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

0:00 Mark: So I think we were up to part one, Section three.

0:03 Wes: All right, so we were just talking about the idea that sex is a social construction. And that there is no, as she puts it in this section, there's no ungendered pre discursive anatomical facticity that is then subjected to what she calls an inexorable cultural law. And that's kind of a description of de Beauvoir's position, this idea that you start out with this natural sex. And then social construction is applied to that. That that's a passive medium on which either culture can impress itself. Or maybe one's own agency. And resisting culture. Right. And resisting those social constructions, as she puts it, the body comes into being in and through the marks of gender. And then she's going to go on to say these marks are discursive. The next section here gives us an interesting critique of Beauvoir by way of.

0:58 Dylan: I was drawn to the paragraph just before the section on Irigaray. Maybe that's just sort of summative. Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which, it will be suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or safeguard certain tenets of humanism as presuppositional to any analysis of gender. The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned experience. Constraint is thus built into what language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender.

1:42 Wes: So this is the sense in which discourse is hegemonic, right? It imposes on us because it limits what is thinkable. It limits what we can imagine. The discourse that we're stuck in. And then that's a kind of launching point for her to say that, okay, well, let's look at what that meant in Beauvoir and compare what that is in Irigaray, because that can mean various things. That kind of general summation that you gave Dylan in Beauvoir, it means that women are signified as the negative of men, as a lack against which the masculine is differentiated, or they're the other.

For masculine, the masculine is the disembodied signifying subject. And women are body, women are sex. And she doesn't entirely like that because it still harkens back to this pre gendered substantial core person who's a subject, has the capacity for reason and language, and then gender is this attribute added on to it. The innovation that you get with Irigaray is that substance itself is a delusion of masculinist or phallogocentric discourse. That focus on substance makes that discourse not even adequate for representing the feminine. The feminine can't be represented within it.

2:56 Dylan: It's unthinkable in those terms, right?

2:58 Wes: Instead of being a lack or other within that, you know, as it is for Beauvoir within the discourse, it's actually linguistic absence. It eludes signification. And then there are consequences to that, you know.

3:09 Dylan: Then she links the constraint in Beauvoir's case as being the uncritical reproduction of the mind body distinction. In sort of a Cartesian way, so that you get this kind of essentialism, she says. Beauvoir proposes that the female body ought to be the situation instrumentality of women's freedom, not a defining and limiting essence. The theory of embodiment informing Beauvoir's analysis is clearly limited by the uncritical reproduction of the Cartesian distinction between freedom and the body. Despite my own previous efforts to argue the contrary, it appears that Beauvoir maintains the mind body dualism even as she proposes a synthesis of these terms. There is preservation of that very distinction can be read as symptomatic of the very phallogocentrism that Beauvoir underestimates.

3:54 Wes: So she doesn't like this liberal kind of existentialist conception of where liberation would involve resolving the master slave dialectic and getting mutual respect and recognition. And that's done by basically transforming women into free subjects, undoing the various forms of domination, whether it's external or whether it's a matter of self concept, whether it's a matter of what the construction is doing psychologically.

4:21 Dylan: She says that's because the ontological distinction between soul and body invariably supports relations of political and psychic subordination hierarchy. So you don't get yourself out of that. That liberal conception involves the very constraint of that that she's trying to avoid in principle.

4:40 Mark: And since we read Beauvoir, the lesbianism chapter, I should just say that she ultimately regards lesbianism as a choice, a choice to restrict the love object to only women. She thinks that the natural. It's not a puzzle why women might be attracted to women because people are by nature. This is a position that Butler at least attributes to Foucault and probably some others in here, but Beauvoir bought it too, that people are sort of natively attracted to everybody in particular. And you could give psychoanalytic explanations for that. And she still is giving a kind of teleological.

Even though she criticizes Freud for seeing homosexuality as like failing some test, like, you didn't meet the normal stages of development that actually eventually get you to being a heterosexual, you stop short. And so you're say for a lesbian, stuck in clitoral ideas of pleasure as opposed to vaginal ideas of pleasure. That's what the mature woman does. So she doesn't like that, but she still is playing within that general scheme of, yeah, a lot of women get over this at some point, decide whether they're going to allow themselves male companionship or not.

And given that she thinks that being a woman is being oppressed, she interprets lesbianism not in all cases, but in some cases as a refusal, a refuse to be made an object. So it's like a form of rebellion. And I just think that Butler's going to have a problem with this whole way of thinking that, yes, there's facticity. Beauvoir even says, oh, you know, a woman might find that she can only get pleasure from being with another woman and not with a man. But, like, that's not enough. That normally to us would be an indication that you are a lesbian.

Perhaps, but no, it's still on top of that for Beauvoir because she's an existentialist, it's a choice.

6:28 Jenny: Just to reiterate what Dylan was pointing out about her critique of de Beauvoir is. It's really clear in this section. I really want to highlight that she's very critical of what she thinks is a kind of. She doesn't use this term, but like radical libertarianism that seems to follow the existentialist mode of thinking because it reproduces maybe unwittingly, the mind body distinction. Because she's arguing that because de Beauvoir, she repeats, and we read this, says that man is the neutral and the Positive and woman is the lack or the negative that that kind of maps on.

If that woman becomes imprisoned by body. Woman is sex, sexuality, and man is sort of not tied to his body. So he has this kind of radical freedom. That's not just a man that has that. It's like that's subject. Subjectivity itself is coded as masculine. Maybe because I've become more nerdy. But what I loved in her analysis of this sort of Cartesian problem in existentialism is she had a footnote where. And this was like her footnote 15. She uses the phrase that, you know, has this view of like, enlivening capacity, of a distinctly immaterial will.

Like somehow like we can remodel our sense of ourselves or something in some powerful way. And then in the footnote she refers to like, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre and stuff. And. And I'd never thought about this, but she says that even the term embodiment, which is what I love about de Beauvoir, and I'm a phenomenologist, I am not a post structuralist. So that stuff that I love, she's criticizing by saying that term embodiment references theology. It treats the body as this, you know, inert or passive thing in which I don't know, that is incarnated.

