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

0:00 Jenny: Good night.

0:00 Dylan: Good night.

0:02 Mark: So we wanted to continue a little, but Jenny and Dylan had to drop off. So we're gonna do a little more close textual analysis at the latter portions of gender trouble here. We also looked at this article, Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex from 1986, which seemed to make some useful tie ins between the last two topics. Where do you guys want to start?

0:24 Wes: I think we were about to get into identity. I mean, I know at least we need to do bodily inscriptions, right?

0:30 Mark: Right. That's mostly what I wanted to talk about.

0:33 Wes: If that's what you want to do, why don't we just do that and then we can pull in other stuff.

0:36 Mark: But yes, the sort of metaphysical issues in terms of an actor behind gender. Is there a disembodied Cartesian subject that acts out various gender things? And I guess in general, part and parcel of the larger metaphysical issue that she refers. She quotes Nietzsche in saying that there's no doer behind the deed. But that is all talked about in this last section as well, so we can bring in earlier stuff as needed.

1:03 Wes: Okay. I mean, the other thing is just to give a two sentence summary of the metaphysics stuff. She's critiquing Wittig for essentially adhering to metaphysics of substance. You get rid of the concept of sex and gender so that women as they are can Kind of assume the status of a universal, pre gendered, free subject. That's what's being objected to. That's not what. For Butler, what a critique should do. It shouldn't just strip us of gender so that we can all be these universal subjects. And it shouldn't be that we think of gender as flowing from some expression of an essential psychic sense of self, and that includes sexual desire. And so the metaphysics of substance is sort of implied in all these positions she's rejecting. She claims.

1:49 Mark: Seth, did you have any sort of opening thoughts about this?

1:52 Seth: We didn't do a great job. I don't think of tracing the linear path of her argument in the entirety of the book. But before we get into that, I want to reinforce that she starts off the book by noting that ultimately her aims are political. So we're talking about her philosophically and we're talking about ontology and metaphysics. And she definitely is working in that space. But she's also has this intimately tied with the political in the sense that she starts off the book saying, should we question feminism as feminists? Should we question feminism?

If it seems like feminism is using the category of woman, is that category problematic? And if by adopting that category, should we question the current feminist project? So when we get to this point here and we go through all the machinations that we talked about of the subject object, the master slave, dialectic, et cetera, et cetera. And so the ultimate upshot of getting to this point where we're trying to escape or deny or somehow subvert, you know, the metaphysics of subjectivity, ultimately it has political implications. And so as we talk about this, I want to keep in mind that one of the strengths of the metaphysical construct that we have is that agency is very clear, or I should say, it's.

There's a transcendental ego, there's the ability to place blame, there's the possibility for emancipation of individuals. And what she's doing when she's criticizing Wittig and I think Foucault as well, in the same breath, is she doesn't want to just, like a Derridian way, kind of subvert the structure and talk about its own turning into itself. She wants to keep in mind this idea of emancipation and agency that she's trying to recover for feminism, or she thinks somebody should recover for feminism.

3:37 Mark: Yeah. And that covers the beginning of this last chapter. Part three is Subversive Bodily Acts. Section four of that is Bodily Inscription, Performative Subversions. And it starts off talking about. About exactly what you were talking about that is there a political shape to women, as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? There's the individual and the group metaphysics of identity at work here.

4:00 Seth: So with respect to inscription on the body, that she asked the question, if you buy the thesis that gender is socially constructed, she then points out that you might think that sex is socially constructed as well, but certainly identity is socially constructed. Then the question becomes, okay, we say it's socially constructed. We're concerned about a notion of agency. People choose. If it's socially constructed, it means people choose to wear it. Particularly in the way that she described it as habitual. Right. That your identity is this repetition of certain actions.

