it also might mean we're closing off different ways of being cognitively in the world or thinking. And so the same.

Another example would be to go back to the idea of trans, when I was studying this, and you're thinking about the possibility of trans. You're thinking about it as a totally disruptive thing to the. Not only sex, gender, but to the binary of man, woman, or whatever, and heterosexuality. But now we've medicalized it a bit or a lot so that there's possibilities there, so people can maybe even get their operations paid for. And that creates a better life in many ways for the folks who feel discomforted in the way that they were arranged before. But it also may then close off more nuanced or other ways of thinking about being in the world that doesn't involve reinscribing those binaries, which is what might happen when we make it a medical thing where my parts aren't matching.

And then that goes back to that very problematic idea that gender is an expression of sex.

21:29 Mark: Yeah, we have this very common. It's probably Foucaultian idea that a lot of people who think they're being revolutionary are in fact using some form of conceptual apparatus that's actually trapping them. That's actually defeating the potential gains of a true revolution. So she starts off the book by saying, look, I mean, feminism. A lot of people think feminism is women in the world unite. There's a universal patriarchy. We've been enslaved since time began and we need to rise up against that. And she says that seems to involve as part of its conceptual apparatus the idea that there is this group, women, that this revolutionary movement can speak on behalf of.

And she has a lot of problems with that. Some of which she states, some of which he just refers to as people are considering this in the literature elsewhere, of considering the patriarchy is universal. Makes it hard to actually see how it works differently.

22:21 Wes: Intersectionality stuff, how it works differently, different

22:23 Mark: parts of the world. It's kind of culturally imperialist. But her main concern, of course, is just the idea that of woman as a substantive. She is taken as the prophet of queer theory. This was explicitly. This work was an attempt to bring together her academic work with these social scenes that she was in touch with of people. You know, she's gay herself. She seems to have no problem with the pronoun. Her we'll talk to her in a couple episodes potentially about that, but was very familiar with a lot of people with a very different conception. So do they get counted as women or they have to await some future revolution?

She just thought it was a little self defeating for feminism to have as a central idea that this binary distinction between male and female, when in fact, as Butler's then going to tell us by talking about various other thinkers, Irigaray and Monique Wittig and several others, that maybe if you got rid of that distinction, you might have greater opportunities for liberationary movement. So as a sort of minor theme, I think less important for us, but interesting coming out of Beauvoir is just, can you have a feminist movement that still doesn't actually start from the premise, like there is this group women, and we're arguing on behalf of them.

She seems to think that you can have a coalitional politics that does not involve any substantive metaphysical claim like that.

23:49 Wes: Just to add to that, I think, as we'll see as we get further into the reading, one of the main problems with this idea of a predefined conception of woman, we need to define it because we need that for solidarity. And then we can have a feminist revolution. And it creates a false expectation that there can be some sort of utopia in which heteronormativity is eradicated. When she sees that as an inherent part of this is one of the things she's criticized for. She thinks sees that as fundamentally inherent in discourse per se. So I just think she thinks it's unrealistic. It's an unrealistic conception of what can actually happen.

24:32 Dylan: And I think part of that is coincident with her undermining of the notion of natural and original. For at least many of these concepts, at least all the ones that she wants to talk about, she wants to undermine that notion. That's why she goes after metaphysics and the constructive force, force of language. But part of that is wanting to reform the way in which we have those conversations. Partly because of what you're referring to, Wes, that it's unrealistic that we live within that kind of normative existence. But she wants to also say that there's basically power in rethinking that so that you could basically hold it in a different way.

And that is going to be the avenue by which you can revise it. If you undermine that it's actually natural or there's something essential in that language, then you are undermining its power in important ways while maintaining the categories in certain ways. So you maintain a kind of language, but you're revising the way that language is working as opposed to a political act of claiming a new essentialism. This book as a criticism of feminism is basically saying the feminism that she's criticizing is consumed with a kind of identity politics that she thinks is completely racist, wrongheaded, because it's setting a new essentialism in place of an old essentialism.

So therefore we'll fail on the face of it. And she has fundamental reasons regarding the way in which language works in the world and the way in which the genealogy of something like gender comes to be. Her analysis of that is that the way that power is working is more than a kind of interpersonal political power of a marginalized group that knows needs to assert its democratic equality with respect to other groups.

26:17 Jenny: So early on, when she's talking about politics and representation and she gets into this, she calls them the juridical systems of power. They produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. Right. If you're going to want to dismantle, say, a system that subordinates women because they are women, saying I am a woman to get rights is not the best way to go about it because it's rigged from the beginning. So for me, I started thinking about, okay, what is she influenced by? She's influenced, for example, by critical race theory. So a really concrete, helpful example would be our notion of property.