This is what she says. Right. You know, that's her big critique of existentialism, is that it's just Cartesian. It has a very problematic view of freedom because it's like a disembodied. But then when it talks about embodiment, it still talks about embodiment as if there is this sort of mind that fills up the body and embodies it. I just wanted to highlight that point. It's really caught up in this sort of free will determinism.

8:37 Dylan: I was just going to bring exactly that. That up that she even phrases it as being mired in the. The language and problem of free will versus determinism. And she doesn't want to take aside in there. She wants to subvert the terms of that discussion, that those aren't the poles. And part of that is, you know, the next chapter is, you know, going after these binary dichotomies, subject object, free will versus determinist.

9:05 Wes: It's a little unclear how much of the critique is hers and how much is Irigaray's. She's giving an account of two different ways of looking at things. And so it is critical to. Of Beauvoir, but she's looking at it through an Irigarayan lens. But then in section four, she's going to critique Irigaray.

9:23 Dylan: Yeah. She isn't simply embracing Irigaray over Beauvoir.

9:26 Jenny: I've read a lot of Irigaray, and I can't specifically remember that Irigaray makes this exact critique, at least the way she articulated it. But she does focus on this early Irigaray that wants to say. And she puts. Butler puts it in this way. Right, that. But this existentialist view is that there's this fundamental distinction between a subject and an other, and that's the structuring matrix or whatever, and that what we need to do for women is make that other a subject that's problematic for Irigaray because the subject is always already male, and anything that is conceptualized is always already gendered. If I can make a reference to Lacan, the feminine is the real. It is not articulable. It disrupts, it jams. The machinery is the phrasing that Irigaray will use. And so it's very influential to Butler. And then she rejects Irigaray.

10:18 Wes: So the way she sums it up in four, she just says, you know, the gender asymmetry for Beauvoir is this failed reciprocity in the master slave dialectic. In Irigaray, the dialectic itself is a masculinist way of looking at things. And then the critique is that there's a foundationalism at work in her and that her concept of masculinism economy across all contexts. You know, cultural, race, class, et cetera, is too globalizing. So she gets into the intersectionalist stuff.

10:51 Mark: So are we just going to assume you'll just take Butler's description of Irigaray as sufficient? Like that? We understand that enough to have it make a point? Because I don't get it at all. Like, clearly.

11:01 Wes: Oh, you don't? Okay.

11:02 Mark: Men have names for women, right? They think they've picked out something. You can say, you know, with Beauvoir, that since men are the ones doing the naming, they don't accurately capture women or something like that. And so, at best, women are considered a lack of the things that they actually care about. Positive qualities that of humanity that they reserve for themselves. Like, I at least understand Beauvoir's position. But the thing that Butler is saying, that that's different than Irigaray's position, that. No, no, the whole symbolic order rules out femininity altogether.

Like, I understand. Yes, we read Kristeva. We've read Lacan so abstractly, yes, you can say man is the subject and the object. And woman is merely the real, the unarticulated, the thing that escapes language. But I have no idea what that actually means, means in terms of our conceptual schemes or men treating women in certain ways, or what am I missing?

12:00 Jenny: I can actually, I think, explain this and I'll put you in the text so I don't go off. So this is again my version, page 10. And she's redescribing again this critique, the differences between de Beauvoir and Irigaray's view. And she says, you know, de Beauvoir, in her system, the problem has been that men have essentially defined women as lack, okay? And so all we have to do is let women have their voices, essential or whatever, and they can fix that or take away all those associations of them as merely the lack of masculine qualities, and then they're fine, their internalized

12:33 Wes: self conception as being that and the way it changes their behavior.

12:37 Jenny: And then she talks about Irigaray and she says, the way that I would explain this, the passage I'll get to in a minute, but if you remember the episode where I described the way I teach the binary opposition and Beauvoir, I said that I'll have students try to, as much as they can, get away from sort of political correctness policing, spontaneously associate as many sort of characteristics with masculinity and feminine as they can, generate these lists, and then ask them what the relationship is. And hopefully they will see, without me leading too much, that it's the lack.

Right? So when I've written about this, I've described it as woman is defined as not a. If man is a, then woman is not a. Irigaray is rejecting that because she's rejecting a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification. So what I've always said is, it's not that we want to undo this misrepresentation of woman as lack, but that the entire grid of intelligibility she would go so far as to say, has not made a space for there to be a positive conception of woman. So it's not that woman is not A, it's that woman is B, but B has not been articulated at all, and that all of her work then becomes a meditation on different ways in which women would metaphysically disrupt our entire Western conception of ontology if they started to enter into language in a way that articulated this not in terms of the relationship to man as lack, but as a unyet articulated reality.

And that's why later on she'll get in this coalitional critique. So Irigaray is very aspirational, hopeful, metaphysical, for sure, speculative. And Butler's very critical is like, no, don't even go there, Irigaray. But she's fairly saying, like Irigaray is saying, de Beauvoir is just repeating the problem of liberal feminism. All we have to do is clear away the negative associations with femininity and woman and then let women bloom. And Irigaray is saying it's much deeper than that, it's that they're excluded. The very conceptualization of gender and sex and subjectivity excludes the possibility of all the things that would open up in the way that we think about the world if, you know, it had been configured otherwise.

And so it's much more radical. But Butler is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, let's not replace metaphysics with the new metaphysics. She's just going to stick with the critical project and say, let's see how the whole thing was constructed.

15:14 Mark: Can I just try to relate this to a common dynamic, whether it's sexism or racism or whatever is talked about. But position A is that the oppressed group, you think that they can't do all the things that white men can do. Well, just give them a chance, they'll do all those things. But that doesn't actually change the value system of what those things. Women can be doctors too. Black people can be just as smart as white people. You know, they can perform just as well in the best schools, in the best professions and be judges and things like that.