And to be is to do almost. You know, she asked the question, if you buy the transcendental subject, or if you buy the fact that there is transcendence, then you can say the escape path from the body and the social construction of gender is to step back into this transcendental space and then have an objective place from which you can evaluate and make choices about what you want to do. Do you want to inhabit the social conditioning or do you not want to do it? But you know, what she says is if there is no transcendental space that you can escape to, you know, this term that they use in post structuralist discourse, always, already you're in your body, and your body is getting inscribed by the culture, by the society, with whatever categories are present.

5:10 Wes: You're saying this is the view she wants to reject, right?

5:13 Seth: Yes. There's no place from which you can judge and make choices about what to take on and what not. You're always already in the middle of this, and you're always already situated in a body. You're embodied, and your body is being inscribed upon by society with notions of what constitutes correct action, correct social status, gender, race, all these things. That's the place from which you need to act. That's where the agency has to come from. There's no way to escape that and take a stance somewhere outside of that for agency.

5:44 Wes: So I think this is just pivoting off of what you're saying, Seth. I think the idea is that in a way, this is a critique of social constructionism. That's what was really interesting about Butler to me. She wants to critique the idea that you just start out, because what social constructionism seems to imply or require is that there is some non socially constructed substrate that is written on and transformed by culture, that there's something pre discursive, pre constructive, that then gets processed by the forces of construction. And she's going to say, no, it's all constructed, in a sense, all the way down.

And so that the body itself and sex itself should be seen as a product of discourse and a product of something cultural and not just a passive medium that gets inscribed upon by discourse or by culture. So the body is not prior to discourse, or it's not, as she says, a mute facticity for existentialists. We're not trying to do this culture, nature distinction that just resurrects a kind of mind, body distinction. It's all constructed all the way down. And that the implication, like Seth, as you're pointing out, there'll be major implications for agency because there's no metaphysics of substance or any sort of individual locus for agency that we're going to be able to point to, really.

It's going to come down to the grounds of agency, have to be there in discourse itself as well. But I think we'll get to that towards the end of this.

7:19 Seth: Thank you for clarifying that, Wes, That I was talking about the situatedness. She buys into Beauvoir's idea that the body is a situation, it's sort of a locus. And I was trying to emphasize the point that she thinks you can't escape that. But I wasn't talking about whether the production of that particular situatedness. So thank you for clarifying that.

7:38 Mark: So I think maybe what you're describing as a critique of social construction west might be a family dispute within social constructionists. I was just recalling here Latour. I think it was the Edinburgh social scientist, he had some name for the thoroughgoing social constructionists that he was arguing against, that he was saying those people think that there's an entirely blank canvas that society comes along and inscribes its concepts on rather arbitrarily. So they could have been anything, when in fact what's going on, says Latour, is some sort of synthesis.

Even though he wants to describe in phenomenological terms and say that, well, there are some constructions that are, you say, more rigid than others. But in any case, it's not a blank slate. So he was using that slate or theater. I forget what terms he was using. Comparable to these people that Butler is arguing against. Latour was also, I think, criticizing. It seemed like he was criticizing the more thoroughgoing social constructionists. So that would mean he was criticizing people, someone like Butler, who thinks it's social construction all the Way down.

It's a little hard for me to see if Latour is categorizing those people like Butler as social constructionists. And Butler is categorizing these people who believe in the hard center, the body that is neutral on which culture rights itself, that those are the social constructionists. I think probably from an external point of view, they're both social constructionists. It's just a matter of how thorough you are.

9:02 Wes: Let me clarify why I think you can see this as a critique of social constructionism, even though it's. I think your phrase is better, Mark, kind of family dispute. But let me get at the really interesting nature of the dispute. So she will say there is no retrievable sexuality outside of the law, right? There's no pre social gender identity where the law refers to the Lacanian version of what psychoanalysts just think of as typical human development, right? The resolution of the Oedipus complex, or the internalization of cultural values and prohibitions and taboos and the things that create the subject in the psychoanalytic sense or the Lacanian sense through processes of identification and curtailments on instincts and so on and so forth.