You have people coming over to the United States and all of a sudden, this is my property, or giving away property, or creating all sorts of laws around property that is land. But there may have been people living there already that had no such notion of land. But now they are in a system where they have to use a notion that was produced by the system to reclaim what was theirs before that system was imposed on them. She's trying to show that we cannot change the situation of women, which is differential along all sorts of axes. Class, race, location, religion.

We can't liberate these women by having a single focus of saying, this is the problem. And if you think about it in terms of liberal feminism, if we just now say gender is inessential, it's not important, we're all human. What has been projected as human, though, has already been gender. It's already masculine. So to pretend like gender is this thing that we should just ignore and recognize our essential humanity is to keep in place a system that imposed very masculine gendered notions of humanity to begin with. It's not just that we should think about our language.

So it wouldn't be helpful for Example to just start policing the way we say things or the pronouns we can no longer use. She. It would be foolish. You can't just pretend like this system of intelligibility can be just chucked. There's nowhere outside of it. It's the only way we make sense is the structures that we have. The way she describes it, with parody and drag, it's almost like a mutation, like the system itself will create these openings that allow changes fundamentally in the way we think about the world. And it's not something that we can as agents say, well, we have not been inclusive enough in the way we wrote our law.

So all we need to do now is say women have the vote or Native Americans owned property before we got here, and so we're going to give it back to them. That wouldn't be enough. What we have to do is exploit those moments where we start recognizing the notion of property itself is constructed, or the notion of gender or sex. You know, like biologically, the fact that we constrained ourselves to only seeing two sexes may not accord with the actual facts. She uses the example of Herculine Barbin that Foucault writes about, where you have a body that doesn't conform, and it's those moments where the system is exposed as being constructed.

And so let's exploit those and play with them. And for her it's all about, you know, she even says early on we need more laughter. She invokes parody for her, you can't hit it head on and say, let's liberate ourselves, because we recognize the system is been imposed on us. And once we create a more complicated system that even once you get to sexuality, she says, we can't just go back and say we're really just polymorphously perverse and then we were forced to be heterosexual. Even that is a construct, right? So we have to look for those moments where we catch a glimpse and recognize, oh, this is all really a set of habits, let's say, that have been enforced in us.

You know, the way we sit, the way we hold ourselves, the way we talk. These things project some inner self. But there are things that have been policed but also produced positively in us. But when those things create something that was unexpected, because that's just the nature of systems for her, then go find those moments and exploit those for the openings. Because the openings aren't going to just be gotten at by saying, this system that we created sucks and we need a better one.

30:16 Wes: It's not like you can just scrape off the dross of social construction, that's the liberating project, right? And then you're going to get either what a woman is really independent of the subjugating constructed parts, nor are you just going to get to some unconstructed, genderless core. There is no such thing. So the project. If you see the project as simply undoing all the constructions and getting rid of them in favor of a variety of different notions that end up being essentialist in their own right, according to Butler, you're on the wrong track.

30:49 Mark: So it seems like the way that Jenny, Wes, you've just described it is emphasizing the part of Butler that makes people like Nussbaum. We read a Martha Nussbaum article that I'll link folks to that was very critical of this. That makes them crazy. This is part of the post structuralist take on politics, that there is nothing that you can do to rebel against this system that's not already part of the system. In a way, it's inherently impossible to make political advances, at least according to some descriptions within this, which is not true. I mean, we've been saying that Butler thinks that there are ways to innovate, but the way Nussbaum interprets her is that, you know, if it's really just a matter of parodying or using the complexity of gender associations to kind of weasel out your own little unique situation, that, that, you know, is very non political, that it's very Nietzschean, you might think, you know, create yourself.

Whereas I, you know, I think things where I've actually heard her talk, I don't think she would have a problem. It sounded like, Jenny, you were saying this emphasis on using the proper pronouns is entirely misguided. I don't think she would think that at all. I think she's not going to think that. That's the whole story. But people who urge that don't also think that that's the whole story and that will solve all their problems. The idea of like, if we just give women the vote, then they'll be men's equals. Yeah, she's going to say that's not enough, but it doesn't mean she doesn't want to give women the vote.

There's lots of these concrete things that less radical feminists argue for that she's going to be perfectly in agreement with and she expresses personally, you know, part of what's driving this is how difficult it is just to get along in the world every day. Where she personally has a traditionally masculine, you know, is often mistaken for a man that's her gender presentation and how this flummoxes people because of our customs and languages.