Whereas it seems like maybe Irigaray is claiming that what you're saying is that those oppressed groups can enter the sanctum that's already been constructed by man or by white man. And that's not enough that we need to actually let the values of the oppressed group interact with the dominant ideology. And so the dominant ideology gets rethought so that maybe in fact, instead of, you know, saying women can participate in the meritocracy that we've set up just as well as man can, maybe we question meritocracy itself. We say that all this striving and things, on the other hand, if you just use that based on the stereotypes of the oppressed group, well, that's not good either.

You know, somebody criticized our first discussion actually by saying you weren't praising enough the virtues of women. It's not just that women should be allowed to become full subjects, but that men should stop being so aggressive, that men should learn from women, that these so called female traits are actually desirable ones, that if You. Well, I just think Beauvoir's response to that in, you know, thinking of, or at least Irigaray's response might be, if I'm understanding this correctly, is that those passive characteristics aren't really what femininity is about.

We don't know what femininity is about because it's never had the chance to fly free.

17:02 Jenny: That's exactly it. So on the top of page 11, she uses much more structuralist language, but she says, and this is her again articulating Irigaray's critique of Beauvoir's feminist project. And she says the relation between masculine and feminine cannot be represented in a signifying economy in which the masculine constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified. The system presumes the subject is male. So male and subject and all of the values and norms are already gendered. And so if you were to say, let's let women become subjects, let's like take that boot off their neck.

That's not enough because then you're just saying, let's let them become men. The. The measure is the male. And so Arigori and I think Butler agrees to this part of Arigorae. Arigora is saying the whole again. She uses, and she gives a footnote to it, the matrix of heterosexuality. Or she'll say later on the grid of intelligibility, she's using very Foucaultian language, but when she uses like matrix, so heterosexuality, she's drawing on other feminist theorists, but she's saying that has precluded, like a lot of linguistic categories, the very possibility of articulating difference.

Right. So gender just becomes the way of. For Irigaray, it's not about women, it's about difference. It's about creating a metaphysics of difference instead of identity. And that's a Heideggerian project.

18:27 Wes: One more way to maybe help listeners understand this. You know, you might say, under Beauvoir's model, you might say, look, it's just this whole representation of women is lack and other and all of that stuff. And the way it's internalized has been bad for. I think maybe this is kind of an extension of what you were saying, Mark, but it's been bad for women. And we just have to help them undo that self conception by changing those sorts of representations of them culturally. So in other words, we just, we're using the same language. We just have to say different things within the language.

I think, Mark, you were getting at the sense in which that, that just means letting women have more of what men have, or according to the sort of masculinist system values. But for Irigaray, the language itself has to change because it's not just that there are these negative representations, is that there is no representation, that the conception of femininity at work is actually a projection. It's a projection of male desire. It's a projection of something within men, or she calls it phantasms of its own self amplifying desire. So that it's not just a matter of, okay, we're going to say different things within the same language, it's just the entire language would have to change.

19:48 Jenny: I guess maybe one way that I see this is that the one reason why gender is a useful way to think about the problem with the signifying economy, with the way that we have structured the world. It's a very potent example of binary oppositions in general. There's not an opposition that Butler's going to try to like, complicate. So any opposition that we take as natural, she's going to complicate as constructed. It's concealed its construction and we take it as natural, whether it be the body, you know, like sex and gender. Irigaray is where I think she's influenced.

I mean, she's influenced by Irigaray in that thinking is that the signifying economy is synonymous with masculine logic. Something that de Beauvoir said, right. Like all logic has been sort of masculine. That way of thinking is completely about creating binary oppositions that then creates the sense of a kind of prediscursive materiality that's being properly named and identified.

20:46 Dylan: That makes sense, this part of it. What isn't clear to me is whether the binary aspect isn't a consequence of whoever has the power, as opposed to it being masculine versus feminine. So this criticism that, you know, so on the one hand, naming it a phallogocentric or masculine economy of signification, that makes sense from the standpoint of describing what's going on, where you're just sort of naming it as well. Let's acknowledge that the men are the ones that made the signifying economy because they are the ones that have the power within the language of signification, and therefore it's a masculine signifying economy.

But it's not clear to me at all that there's anything what the function of that word masculine is, at least in terms of the descriptor. The other two words, signifying an economy are talking about a way of understanding linguistics and naming things. But then adding the word masculine on it is naming the point of view of it and kind of a value system associated with it. And maybe there is something that is, I'll call it inherently masculine, which to me, Butler would completely disagree with, because there's nothing inherently masculine. There's nothing like originally naturally masculine that would allow you to say that it's masculine.

It's just descriptive in the sense of the culture of description regarding the word masculine.

22:13 Jenny: It's values that have been imposed. Right. And they just so happen to have been imposed by those who are in power, who just so happen to be what we call men.

22:24 Dylan: There is a criticism to be made to me about binary thinking that is overly extrapolated. That's why this using gender is a good example to try to work on that is that there are plenty of examples that's called natural facticity that if you observe them, undermine your notion of there being only two genders. And you can, you know, you can do that with human beings. You can do that with other kinds of animals. The same thing with, you know, you run into similar, similar kinds of questions regarding things like speciation. You know, when you start talking about Darwin, maybe this is part of getting us to us later.

But she roots that in this binary world. It's not clear to me that there's anything other than whoever, sort of the history of human thought and whoever happens to be in power to be thinking about the world being in terms of binaries, and that you're running up against cases where understanding everything being in terms of opposite turns out to be not so fruitful, that there are things that are useful in terms of being binary. But it may be that it loses its descriptive force, that you end up using your very language to misunderstand what you're talking about.

I mean, that seems to me to be very potent. Maybe the end result is that if we lived in a world, if I lived in a world that was a feminine economy of signification, it's not clear to me that it wouldn't be perfectly binary.

23:49 Jenny: Well, so the way that Irigaray avoids this. I get what you're saying, but one of Irigaray's books is called This Sex Which Is Not One, which is what she's referring to. And then let's go back to a passage that Wes referred to, page 12. She says the phallogocentric mode of signifying the female sex perpetually reproduces phantasms of its own self, amplifying desire. That's a reference to her book Speculum of the Other Woman. And this notion of specular, specularization and the idea that woman is the tain of the mirror, essentially, there is no thing that is woman.