So even though Lacan is language ifying, you know, all of that developmental stuff, that's all stuff that used to be kind of thought of as natural. And what she's trying to go so far as to say there is no natural. But if you want to get at a bedrock, the bedrock itself just is culture or just is discourse, then she's going to say, but it's inevitable. Part of her point is that there's no specific feminine sexuality right? Outside of phallic sexuality. You're not going to retrieve sexuality outside of the law. It's inevitable. It's a critique of social constructionism in the sense that you can't undo these constructions, as she'll say, because the substrate for them is so inalterable and thoroughgoing.

And as we saw with hacking. Right. The essence of social constructionism as we typically understand it is that these things turn out not to be inevitable. So someone could accuse her of saying, look, you just have a kind of quasi metaphysical theory in which nature has been replaced with discourse. And arguably it's very close in some ways to Hegelian idealism, except that there's an emphasis on language. But I don't want us to get bogged down in it. I just want listeners to be aware of how Butler is not your typical social constructionist. She doesn't reflect what goes on in social construction.

Talk. It's just become very popular in the media and you'll see it frequently talked about publicly. It's very different from that type of social constructionism.

11:16 Seth: She's not a typical social constructionist. She's quote unquote, problematizing the concept of social construction, particularly as applied to this feminist enterprise. Almost in the same way that hacking, you know, calls out, hey, there's three or four different ways you can interpret the term. And what does it mean when you say this? And he's kind of doing this taxonomy. She's calling out the feminist project and saying, what does it mean? If you say that gender is socially constructed, what are you committed to? What does that actually mean?

She's basically following through to its logical conclusion and arguing that, in fact, if you say that, you're saying that all of this stuff is socially constructed because as you keep peeling back the layers and. And then she's adding on top of it, this metaphysical analysis that's really about strategies for understanding the structure in which that construction gets produced, the discourse. So the production of the social construction, so to speak, is like three parts, the social construction itself, which is almost phenomenological. So let's do an analysis of how these things are made and not born.

Then let's look at how they're made. What's the process by which. She mentions this frequently throughout. She's like, if we're going to say this, we have to ask, how does it get produced? How does social construction take place? How is it that society is producing genders? Why does it produce genders? What purpose does it serve? And that's where she emphasizes discourse. And then she adds this third piece on top of it, which is if you want to talk about a strategy for emancipation or liberation or even dealing with it, then you get into the whole mess of the whole thing seems to be produced inside a discourse of binary distinctions.

You know, mind, body, subject, object, what have you, that buys into this traditional philosophical model. And so even if you are on the bandwagon for the social constructionist project, you're still buying into some fundamental metaphysical assumptions that you may want to question yourself. She's not just blindly saying, oh yeah, gender is socially constructed and so is sex, period, End of story.

13:10 Wes: The other thing is, though the emancipation doesn't involve getting rid of gender roles. That's the other thing to keep in mind. And the reason for that is in the same way that someone might have thought gender roles are an inevitable product of nature, Butler's saying they're an inevitable product of discourse. They are written into, in this Lacanian way, into the very structure of discourse. If you get rid of them, you get rid of discourse. There is no discourse without these. Maybe someone would disagree and maybe Butler evolved and that's my interpretation of this text.

And so that's why you will get something we'll discuss more here as we go along is the idea that emancipation actually involves not getting rid of gender roles, but becoming aware of their A performative nature and B, their nature's performance, which is related. So you subvert them by repeating them in ways that reveal the fact that they are not natural, that they don't simply flow from nature.

14:15 Mark: I recall her mentioning in this book, again, I don't know if this is her view or something she was attributing to Beauvoir or something else that, you know, in other cultures you might actually have three genders identified like Beauvoir, I think specifically talks about the older woman. The woman who is past menopause is in some cultures considered actually a 3. My impression from Butler was that the performative character of this does point to it being random, but something that can be expressed differently. Certainly if you're going to interpret her as the whole point of this text is to open society up to other ways of enacting gender of queer performances, then you have to think that.

Are you saying, Wes, a queer performance is just a reflection on a self aware, ironic reflection or something on the fact that there is a written in might as well be nature, but deep, deep layers of culture and psychological development, A binary gender system.