32:43 Jenny: For her, it's the practices themselves, the performances themselves are what create these spaces and changes. And that's what she wants to study genealogically rather than say to us, here's how to be a good feminist. Look for opportunities to change the linguistic representations we use. I don't know that she would reject that we do that, that we make conscious efforts. But the fact that we start making those conscious efforts is an effect of something that happened that exposed the constructed nature of the way things are now and then, maybe gave us some other ideas.

But going back to this notion of undoing the construction, she would say, okay, if we're going to undo these constructions, and what are we going to put in their place? We can't think of what else to put in their place outside of the way that our minds have been shaped by all the facets, the institutions of practices, language that we use, so to say. Like, okay, well, now I see the faults. So I'm going to create a whole new language, a whole new set of practices, which is sort of becomes the parody of political correctness. You can't do that. They happen.

So seize upon those moments when they happen and then see what kind of imagination becomes possible in those moments.

33:48 Wes: It's very unclear to me how something like this would account for someone being transgender. And she doesn't discuss it in the reading. If she's challenging the notion that there's any sort of inner core and that it's all constructed all the way down, then the question is how you get the kind of conflict that you get in a gender dysphoric person between what apparently is what they feel like on the inside and then what they are bodily, and the idea that those two things could be out of accord or that in accordance. I know more recent work, she's probably almost certainly talked about all this stuff and would have, but I don't know. In this book, I'm not sure how you reconcile that.

34:30 Dylan: I think there's a very interesting effect. I forget exactly where it is she's talking about this. But it's not just that you would break up the world that you view in terms of certain kinds of categories, say gendered categories, and have that lens. But it's the very way in which you understand yourself, yourself and that frame of language reflects back on you and those frame of those categories, positively or negatively, or the self description reflects back on you. That question of who am I? She would argue that that whole question is culturally framed. In trying to frame that question as an essential I. And so you're trying to uncover and discover that I, that you are, are, and that that way of interacting even with yourself is culturally framed. And so the same thing would be true about maybe even the dysphoria, right? I don't know.

35:24 Wes: I wasn't trying to get us into a speculation about that. I was just putting that out there as something to acknowledge. And there's a whole political thing going on right now with trans terfs or trans exclusionary radical feminists, or as they like to call themselves, gender critical feminists and trans activists, where the conflict is over just this very issue. The gender critical feminists will say, look, gender is a social construction. And so this idea, this is an extreme. I don't think they would characterize themselves as anti transgender by any means, but some of them will say and as socially constructed.

It's this idea of a conflict between an inner essence, between the bodily existence and the constructed existence. Doesn't entirely make sense. I'm butchering the conflict there. But let's just say we ought to acknowledge that that exists. There are feminists who think that by, you know, especially for transgender women, so it comes down to people who are, you know, transgender women and participating in sports, for instance, or other issues that some feminists think are of real importance to the rights of people who were born as biological women, which in some, to even say that sort of thing is taboo in some circles.

They want to make that distinction.

36:36 Jenny: Years ago, when there was a pro choice rally and the first person that caught my attention was a trans activist, we'd say now, who was anti abortion in a larger criticism of the, let's say compulsory heterosexuality, maybe the even discipline of obstetrics itself, to say, give us determination over our bodies. That person was exposing to me dramatically that from the get go there's kinds of medical procedures happening on babies like, or newborns that is constructing what we now see as the two sexes. I mean, there is the biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, who wrote, I think even before Butler wrote this about the five sexes.

And she's a biologist, feminist biologist. And that to me is a good example because that exposed to me a certain logical flaw, that person's sign. It was weird and I had to spend a lot of time thinking about it. But I think it's those kind of moments, moments in performances going back to the trans thing, like, yes, there are people that are going to now advocate that they want to have the right to Express themselves the way they feel biologically. But there's a lot more nuanced positions within the trans community that might be more akin to, say, like, Mad Pride or the disability movement, which is, instead of make all these changes because then I can express myself or something that are kind of intended to exploit the constructive nature of the institutions that are monitoring these people.

Or, you know, like in the case of disability, sometimes a good disability case exposes that it's not that there's not a fair accommodation, but the world has been structured in such a way that it presupposes a certain kind of body to inhabit it.

38:19 Mark: So before we spend the rest of this being very disciplined and going through this very difficult text, Seth, Dylan, did you have any impressions from this what the political upshot was supposed to be? Or were you able to think that concretely, given how abstract she was being?