Woman is just a way in which men keep constructing the world in their own image and holding it up in some way. And so, yes, I see what you're saying about. Well, it could have been that women started that whole process. But the way that Irigaray gets around that is, is there's a reason why it's called phallologocentric. It's that idea that men's sexuality is sort of univocal or that there's like the phallus is like this very clear. It's a pointer referent, right. And it's reproduced in, like, obelisks and like statues. The phallus is everywhere.

Right. And the point is that women's very. And this is where Rigora is really different from Butler, and why I have a hard time with Butler is that Rigora is like, look at women's bodies the way they are. They're just messy. Their very sexuality is not univocal. They are not one. She has a whole thing called the two lips. Right. I won't go into it in case this gets too, you know, sexual. But her whole sense of the morphology of the female body resists articulation in a metaphysics of substance and identity because there's no identity. It resonates, disrupts the very notion of something that is identical.

Does that make sense?

25:36 Dylan: It does, but maybe I could just reflect it. Just to summarize, is that without going and reading Irigaray, that the argument is that we gather our metaphysics out of our bodies and that men's bodies naturally lead to a binary ontology, and that women's bodies or that a fish's body or whatever would lead to a different kind of ontology of the world.

26:04 Jenny: And Butler makes very clear that she's anti phenomenology. She says it outright. But if you're an Irigarayan or you're making the point of a fish's body,

26:13 Dylan: or how about a dolphin, right? There's a whole series of books about dolphins, intelligence and stuff, their way of

26:18 Jenny: interfacing with the world would resist the logic of the person who has perceived himself, she would say, as identical to himself, and that that's sort of reflected even in the way he understands his sexuality. It's a very convoluted psychoanalytic critique. But she's saying women morphologically don't live that way, and so they can't speak. There's no entry point.

26:44 Wes: I think we can skip Section four, because we kind of. That's a critique of Irigaray in terms of intersectionality. I think we've given enough of that and we can move on to the metaphysics of substance.

26:55 Dylan: Section five, we get the business of performatives. Maybe. In fact, I don't know if it's the first time she uses that word. But at the end of section five.

27:04 Wes: So section five is. It's about the sense in which we can't even talk about identity prior to gender. Identity is not intelligible without talking about gender. So it's unclear to me, because she doesn't spell it out, how this relates to discussions of personal identity. Traditional philosophical conversations about how a person persists over time. But she's thinking of personhood as consciousness capacity of the language for moral deliberations. Traditionally, that is thought of as something that is ontologically prior. And you can give these analytic conditions of identity, persistence of identity over time.

And then the social stuff is just added on. And then it's. This subject is externally related to a social context. But for her, our sense of personhood, identity, internal coherence as a subject, our sense of being self identical, these come from the discursive regulatory practices that constitute gender. And there is no way to have those things without having a sense of having a gender.

28:08 Dylan: I guess the very notion of coherence and continuity of the self is a socially driven effort. It comes from interaction. It's discursive.

28:17 Wes: What she calls norms of intelligibility are very important here. The way in which we get that coherence, that sense of coherence by patterned experience. And that's the stuff that Mark has been talking about. The way in which you make sex line up with gender. And both of those things line up with sexual preference and practice. You do that to create this impression that there's this underlying truth to sex. That there's this substantial underlying core. And then that gender is an expression of that, whether it's biological sex or something else. And this is very important because she's getting at some of the motivation for even doing this stuff is that that's the way we can ground a sense of identity.

29:01 Dylan: This is one of the things that I really found interesting, even putting aside thinking about agreeing with it or not, is that the activity of getting coherence in one's life is thinking about how much of that is driven discursively. Or how much of that in the sense of a discursive need or put on us socially. Or how much of that is in some ways A kind of complicated reaction in which it's an activity of self understanding that is also part of the reflection of ourselves within society. I think Butler is in this kind of frame of mind that it's overly simplified to say that it's imposed this notion of identity on us externally. But it's also overly simplified to say that we have identities that are revealed somehow by getting to know ourselves, that are independent of our interaction with the rest of the world.

30:01 Jenny: In this section 5, it seems to me that the motivation. She does touch on personal identity as a topic of philosophical discussion right after. Right in this first long paragraph. And she kind of references the psychological theory of identity, that we're identical psychologically, not whatever bodily or something. She doesn't say it that way, but she's kind of getting at that because she says, you know, personal identity within philosophical accounts almost always centers on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self identity of the person through time.

But she starts the chapter by saying, you can't analytically distinguish personal identity and gender. That's one of her arguments. Right? And so to think that we need to. To understand gender identity, we need to first understand what identity is not like identity metaphysically about any object, something that persists through time is the same, but also persons that persist at the same. She's saying, you can't distinguish personal identity from gender because it is. Gender is what makes personal identity possible. And it does so in a masculine signifying economy.

I'm not saying that like this is all accurate. I'm just saying this is how I understand her argument that the masculine signifying economy has, through that articulation that De Beauvoir made, has allowed itself to make itself identical over time by always being able to say, I'm not that I'm not that I'm this, I'm not woman, I'm not nature, I'm not the identity is this kind of construction by being able to say, my identity is that I am not that. And so that's why early on she keeps saying in this signifying economy, categorization itself, the process of categories, excludes things fundamentally.

She's rejecting almost like a Hegelian view of thinking, like it's not that an object is opposed by being opposed. I mean, the rigorous saying, yeah, that happens, but that's not the way it has to happen. It's not necessary that we had to construct meaning and categories that way, but that is the way it's been constructed. And they're just going to name it for better or for worse, masculinist thinking.

32:05 Wes: So the reason I kind of tried to skirt around the personal identity thing is just because I think personal identity is really a metaphysical question. And she's actually addressing a psychological question about what gives us a sense of.

32:19 Jenny: But she thinks she's addressing a metaphysical coherence.

32:22 Wes: And yeah, maybe if someone thinks those two things are the same, then yeah, but I don't think they are the same. But I don't think it's important either. I think the point about the sense of identity, a sense of coherence and the relation between that and gender is defensible and interesting. I don't think that the idea of metaphysical grounding, metaphysical personal identity this way is very workable.