15:16 Wes: Yeah. The thing about culture is that the reason why queer performances are possible. We could go back to the section on drag if we want, but is that you can do a kind of mashup of performatives that seem incongruent. Right. So there's a whole feminine repertoire, there's a whole feminine language and there's a whole masculine language and there's the bodily presentations that typically associated with the feminine and masculine. And so if you mix all those things up, you draw attention to the discursive nature of them. So I think the one advantage that the discursive has over nature is that you can do these sorts of mashups with it.

So it is not inevitable in that sense. It's not inevitable at the level of these performative or these performances. But that doesn't mean that the components of the mashup can be fundamentally altered. And I think she's pretty clear on that. I can point you back to the section that would Lead us back into section one, part six. But this idea that gender roles are written into discourse as such, I think that's the thing, you know, you can do these mashups, but the fundamental components of the mashups are those are our categories. There's nothing we can do about it.

16:28 Mark: So this was making me think as we were going through here, as she emphasizes time and time again, the idea that we've said that even in Beauvoir, and certainly in Sartre, less on Beauvoir. You see, part of this idea of the absolute freedom of existentialism seems to be that you've just revived a cartoon Cartesian subject that, you know, we thought with Heidegger, the whole point of being in the world was that there's not a subject that then inhabits a body, enters a body. But if you think about like Beauvoir maybe does, as, you know, one becomes a woman, that seems too Cartesian about, you know, I am not my sex. I am something prior to my sex or prior to my gender. No, there's just embodied people. And so Butler is critical of any vestige of that. She's also critical, as we've said, of the idea of an interpretation free body.

17:18 Jenny: Right.

17:18 Mark: There's just this brute physical fact that then culture comes in and interprets in a certain way. And she has a quote here. I'm looking actually at the article on Beauvoir. This is page 39 in whatever journal that was. Sartre's comments on the natural body as inapprehensible. Fine transcription in Simone de Beauvoir's refusal to consider gender as natural. We never experience or know ourselves as a body, pure and simple, that is, as our sex, because we never know our sex outside of its expression as gender. Lived or experienced, sex is always gender.

We become our genders, but we become them from a place which cannot be found and which, strictly speaking, cannot be said to exist. For Sartre, the natural body is an inapprehensible and hence a fictional starting point for an explanation of the body as lived. Similarly, for Simone de Beauvoir, the postulation of sex as fictional heuristic allows us merely to see that gender is non natural, I. E. A culturally contingent aspect of existence. It hadn't struck me so clearly that those critiques are one and the same. In other words, of course, saying it this way, that if you're critiquing the disembodied subject and also critiquing the body, taken in isolation as a natural fact untouched by culture, that's the same critique.

It's just The Heideggerian one altogether, that these really need to be apprehension one and the same thing. Do we want to keep going in

18:41 Seth: subversive bodily acts here from the first part? I just want to read something real quick. Categories of true sex, discrete gender and specific sexuality have constituted the stable point of reference for a great deal of feminist theory and politics. So this is tying back to the beginning of the book that I mentioned. These constructs of identity serve as the point points of epistemic departure from which theory emerges and politics itself is shaped. In the case of feminism, politics is ostensibly shaped to express the interest the perspectives of quote women unquote.

But is there a political shape to quote women unquote, as it were, that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view? How is that identity shaped? And she goes then on to say, like, how are women circumscribed by a sexed body? And how does that happen? What does that mean? And how does that operate as a foundation for this stable identity, which she of course is going to undermine?

19:36 Mark: Yeah, so she says the sex, gender distinction of the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a generalization of the body that pre exists the acquisition of its sex significance. So exactly what I was just talking about, it appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from the a cultural source figured as external to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to question the body as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior discourse. That's Cartesianism.