38:34 Seth: I think there's a political upshot, but it doesn't come until late in the text. And I have no fucking idea about how to associate it with trans identity or any of the things that have been discussed. So let's move on.

38:46 Dylan: To me, it was about these examples where you see the limitations of the structure. For instance, language. There is a structure to our language which, you know, she likes Foucault and uses him in terms of the activity of power, in terms of setting what the terms of that discussion is. The terms of that discursive activity is understanding how that activity is working. That was most interesting to me. I was taking, frankly, a little bit less out of what I need to do. I mean, in the end, to be honest, I found this book very, very metaphysical, Very, very fundamentally about how we think, about how the world works.

And it's, to me, a direct extension of the social construction conversation and how we gather meaning out of the world and how much of that meaning comes to us to be discovered and how much of it is that we impose upon it and how much of it is a complicated mix. And she's right there in that saying, it's a complicated mix, and if anything, it's more mix than revealed. And I think that is a super, super interesting place, because she doesn't want to give away that there's something true to be said about the world. That's my comment about the political stuff, because that was not the part that was interesting to me.

40:04 Mark: She's so thoroughly critical that I think in terms of how much you're going to buy into this, I think you can draw the line in a couple different places. And as a Saying earlier, she's most concerned here about gender and about gender and sex and sexual orientation. Sticking together about that construction of everybody at birth is even if surgery is necessary, is divided in one of these two sexes and they're presumed then to have a gender and sexual orientation based on that. And I think her critique of that three part thing is very thoroughgoing in this text.

I buy it politically quite a bit. That's not going as far as these discussions of trans issues or really ultimately what's I guess discussed in her subsequent books about biological sex being merely a social construction that you can think that do you feel at your core masculine or feminine? You might think that that is a construction, that's a myth. Because there is nothing that. That we feel at our core. We just don't have souls like that. We're not born into the world with an inner truth that then we search all our lives to express. You could maybe buy that and stop short of actually saying that all scientific facts are socially constructed.

In other words, from our Latour discussion that this can be an example of there is nothing that physics could describe, nothing that biology could describe that does not ultimately, you know, you can't give a genealogy of that description and say it's ultimately the political that caused us to think that way. I think that is again a larger discussion which she doesn't give us enough here to judge. I think you could take a more common sense view.

41:48 Wes: Well, she does say that about the body and about sex.

41:51 Jenny: So let me just give a passage, page seven. She says gender must also designate the. The very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. She even says later on that essentially there is no difference between sex and gender. She's making a very strong claim. I mean the book is a critique of whatever the metaphysics of presence or substance or however you want to construe it. Essentialism in Aristotelian or teleological sense. It's a critique of those things with the lever. The way in is the way that gender is a fiction.

And once you dig into it, you realize that it's not that gender is the part that culture, you know, that's malleable to cultural practices and institutions, but that sex is projected as a reality by virtue of these cultural practice institutions. So I mean, she's making a very strong claim and it's inherently political because it then it comes about the body like there is no neutral body, there's no pre discursive body.

42:54 Dylan: That's why I like the word discursive way better. Than political.

42:57 Wes: In the same way that everything, you know, for Khan has to be in time, everything for her has to be in discourse. And in both cases, that means everything has to be constructed.

43:07 Dylan: I was just going to point to this, the very last paragraph before section three, which I think Jenny has in mind as well. Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature. Genders also to the discursive cultural means by which sex, nature, or a natural sex is produced and established as prediscursive prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. The production of sex as the pre discursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. This dichotomy between the natural versus the culture, in which gender is the cultural and sex is the natural. She's undermining that as it being what you mean by natural as being discursive.

43:51 Mark: So I'm not trying to deny that this sentence is in there that you just read. I'm perfectly aware of that. I was just thinking of this in terms of what is. It's just that's such an inflammatory claim that it would be very easy to just want to focus entirely on that and say, wow, that sex, biological sex itself is a cultural product.

44:10 Jenny: That is what put her on the map. And she wasn't the first one to do it. And it doesn't seem to me that radical.

44:15 Wes: To me, it's radical. It's something that analytic philosophers would.

44:20 Jenny: This book sold so many copies because it was so. I mean, that's why you have Nussbaum coming after her, you know, again, going back, I think at the time when Nussbaum was writing this, you also had, just before that, the whole sort of. Do you remember when the folks published the Faux article in one of those Continental philosophy or some kind of journal, the Sokal affair. Right. So you had this whole context around this time that was very anti continental philosophy. And that era's kind of passed. I mean, there's much more overlap. But when she was writing this, she really pissed people off.