32:46 Dylan: I mean, at least at the end of this section it's on this angle that she gets to considering at least gender in undermining its origin in a metaphysics of substance that she points to it as being an example of performative. And she does this, you know, just the paragraph, this is the very last paragraph of section five. And at the lead in from the previous paragraph, if these substances are nothing other than the coherence is contingently created through the regulation of attributes, it would seem that the ontology of substances itself is not only an artificial effect, but essentially superfluous.

I wrote really question mark in the back because I'm wondering if it's going too far. But in this sense gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free floating attributes. For we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative, that is constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre exist the deed.

That last sentence to me is one of the hearts of what she's talking about and because it gets right to the performative nature here, is that there is a doing. There is a doing that we are referring to when we talk about a thing or a substance, but that does not presuppose any underlying thing that is doing that doing. And the very fact that I'm tied up in that way of speaking is a consequence of the language that we have.

34:25 Wes: So I think we're going to have to really say what performatives are at some point. I don't know if that's point is.

34:30 Dylan: Now I think that we do all

34:32 Wes: right, so let's just review Austin real quick, shall we? There are certain types of. It doesn't have to be sentences, but includes things we say, things we do with words that do not simply describe or report. They're not things that are necessarily true or false, and nor are they describing some inner state. In myself. They're not describing what I'm doing, but they are themselves a doing. The utterance itself is the doing of an action. So it could be. So, for instance, saying I do. These are all Austin's examples. When I am getting married or something, or I say I name, I hereby name this ship and then give it a name.

All sorts of things. Orders, requests, warnings, invitations, promises, apologies, predictions. One of the important things about all of this stuff is that it's not just word magic. And I think this is going to be important for evaluating Butler as we go on. For Austin, there's all sorts of things that have to be in the background for performatives to work, what he calls appropriate circumstances. That includes the intentions. That includes these inner things. Right. That ultimately Butler is going to want to avoid. It includes the fact that there are all these sorts of things that are the objects of our collective intent.

This thing that Searle calls stuff that's epistemologically objective. So whether it's a real marriage, for instance, depends on and whether the person marrying me is actually a legal authority, and whether he's a legal authority depends on that institution, and whether people treat it as something real and so on and so forth. And whether a promise actually works or not depends on, or whether a performative works depends on all sorts of conditions. And I might be lying and this and that. I might be saying that I'm marrying you, but I'm deceiving you.

All sorts of stuff like that. So there are all these background conditions which are not themselves just outward utterances. The doing of the utterances depends on all these interesting background conditions. And that's a lot of what Austin's book that we went through this meticulously, is defining those background conditions and saying when performatives misfire because of them, when they're being abused, when those conditions aren't met. She's also thinking about Searle, who worked on this as well and actually argued that performatives were true or false statements.

But anyway, I need to add something

36:57 Mark: to this because which is going to be unsatisfying, which is, I think you've given a very good account of chapter one, or maybe it was chapter one and chapter two, the first part of Austin's book. But as it progresses, the ultimate point is to show that you might have thought that there are some statements that are constantives. In other words, they're actually stating facts. And there are some that are performatives that are there making something happen, but that by the end of the book he's saying, actually, the distinction is not as clear as you thought between these.

And so that there is in ways that he doesn't go into, which is why I said, this is going to be unsatisfying. So Butler is creatively building upon Austin's by saying, in the case of it's a girl, it's a boy, you know, that we think those sound like substantive claims, but in fact they are performatives, or, you know, saying, I am feminine. Or, you know, in fact, so many of the things are not even sentences that she's referring to. So she's doing something that is loosely

38:01 Wes: based on the inspiration, like stereotypically feminine cadence of voice or movement or dress or, you know, all the. All the things that we associate with femininity and masculinity would be performatives in the sense of saying, I hear. And it's unconscious. Right. That's also what's interesting about this. It's done completely unconsciously, but it's. It's really what you're doing when you do these things is you are saying, you know, I hereby am a man. I hereby, by this gesture, am a woman. Which is not to say you're saying, I feel like that inside, and this is how I'm expressing it. Nope. The performative itself is what constitutes the actual movements and gestures and clothing, and those constitute gender. They're not simply expressions.

38:49 Jenny: If you want to go to the text to underscore your point towards the end of this first section that we looked at is where she says one of her most famous things. She says, and this is in my text, 33. She says, gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. And because now I love William James and Dewey so much, I kept thinking in my head, like, what's the difference between that and habits? But what she's saying is, I guess the reason it's different than habits, like our habits make us give us agency.

If you're Dewey or something like that. The things that we repeat and then become natural ways of being, they become second nature is what gives US Agency. But what she's saying is that we're so policed and surveyed and punished in a compulsory heterosexual world, if we don't take up certain stylized ways of behaving, dressing, how we take up space, do we cross our legs, do we open our legs, what the pitch of our voice is, how assertive we are. You know, I mean, there's so many things. Sometimes we're told, be a lady, but usually that's without any kind of content.

It's usually in the enforcing or punishing of certain behaviors. And then these styles of existing become, through that regulatory framework, repeated so often that they just seem natural. They become second nature. Right. And so that's gender. Gender is shaped through these forces that are not people doing it. They're the very institutions and practices that we have carved out culturally, historically, but they inscribe themselves on our very bodies. Then in our behavior, we signal that we're one gender, which means we're one sex over another.

And that's what she's disrupting that whole thing right there.

40:43 Wes: Just to re. Emphasize your point, because it's something I missed, is that the performatives are not just saying, I am a man or I'm a woman when I do this particular behavior, but that I am this thing, and it is my inner core. It is expressing my inner core. I'm saying that as. As well, even though it's not true.

41:02 Jenny: And in that sense, gender is projecting the fiction of a natural sex, but it's all a construction that operates by constructing the body and certain behaviors and mannerisms and practices that then project that fiction of a sexual identity.

41:19 Wes: Well, maybe we could just jump to bodily inscriptions, since we're already kind of on that.