20:05 Seth: And so on page 166, she says

20:08 Wes: Foucault does this, and this is the point where she's going to move on to talk about the demarcation of the body from active structuring social fields. So essentially via taboos and ways in which the inner and the outer are distinguished, which taboos are very important to and the rendering of what is abject. Going back to Kristeva, what is other and what is oneself. And also kind of a grounds for the possibility, even though she doesn't use this phrase, she comes close of any coherent identity at all. So this inner outer thing, this in a way is one of our basic categories. If you want to do an ontology here for establishing an identity. And that inner outer is intimately related to the concept of taboo and what is to be expelled from me versus what is to be kept inside and all that stuff.

21:05 Seth: Wes, maybe you can shed a little bit of light on this, that concept of the negative definition or the taboos, she refers back to Freud, but is she's saying that part of the original act that points to the fact that the body does not exist prior to its definition in society is that our definitions for what constitutes the body or the role of the body, it's like negative definition. So being gendered in in such a way or having a body in such a way means you don't do this, you don't do that. Is that the mechanism? Is there some kind of psychoanalytic or Freudian mechanism that creates definition through like it does a negative definition, like the negative dialectics or the negative characteristics of God? You don't say what the body is, you just keep defining what it's not.

21:50 Wes: She's talking in a very metaphorical way, right. So it's a bit difficult to get at. And it's hard to distinguish between ontology and psychology at this level of speaking. So when you talk about the contours of the body being established by taboos, for instance, we know that our sense of our bodily distinctiveness from the world is related to permeability. And impermeability, for instance, is related to our sense of quote, unquote, boundaries with other people and boundaries with the world. And so one might argue you can't really distinguish these social emotions and psychological concepts of boundaries from the idea of bodily boundary.

This is not something I accept, but this is, I think, part of the argument, and the other part of the argument here is that gender is an exaggeration in a way. These are artificial distinctions, right? The inner and the outer, the within and without. And then gender takes that artificial distinction and exaggerates it further, where the female becomes the exaggerated other.

22:57 Seth: Yeah, so I guess I was just asking a clarifying question because I thought she was referring to some well known psychoanalytic structure that I was not familiar with.

23:06 Wes: There's a lot of Lacan here. So a lot of it is about, in the creation of the subject, the importance of these prohibitive factors, which in Freud begins with, you know, say, for instance, the incest taboo and ultimately the fact that the mother is, you know, as we separate and individuate in a literal and metaphorical way, the mother is barred from us. We don't have the same access to her anymore. But that stuff is written into the very structure of language. And we become subjects through being in language. And part of that is just the way in which language and the symbolic separate us from the real. Right. They recapitulate this sort of tragic being cut off from immediacy. It's a little confusing or a lot confusing, but it gives you an idea of what's going on in the way she's drawing on Lacan and psychoanalysis.

23:56 Mark: I've just gotten thrown off in these sections between what is an elaboration of a view that she ultimately is going to disagree with. Although it seems like we've compared this to Hegel, that even these views she disagrees with, there's a reason she's sketching them out. It's not just that she's going to throw them away, it's that she's saying there's something about this. It just doesn't go quite far enough. So I'm thinking Douglas also on 165, when she's talking about Foucault, the destruction of the body understood on the model of Freud's civilization as the destruction of the body, forces and impulses with multiple directionalities are precisely that which history both destroys and preserves through an entstehung historical event of inscription.

As a volume in perpetual disintegration, the body is always under siege, suffering, destruction by the very terms of history. And history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body. This corporeal destruction is necessary to produce the speaking subject and its significations. So on the one hand, I think this is part of her critique of Foucault is not going far enough because he's considering that there's this thing, the body, that society then comes in and destroys. But on the other hand, the effect is the same, right?

If the post society, post cultural deterministic developmental practice, we get something that could accurately be described as a volume in perpetual disintegration. In other words, we don't ever just see the clean body before history has tramped all over it. You know, we can see then actually that even thinking of this clean pre social body is a theoretical abstraction.

