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More Gender Trouble (1990) with Jennifer Hansen. We get into the metaphysics of substance (are gender and sex attributes that a person has, or is there a better way to describe the situation?), performatives, and what Butler sees as the available mechanisms for changing gender norms.
We compare the different views of femininity within male-defined conceptual space according to Beauvoir (for whom the female is defined as the lack of male attributes) and Luce Irigaray (for whom even this "lack" is another aspect of maleness, with the feminine literally unspeakable, i.e., there's no room for it at all in our current scheme). Another go-to figure for Butler is Monique Wittig, whose analysis labeled compulsory heterosexuality (in the service of propagation of the species) as the primary force driving the creation of binary gender concepts. She also talks about Foucault, on three counts: First, in his History of Sexuality, he gives a picture of humanity as natively pansexual, but then "The Law" comes and creates a structure by which both (approved) heterosexuality and (forbidden) homosexuality are articulated. Second, he adapted Nietzsche's idea of philosophy as genealogy to its modern form, which Butler says is her goal in this book even though her story of the origins of gender lacks the concrete historical detail that fills Foucault's books. Finally, Butler talks a lot about Foucault's introduction to the memoir of Herculine Barbin, a "Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite," which demonstrated for Foucault a gender identity less wholly determined by—in fact, in explicit conflict with—social norms than is the case for most people. Butler uses all of these other figures as dialectical steps in her critique: They all have something right and worth articulating in them but are then in turn critiqued for not seeing all the logical conclusions of their views.
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Buy the book. We also found these earlier articles by Butler very helpful: "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" (1988) and "Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex" (1986). For a more confident and detailed argument for the thesis that biological sex is socially constructed (in the current book it's more raised as a question), try her subsequent book, Bodies That Matter (1993). For a more direct, recent treatment of trans* issues by Butler, see this 2015 talk.
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James j Briggs says
February 11, 2020 at 4:44 amGender is a biological fact and part of academia’s attempt to exterminate the human race is an attempt to destroy gender. The most endangered species is the human one.
Kat says
March 10, 2020 at 4:43 amThere are literally so many people on the planet earth that we could kill it and our entire species relatively soon just by having too many of ourselves, so I really don’t think we’re the most endangered species. It’s also possible that this new analysis of/attitude toward gender and sexuality is actually an evolutionary mechanism in its own right because it would be in our best interest right now to reproduce less in order to ensure the survival of our species
Biopragmatist says
February 11, 2020 at 10:58 amThis is great! I’ve been reading Gender Trouble for the first time over the past week, and these podcasts have really helped. The discussions of discourse in Butler as analogous to idealism and of her conflict with Irigaray were particularly enlightening.
For what it’s worth, Butler’s suggestion that there are no prediscursive anatomical facticities or precultural desires read to me as deeply anthropocentric. Taken seriously, it would seem to imply that discursive, cultural creatures such as ourselves could not have evolved from non-discursive beings with their own bodies and desires. On one occasion, I recall, she claims (contra Foucault on her reading) that pleasures are “always already embedded in [social laws]” and, in fact, are “generated” by them (p. 98, 1990 printing; similar remarks occur in her discussion of melancholic heterosexuality on p.71). If I’m reading it right, such a view suggests that most other animals either (a) don’t experience pleasure or (b) do so only within the (human?) social laws of the cultures in which they are embedded. My first thought on reading it was to wonder if she’d say the same thing of pain, suffering, familial attachment and other morally salient experiences commonly attributed to non-linguistic animals.
dmf says
February 14, 2020 at 11:24 amyer way off I’m afraid she’s only talking about human pleasures and really even the pleasures post-infant.
If you find that you are reading a figure like Butler in a way which denies evolution it’s probably a good idea to look into some secondary literature.
https://soundcloud.com/ucd-humanities/monique-scheer-emotions-as-cultural-practices
Biopragmatist says
February 15, 2020 at 11:58 amThanks for the link. I’m pretty sympathetic to the perspective Scheer offers in the lecture. She seems fine with thinking there are biological dimensions of experience that are not dependent on discourse and may even predispose a body to certain forms of practice, though. What’s emphasized is that these dimensions are invariably “modified” and “shaped” by life in such a way that the expression of emotion takes on a multiplicity of forms across time and cultures. But this seems like just the kind of view that Butler takes Foucault to task for, viz. countenancing emotional (sexual in Foucault’s case) inclinations that “are not the effect of any specific discourse/power exchange” (p. 97) and “maintaining a body prior to its cultural inscription…a materiality prior to signification and form” (p. 130).
On the point about other animals, it makes sense that Butler has humans in mind when she writes and may even want to restrict her claims to humans. Yet that leaves open how her account deals with other animals in a way that doesn’t require a vast gulf between us. If there aren’t bodies prior to cultural inscriptions or signification, then how do we reconstruct an evolutionary history that is supposed to include the evolution of culture itself or think about the bodies of animals who, it’s commonly believed, do not themselves engage in discourse or cultural inscription? It’s clear from remarks elsewhere in her writings and interviews that Butler doesn’t subscribe to a linguistic idealism, but I’ve not been able to find a place where remarks like those cited above have been reconciled with the idea that (1) other animals have bodily forms independently of their signification by humans and (2) humans and other animals are fundamentally alike (e.g., that what holds of animal bodies holds also of human). From what I can tell, this worry about anthropocentrism is fairly common. Barad’s take in “Posthumanist Performativity,” for instance, raises such concerns in a fairly sympathetic manner.
dmf says
February 17, 2020 at 10:47 amit’s not so complicated non-human critters have the anatomies they have (nerve-endings,sexual organs, hormones, etc) what they don’t have is genders or gender-norms or the like or any such concept/language dependent features.
Christos says
February 11, 2020 at 6:23 pmConceptual engineering comes in handy in so many areas of philosophy. Would enjoy an episode on conceptual engineering in the future:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/conceptual-engineering-and-conceptual-ethics-9780198801856?cc=au&lang=en&
dmf says
February 14, 2020 at 11:31 amalways seems like pragmatism/instrumentalism to me, is there something more than that to it?
http://consc.net/papers/engineering.pdf
Peter Haggar says
February 17, 2020 at 4:34 pmTowards the end of this episode when the conversation moves to evolution as performance you pretty much stumble into ‘queer ecology’ which takes the Butler’s concept of performance and uses it to dismantle the nature-culture binary. ‘Ecology, biology and queer theory aren’t just related they’re the same thing’ Timothy Morton
The trigger event that would allow for a reappraisal of existing social constructions and what it is to be human is the current climate-extinction crisis
While this would indeed lead to a libertarian style of politics to imagine that as a market based is to fall into another essentialist binary (market-state) where queer ecologists would more likely to be thinking in post capitalist, even post anthropocentric, terms.