41:24 Jenny: Do you find the example of drag helpful? To me, it's like the key to finally getting her. I don't know if you found that example helpful to explain what she means, but go ahead.

41:34 Mark: Yeah, no, that's an illustration for what we were just talking about. She mentions at the beginning and at the end.

41:39 Jenny: That's how most people think about her notion of performativity as drag or acting. That gender is a performance in the way that drag is a performance, in that it both. It's an exaggerated performance. The drag queen is being feminine, but in a way that's so parodic, so over the top, that it kind of exposes that that's the mechanism by which we make subjects feminine, is by making them do these certain stylized behaviors and actions and engage in these certain kinds of actions. And that exposes it and exposes that you can't make sex and gender. Sex then produces gender. Because if it's a man performing as a woman, it just complicates all of those categories.

42:23 Mark: It's a double inversion that it is stating, in effect, that appearance is an illusion. Because on the one hand, it's, hey, look at me. I'm really a man, but I'm dressed as a woman. But why am I doing this? Well, unless it's, you know, dressing up for a Monty Python skit, if you're actually doing it because you're, you know, embracing the drag lifestyle, it is, in effect, saying, actually, in my everyday life, I am woman inside. And wearing men's clothing, that's the disguise. So that by making this political statement of wearing drag, you're not just.

Certainly she's very aware of. People could just use this as a way of mocking women or something like, I'm just gonna dress up like a woman, you know, for Halloween and act really obnoxiously, like I think women do. That would be the. Like the man appropriating drag. But honest to goodness, dragon, the drag queens going out and doing this, they're trying to express something about their sexuality through this impersonation. And so by saying, I'm putting on a fake outer female, it's really saying, my normal outer male is a fake. Both claims to truth contradict one another and so displace the entire enactment of gender significations from the discourse of truth and falsity.

43:43 Wes: Amen.

43:45 Mark: What did you think of that? I mean, that doesn't seem to me like how the reductio ad absurdum works, this double inversion. It takes it out of the discourse of truth and falsity. I don't quite buy that exact formulation, though. I get I'm putting on a fake outer female is really saying, my normal outer male is a fake. I'll follow her that far.

44:04 Jenny: It occurs to me that the only way that drag is a good example, a good drag queen, makes you question at first if it's a woman or not. And then you realize, not because the person doesn't look like a woman necessarily, unless it's, you know, just a bad example, but because the. Of the exaggeration that it's not really a woman, so it's somebody who's overdoing femininity, not because you can tell by looking at the body, but it's the way that that performance is being done that so exposes femininity as a set of performances through the very exaggeration of Making fun of it is precisely what exposes the constructed nature. Not anything about the way that person, how well that person passes.

44:49 Mark: Couldn't a woman then dress extra girly and like that? Look, I'm making fun of girliness by dressing extra girly.

44:58 Jenny: And that's what Irigaray would say is make fun of it to expose the lie. But I also think in your example of the guy who's just dressing up as a woman for Halloween, that works too. The whole point is to show gender is actions, behaviors. My friend gave his dissertation defense, and he said gender's in the elbows. You know, it's like how you. I mean, it's like how you move your body, and when you exaggerate it, you go, oh, shit. Yeah, that's what gender is, is a bunch of habits that have been policed, but the person mimicking them is exposing them as arbitrary. They're not like, I'm just expressing myself. They've been policed and reinforced. How women sit, how they take up space, how they speak in the. In the presence of men, the tone of their voices, the ways they look, you know, same with men. The way that men interact with each other, all those things have been regulated.

45:53 Wes: Here's a problem with this, which I think I'm just bringing it up because I think it's illuminating at this point to saying what she's saying, which is that I might say, well, all of these external signifiers of whether it's moving in a certain way or speaking in a certain way. Just think about stereotyped way of the way a man walks down the street or a woman does, and then think about the very exaggerated versions of those things, the sway of the hips or whatever. Those things aren't just surface stuff. So they do. Someone might say they do express something.

It's not necessarily. Doesn't have to be biological sex that they express, although someone might claim it's related to that in the end. But it could be that we've internalized certain things. You know, we've internalized these social roles, but that's still something internal and significant that we're expressing that we then express. None of these things mean anything by themselves, right? Any more than the word dog means something. If you don't know the language, you got to know the language to see a certain way of walking as a signification of masculinity and femininity.

So this is one of the background conditions, basically, that Austin would talk about for it to really be a performative. This is one of the background conditions that there has, you know, that has to be there, which is that it. Which is a very basic one, I guess, that it has to have that significance. So to say that gender is just constructed of these surface level body things doesn't sound to me entirely right. Because the semantics don't simply, you know, in the way that I think post structuralists would like. Would like it to be. Semantics don't simply come out of syntax or the masculinity of a certain way of walking or the femininity of certain certain way of walking.

It's not just a function of that ritualized thing. It's the way and that's gotten associated with a certain meaning and a certain feeling that we all know and understand.

47:58 Jenny: I think that for me, because I don't know the Austin as well as you, it's maybe why it's like it doesn't get in the way for me.

48:04 Wes: Maybe because consider just like smiling, for instance, and what it means to see someone smile versus looking at the kind of whooping thing that I forget what it's technically called that chimpanzees do, which we kind of get it, but it's alien to us. We're not on the inside of that language, so it's not meaningful to us. I think in the same way it's not. The experience of it, of what it means to another chimpanzee is not the same as what it means to us. To us, it looks weird. And if aliens came along and looked at us laughing or smiling and they had a completely different system of bodily meanings, it's just.

It's going to look weird and there's no way to attach any significance to it. And I think those linkages, partly it is evolution, right? The smile is something that took millions of years to evolve and to have the meaning that it does. There's a whole, I think, speaking of history and genealogy, there's a very. To some of these things, there's a very, very complicated process by which a certain movement or facial expression or some other signifier could come to mean anything at all.