25:34 Wes: Right, exactly. And what she's talking about with this destruction of the body, it's sort of a variation on why she's talking about Freud's civilization, on the idea that, and with obvious roots in Nietzsche, that as subjects we are shaped by this severe curtailment on our instincts, where the instincts are the natural pre social thing that's imprinted on and that we are essentially destroyed in our naturalness, our pre social construct naturalness by all of that and where the instincts get identified with the body here. And you know, I think Lacan is where she wants to go.

So Foucault is still working with that model. But to go further is to say that instead of locating the repressed within the body as something pre social, we just say that we're constructed hegemonically from the ground up within the prohibitions of discourse or something like that. There's a transition there from this Foucaultian and Freudian idea to the Lacanian and to this use of discourse.

26:41 Seth: And I think the consequence, or a consequence of this, the destruction of the body and the production of the body through discourse, is what she points at here, the loss of interiority, or this is the reason why she brings up the taboos and the transgressions and the boundaries of the body. You know, she talks earlier on about the idea that there's a passive material thing that receives attributes or receives inscriptions, right? The concept, the whole idea that of substance, the metaphysics of substance, that you have something and there are attributes assigned to it, or that it acquires and that there's a thing that evolves and grows and develops.

And I think what she's saying is if you say not just gender, but bodies are produced in discourse, then all you have access to is the surface of the body, the limits, the boundaries of the body, because you're not talking about a thing that's getting attributes. You're just apprehending what has been produced by discourse without any recourse, without even being able to say that there is any interiority. And that, again, this is to her something very disturbing for trying to understand how you could have a politics of emancipation associated with this.

We understand how these things are produced and what ends it serves. But how do you subvert that if there's no inner life, you know, subject, material, body that can stand up and claim to want to take on different attributes than it has? That's why her transition into the performative is so critical, is because she's saying discourse as a mode of production is performative. And so the only way out is to subvert performance, not subvert metaphysics or gender categories or something like that.

28:30 Wes: So this is on 171, from interiority to Gender. Performatives is the section. So I think that is an interesting transition because we want to get at the idea that there is no gendered inner essence, and that requires some explanation. And there's no inner truth to sex either. So I think she's going to continue the kind of explanation that we've been talking about in terms of what's prohibited and what's taboo. But now she's focused on the way it's related to conscience, what she calls the law of desire. And she wants to say instead of the way we typically think of it, which is that, oh, we just kind of internalize these values.

No, it's deeper. It's something a more basic or we identify. That's another way of putting it. It's more basic than identification. It's incorporation. So that the body itself is a product of these things. So instead of being this body instinctual thing and then, hey, we internalize these values and prohibitions and they come into this conflict with our instincts. Actually we incorporate all that stuff from the very ground up.

29:44 Mark: Yeah, I'm not sure that's going to be clear. The quote it's on 171. In my version, the law is not literally internalized, but incorporated with the consequence that bodies are produced which signify that law on and through the body. There the laws manifest as the essence of their selves, the meaning of their soul, their conscience, the law of desire. In effect, the law is at once fully manifest and fully latent, for it never appears as external to the bodies it subjects and subjectivates. Then she quotes Foucault. You can't say that the soul is an illusion. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality. It is produced permanently around on within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those who are punished.

30:24 Wes: I think the way to understand this is to think of it in analogy to behaviorism. She's trying to get us away from the intuition, the typical psychological intuitions in terms of inner and outer. And like I said, being this embodied thing with a soul. And I internalize those external values and it's affecting my character and building my character. It's about habits and performatives and things that happen on the surface. It's about our behavior and the way discourse produces those behaviors. And then gender just becomes that surface stuff. The play of presence and absence on the surface of the body, she calls it. But it just becomes a behavioral repetition that has no inner significant essence psychologically beyond that outer behavioral stuff.

31:15 Mark: And I know we talked about performatives a lot previously in this discussion, but never made the full jump that I felt like the last step of that is to just conceive of these repetitive gendered behaviors which are not of course, just you going and behaving by yourself. It's a. They're systems of behaving and other people reacting to that in customary ways. I was actually just thinking of These, in terms of language games, that really throws away the idea that the specific sentences you might be saying, if you say, I am acting girly now, or wow, that's very manly of you. Those don't have to actually refer to anything because they're just moves in a language game. Just like moving your pawn forward isn't referring to some external thing, to the chessboard.