But she pissed people off because she was taking the social construction claim really, really to its natural conclusion, connecting the dots in ways that I don't think other feminists were really willing to do and may still not be willing to do. Again, early on, she says what her project is, that she is giving a feminist genealogy of the category of women. She's taking that notion of genealogy from Foucault and Nietzsche. And she says the idea here is to trace the political operations that produce and Conceal. So for her, again, constructivism is inherently shot through with both productive, like positive possibilities that are opened up through the political or through power and repressive.

She's not saying that it's all domination. The fact that we live in linguistic structures or these matrices of intelligibility doesn't mean that we're completely being dominated by them. Right. But it's the only way that we make sense of the world. And so we can't separate the political from the metaphysical.

45:51 Wes: I think Mark was trying to avoid getting us bogged down and probably me, right, trying to litigate this issue of whether scientific facts, for instance, or something like sex or the body could be a social construction. I've already given this some of those objections in previous episodes, and I do think it's a mistake. I think it's for deep reasons. But in this case, I'm kind of with Mark. It doesn't matter that it's a mistake.

46:20 Mark: There's so much else that's interesting in this book.

46:22 Wes: Maybe you don't think it's a mistake, but it doesn't matter. It mattered to me in the beginning. I'm like, God damn it, I'm going to come on the show and I'm going to talk about this. And I realized, okay, this is not an issue worth battling over. I think it's ultimately a form of relativism that doesn't work to say that everything is socially constructed. I do think, though, we don't want to get bogged and down in that at this point. I think Mark is right about that.

46:45 Mark: And you can read that introductory sentence that we're going to do a genealogy of women as the gender women. Now, of course, as we said, she ends up saying that there is no difference between the gender and the sex, that it's a false dichotomy. But because it starts with the idea of one is not born a woman but becomes one from Beauvoir, then that at least is used as, let's say, a step in the dialectic. That this treatment of the three of them as one thing and some of the other things that she picks out are trying to pull these things apart. That is the law, right?

The juridical that we keep using that term for. Jury, right. Just has to do with the law, whether it be social or psychological. Ultimately those things are not different because the social gets subsumed and becomes psychological. Right? Your self conception is what has been pushed on you in various ways by society, you know, using very complicated psychological mechanisms. So it's not a Straightforward. We're just blank slates that you can impose anything on. But, yeah, she's trying to shake up the status quo, and that's what the status quo is.

So you could be shaken up in various ways. You could reject that point that Wes has rejected, but still get a lot out of this book.

47:57 Wes: Let me say something to make maximal sense of that point, though, to be the most charitable and say, because we discussed in our early social construction episode the different ways there are many different meanings of social construction. And that's part of. Part of the problem here and the ambiguity. If I'm really. If what I'm saying is I can't help look at a body as gendered. If I could never see genitalia or sex or something or, you know, pure materiality except through that lens, I think that's probably right. So that conceptually those can't be disentangled.

There's a conceptual scheme through which I'm inevitably looking at things. Or we might say, in my view of myself as a sexual being, I've incorporated that kind of social construction stuff. So even my own understanding of my own body and my own sexuality and sex is socially constructed, the kind of looping effects that Hacking talks about. But then we get to the point where you want to talk about ontological social construction. Or you might think of Searle's idea that money is a social construction and it's not ontologically real, but epistemologically real in the sense of an object of collective intent.

49:09 Mark: You just reversed that, actually.

49:11 Seth: Sorry.

49:12 Mark: It's ontologically subjective because we all came up with it, but it's epistemologically objective.

49:18 Wes: That's what I meant to say. So I thought I said epistemologically real. But, yeah, epistemologically objective is the right. So it's epistemologically objective, but ontologically subjective in the sense that money is real, but not because it's a real thing independently in the world, independent of our collective intent. It's real because it's the game that we all play. And by the way, that'll come up again with performatives, because performatives are intimately related to the concept of epistemological objectivity. But then you get to the whole quark example where you can no longer say, it's like money.

Right? This is the thing Hacking criticizes Stanley Fish for. You can't conflate those two things. You can't say, oh, you know, money is real and socially constructed. Why can't quarks be both real and socially constructed. It doesn't work that way. Quarks aren't just meant to be some kind of game. They're meant to be ontologically objective, not just epistemologically objective. So I think what's happening in post structuralism for someone like Butler is that distinction doesn't quite matter. Because there's a kind of crypto idealism at work underneath all of this.

So this whole distinction between epistemological and ontological objectivity just doesn't matter. In a way, discourse and the social is ontologically primary for these theorists. So the problem doesn't come up.