49:19 Jenny: I think it's a good criticism. You're articulating this kind of theory of emotion that has an evolutionary basis in very basic emotions, right? And then there are some that are more culturally specific, like saving face and what. And I think it's a good criticism of Butler, and I share it, and I get what you're saying there, and I get. I have a lot of criticisms of her too. But I guess what I was just trying to say is for Me, what I think the way in which Austin doesn't get in the way for me is that I never end up conflating performance with. Even though Austen's not talking merely about uttering sentences, it's not always linguistic, like she says, a stylized repetition of acts, the effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and hence must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

And so I just see her as saying that it would never be enough to say I'm a woman or I'm a man, that we read that someone's a woman or a man precisely by those stylized bodily activities.

50:24 Wes: I think it's right and it's profound. And my criticism, in a way, is I'm just trying to illuminate the radicalness of the point she's making. Part. I mean, I do. It's a real criticism. I'm not sure how she would address it. In the end, it may not be that her account is inconsistent with it. It's just that what I want to emphasize for listeners is that there has to be some semantics to this, right? It's just like moving as certain acts, gestures and so on and so forth. They can't mean by themselves masculinity or femininity without some history that semantically ties the meaning to the signifier.

The meaning has to be simply more than the signifiers. And I think. So a post structuralist is just going to want to say, well, gender just boils down to those surface level significations, and there's nothing beyond that. And I'm saying there is a semantics. It is related to an inner life, this inner expression stuff that she wants to avoid.

51:23 Jenny: But she's not a voluntarist, right? So she knows that you can't just say, you know what? I've just realized that this is. Has all been inscribed on me by these regimes of power, so I'm free. So I think you have a different ontology than her and a different understanding of the world, which I get. She's describing reality differently. But the practical effect is whether you want to say there's something about it that is prediscursive or whatever. That's one of the things that people, I think, misunderstanding about her genealogy of gender is that it's not like she's saying, I've done this work for you, go be free to express yourself any way you want to.

For her, that's beauvoir de Beauvoir. That's not her. She's saying we're stuck. So all we can do is innovate and exploit those moments when it becomes clear that we. This is acting upon us. If your metaphysics or ontology is different from her, the practical difference of your accounts may not matter, right?

52:16 Wes: Someone could accuse her original discursive thing as just being another version nature.

52:22 Jenny: But where the difference is is what it means. And that's maybe why I harp too much on politics. I don't know. But I think for her, all of this account matters insofar as what are you practically going to do then for your situation? Because you can't just face it head on and change it. Change it to what? Or undo how? How would even any of us undo our habits at this point without a lot of effort, you know, like a shit ton of effort.

52:48 Dylan: It's even worse than that, right? Because you can't change those habits on your own because you're enmeshed in a society that has a particular way of

52:57 Jenny: interacting and rewarding them or not. But how many of us have gone on a diet or tried to quit drinking so much? I mean, these things are not easy to do, right? I mean, they become like second nature. I think that's why habit's such a good word. And so it's not like you can undo nature easily. Like you have to really like set your mind to it. And not even that won't do it. You have to change your behavior and then keep it up consistently for a very, very, very long period of time.

53:24 Wes: There's nothing to change to in this case. There's no new habit to what?

53:28 Jenny: Right? Like you'd have to have some incredible imagination.

53:31 Wes: But it's not. It doesn't exist. It's just because discourse just does this.

53:36 Jenny: Well, this is where I think that she's. You could read this evolutionarily, and I wish I could find the passage, but the way she describes this, that new things come into being, you could just substitute mutations if you want to think evolutionarily instead of her post structuralism, the things that happen in nature that create new possibilities are mutations. She's essentially saying the system fails. Like the repetition repeats with a difference and that difference creates an opening or an innovation that creates new possibilities. That's how things change is. That's her account. So it's mindless. We can't determine to do it willfully. Like, you know, this like super libertarian subject is going to come in and change things. It happens and we have to exploit it. Or not.

54:19 Mark: When you give this imagery, it makes me think of decentralized economics, that she's actually conservative in a certain way, strangely, given her reputation as a radical, but that if you feel like it is not within our power for a centralized command and control to change these structures, they have their own economy, symbolic economy. And the best we could do, just as, you know, a private business person, is to kind of work on their own corner of the world and try to create something that is valuable. But you're not going to be able to. It's going to be very hard to induce cultural change. Right, Is what a social conservative would say.

55:01 Jenny: The thing to do is to capitalize it when it happens. Like, even if you think about business lingo today, when they talk about disruption of an industry, right, Or a sector, the disruption wasn't planned. It was an effect of iPhones or digitization or, you know, apps or whatever. But that changed fundamentally the very way people thought about how to do things as a business, let's say. But it wasn't like people sat down and planned to change it that way because it's so hard to change things institutionally. And so it. The disruption becomes a moment you can exploit for better or for worse.

55:35 Dylan: I disagree with that a little bit in that I think that you can. I think that sometimes, often people intend to do that kind of disruption and it's very rare that it actually is successful. So sometimes this disruption happens and no one was planning to do it. But it happens to me, probably because I'm a scientist, is examples of scientific innovation or experiments or ways of technology that happened that just were developed, that didn't have any intended, like the development of the transistor. No one thought about LCD TVs and iPhones as a result of the transistor, but that's what happened as a result of that, right?

Maybe even further back, no one thought of the iPhone when Quantum Mechanics was developed, but that's what happened, right? But on the other hand, I guarantee you that Steve Jobs intended to disrupt the way in which music was listened to when he was the brainchild of the ipod. And I guarantee you he intended to disrupt the way in which we interact both with phones and computers when they developed the iPhone and the smartphone. And he definitely understood that technology as being disruptive in a deep way. Exactly what the consequences would be.

I don't think that he knew, but he understood that he was throwing a grenade into a room when they developed that the Bolshevik Revolution was disruptive on purpose, Right?

57:13 Mark: This is also making me Think I know from just reading other things about her that, like I didn't see any Marxists talked about in this, but I know she engages with Althusser and maybe some other folks in other works. You know, I just think of Marx's general point of human nature, that if it's, if you change the rules of the game, then people adjust to that, they react differently. And that in some ways sounds very much like Butler. Right. Our activity is. But with Marx then goes a sort of an approval of top down change. Yeah. That she doesn't seem to have.