32:00 Wes: I think that's exactly it. Yeah.

32:03 Mark: So we should move to page 173 or so where she's talking about identity being an enacted fantasy or incorporation. Sorry, expressive ideal.

32:13 Wes: So according to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished for, idealized, and that this idealization is an effect of corporeal signification. So there's movement that she's making from identification to incorporation. That's a kind of psychoanalytic distinction between something that's more advanced and something that's more primitive. But in this case, it becomes something that is more preservative of a psychology of interiority, and then something that happens more at a bodily level.

She wants to reduce things to a surface level, to this level of corporeal signification that will give us the illusion of coherence. It's sort of like Lacan's mirror stage. Right. It's not that there really is an ego, this coherent ego that's produced by psychological development. It's just that we develop the illusion of that.

33:17 Mark: Just to clarify with. So incorporation, that's from the idea originally, as we were talking earlier, as Jenny was talking about earlier, Freud introduced in the Mourning and Melancholia paper. Right. Is that mourning. So in other words, the proper way to grieve for someone is to correct me if I'm wrong. Incorporate.

33:36 Wes: It's the opposite. So mourning and melancholy. So melancholy is something like depression. The melancholic lets go of the object. Let's go. And this can be literally like a dead person, or it can just be people in our lives and the way in which they disappoint us. And we have to let go of certain fantasies of them or idealizations of them through a kind of mourning process. And then in general, we have to. Maturation means relating to this way in general, not expecting people to behave ideally. The mourner, what Freud calls decathexis, gradually severs the attachment to the loved object and lets go of it.

And the melancholic, they incorporate, or they identify with the object and they say, I'm just like the object, so that they can continue not give up the attachment, narcissistically love themselves as if they were the object. Except that goes wrong. Because their sense of anger and aggression over the loss, they can take that out on themselves. So when you see a depressed person berating themselves, they are berating the object, the loved one, for disappointing or leaving.

34:48 Mark: So, yeah, listen to our suicide episode for more information on that. But.

34:52 Wes: Or my subtext on Mourning and Melancholia.

34:54 Mark: Yes, but you just. The way you just described it, you said incorporate or identify, which I was hoping that bringing this up would help us distinguish between the two.

35:04 Seth: Yes.

35:04 Wes: So unfortunately, I don't think when that paper is written, there's a very good technical distinction between that. But identification. So later on, identification for Freud became just. It's not just a feature of melancholia, it's a developmental feature of the way we become people. Like identification, we internalize values. We develop all of our character traits through process of identification. This taking things in from the outside world, incorporation can be something. A kind of failed, more primitive version of identification. It's on analogy just to eating.

You could argue that the melancholic is doing incorporating instead of identifying, because instead of functionally ingesting or functionally taking in, like, I take in a function of the object, I just take the object in as a kind of idol, as a kind of whole piece of objectified meat. And I don't know if that helps. So instead of like maturing and gaining some kind of ego function through that, I compromise myself. But for her, she's going to want to say that this distinction. And she likes, I think, the metaphor of incorporation because it looks more like a denial of this psychology that presupposes an interior.

And we can talk more simply about the body and corporeal signification. I don't know if that's helpful.

36:30 Mark: I was hoping that certainly what the positive upshot of playing with possibilities and creating your own gender space. And it seems like that that is a transformation from incorporation to identification, right? That you're merely going through the motions. You're playing these language games, you're acting out your gender. But if you become more aware of this, then you can sort of decide maybe this is what we in common parlance might think of as. Instead of going through the motion, you introspect and you reflect. And what is my real gender? I've been acting like a man for all this time, but really I feel like a woman.