But again, I'm not sure what the practical upshot because when I think about, you know, what has been the institutionalization of anti bullying measures, like I think that is such a positive thing. When I compare the way I grew up and reflecting on this in particular, you know, if anybody that violates gender norms, like especially on men, that that just would come down in instantly. And by saying institutionally across all schools, all public schools, at least we're going to do our best to crack down on this. I mean, it might take a little doing, but the Marxist theory would seem to be that if you, you know, as much as adults, older people or whatever might object to this sort of PC regulatory scheme, that it sort of works on kids.

That it's not merely the case that all those nasty things that they would have said and nasty ways that they would have act out just get sublimated, you know, moved over toward beating up each other after school. Like, you know, you'd have to look at the signs of how these things work. But my sense is that there is quite a bit that one could do to get rid of this gender policing. And that is already underway in a very positive way that, you know, when I look at the way my kids talk about it, like it's just miles away from the way we talked about it when we were their age.

59:07 Jenny: Yeah. I mean, it's weird because throughout this conversation tonight, I keep feeling like I don't agree with Butler at all. I don't know if I made that clear when I said like she's my Dennett, but what I've tried to do here is give the most faithful charitable read I can for her argument. And I don't mean personally to suggest that some of the institutional changes that we've chosen to make that we've planned out and executed, we shouldn't have done. Because Butler's account of how things change is the most accurate. I am just trying to say what I think she's saying and I think going back to the Steve Jobs example for a minute.

And again, my area is philosophy, psychiatry. All I do is think about neuroscience and science all day long. And I think and technology and biotechnology. And so what I think, if we're going to be Butlerian or whatever about that she says early on in her very first chapter, strategies exceed the purposes for which they are intended. So it's not that you can't strategize to do X, it's that you can't control always. And so what I again, as a pragmatist, just that's how I'm wired. Maybe the way I would explain it charitably is Steve Jobs may have intended to disrupt, but he just happened to be successful because he just happened to be successful.

And now everybody's imitating that success that he paved the way for that no one saw. And that's kind of what she's saying, is that sometimes these things pop up in the world that change the world or that change the way we do things.

1:00:37 Dylan: I completely agree. I was only reacting to the notion that disruption only happens on accident, like mutations in evolution. And I was wanting to say that just like the way in which other aspects of our human life is self reflective, that we affect the way we think about things and the way we think about things affects who we are. Is the same thing's true about disruption. It's not something that happens just to us.

1:01:08 Jenny: Right. I want to affirm that there may be something that we can do to like disrupt, that we can choose to. I want to affirm a kind of agency. But she's complicated all the way down that kind of agency. But she hasn't complicated agency, if you understand it outside of somebody who pre, who saw in advance perfectly what he or she wanted to do and executed it perfectly, but instead maybe intended and then it went even better. And the practical effects are such that other people are going to imitate it. So going back to your point about Mark, about anti bullying, like in the feminist literature on trying to prevent rape on campus, for years everyone's tried to say like don't rape women or whatever.

They've tried. And then they all of a sudden started looking at different fields like first adopters and tipping points, you know, Malcolm Gladwell type stuff and recognizing, you know, that in these different ways of thinking about systems and people interaction, they had more success in creating bystanders. Right. So it's like practically that worked better. So it's not that we give up on the hope to change the things, but how Are they going to change? And I think Butler's just disagree. Providing an account that's less about. We can sit in a room and solve a problem and execute it and then the problem solved.

But sometimes the best solutions are going to be capitalizing on something that happened beyond what we expected. That's all. And again, like, I'm giving the most charitable read I can ever, because when I came in here expecting that I was going to just rip her apart to you guys, and I've ended up defending her the whole time. I did not predict that in advance because you were all like, I love her. Like, I mean, she's so much better than I thought. And I was like, oh, are there

1:02:45 Mark: other bits of the text that we want to pull out before we wrap up here? Or we.

1:02:51 Dylan: I enjoyed it. It does make me think, honestly, with this discussion about evolution, it makes me think a lot about pragmatism. And so I completely understand, without talking to you, why you would move from this kind of account to moving to Dewey and James.

1:03:10 Mark: As a sort of a closing statement for me. I mean, I think we read the quote, Jenny read it originally from the intro, that this is supposed to be genealogy. She says genealogy investigates the political stakes in designing as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact, the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin. I actually didn't see a lot of actually doing that in here. Right. It doesn't read like a Foucault genealogy where he tells a story of the history of mental illness or the.

The history of views of sexuality or the history of punishment. And it's not a genealogy in the way. Maybe you could take Beauvoir. Some of what she's saying is a genealogy going into discussing all these myths and things when she's saying the political stakes. I mean, we've pointed to some other thinkers as she talks about Irigaray that like, oh, it's all masculinist, and even logic is masculinist. But she seems to have in line with this decentralized economic picture that, no, these structures kind of just happen. They evolve over time, and they're certainly relevant to power.

The most direct thing that sounds like a genealogy is actually where she's just giving Monique Wittig's view, which she brings up periodically during the text. Wittig's views sometimes to criticize them, but she talks about this view that, you know, maybe all this sticking together of sex and gender and sexual orientation as part of a single identity is part of this system of mandatory heterosexuality that she then says is basically for evolutionary purposes. Right. So in other words, you don't have to say there is some evil conspiracy of men that did this.

It's more nature wants people to reproduce. And so if everybody turns gay, then we don't do that. So over time, society developed sort of out of this mandatory heterosexuality which then Wittig, and consequently Butler has a great deal of criticism for of like the human cost of what might have been, you know, for evolutionary purposes in the first place. That little story, though I don't know if I entirely buy it, is so much more vividly a form of genealogy than anything that I actually see in this text. This text is like going through a lot of different people's theories about things.

It's not a lot of investigating the political stakes in determining as an origin and cause. It's more, you know, getting into these metaphysical versus social issues. It seems more diffuse than that. So I'm not sure that if she's succeeded by her own lights or I'm just misunderstanding what that description of her project at the beginning was supposed to be. Thanks for participating in this, Jenny.