I'm. So that's a phenomenology. Now Butler is going to deny, as we've been Saying over and over again that that's actually what's happening. When you do that, you're not realizing that this is what you've been all along. What is the alternative? I mean, you're creating something new, bringing something, I would think, to conscious identification. You're consciously identifying yourself that whatever my external body might look like, whatever my physiology, I am in fact woman. And that is a positive Nietzschean statement.

37:42 Wes: So you're right. And you've given a much clearer explanation of this than I did. So it's just if it's identification, it's that then I've built this inner essence up. You know, if I'm becoming a boy or girl through identification, then there's the idea that, hey, there's this inner psychological development where I internalize these gender roles. Then you can associate identification with the melancholic as well. But on the analogy of incorporation, it's more superficial, right? It's enacted fantasy. It's corporeal signification. And it's not like I've developed this inner gender essence through this psychological process. It's just that I've developed this repertoire of behaviors. Does that mark what you were kind of saying?

38:23 Mark: Yeah, I think so. You know, I had started earlier in this to say it sounds like Butler is critiquing the everyday trans sentiment of I wanted to act externally like my inner me was all along. But maybe she's critiquing the metaphysics of that. But, you know, just like Hume, you know, will critique the underlying philosophical assumptions behind something, but maybe not actually critiquing that language as everyday use, right? That it's as if, you know, when you are asserting a positive. What seems truer to you, gender identity, than what society assigned you, then you're not actually, as I was saying, reading off an inner essence. You're creating an inner essence. And that's in some ways it's just a linguistic difference. If you're actually a human being going through that process, reading that metaphysically you're describing it wrong is not going to actually change that, I don't think.

39:18 Wes: How could you be dysphoric on this account? How could you have this extreme distress over the difference between the corporeal significations that you are being forced into or that you have in some way, if your body is a certain way, inevitably you have these corporeal significations associated with one gender or the other. What is that? Something else that's not the corporeal significations. Where's the conflict?

39:44 Mark: Conflict on Butler's view. I'm not sure.

39:47 Wes: I'm sure she has an explanation somewhere that we haven't looked at.

39:50 Jenny: Right.

39:50 Seth: Yeah.

39:51 Mark: It seems like this is something that this book was criticized for, that if you don't believe that there's a disembodied pre gendered actor that can decide and you don't believe that there's an inner essence that we're all just looking to externalize and, like, those seem to be the options.

40:08 Seth: Yeah.

40:09 Mark: For what would cause you. But clearly, like, people just have these feelings, they have these desires. They're not just fooling themselves. You know, if you send them to Christian therapy to get them to act their assigned gender, like, that's disastrous.

40:24 Wes: It'd be really interesting to know what her explanation is, but I can't imagine it right now.

40:30 Mark: If only we were going to talk to her in a few. A couple weeks.

40:33 Wes: If only.

40:36 Mark: Are there more bits in the text here that we want to hit or do we have finally, are we at the point where we can just talk about this performance? And Seth, earlier I had invited you to. We were already in the political realm and you're like. But her political point is not to the end of the book. Well, we're at the end of the book now. So do you want to kind of start us on this last section here?

40:58 Seth: The last section, the conclusion, which I think got Martha Nussbaum onto her screaming from the porch. Slate article. Kids Get Off My Lawn. It's called From Parody to Politics. Essentially, what I take her to be trying to do here, she's established that sex is performative. That agency and the. And subjectivity, really, if you want to call it that, is performative. And so the question becomes if there is no thing that has a place to stand outside or even an identity as an actor in the world to be able to make conscious decisions and choose differently and be emancipated or self emancipate, then how do we talk about politics from within an oppressive discourse?

Like, how does somebody who's oppressed by the current discourse, in this case women, transgender, but also black people of color, any minority, you name it, that doesn't say the dominant discourse. How do you act? And particularly, how do you act for change and revolution? Essentially, her strategy seems to be something along the lines of that since everything is performance, the first step is that you have to parody or you have to make a point of showing that things that we take as being natural or ordained or inner are actually performances.

So she talks about drag, meaning like drag queens because she says what's interesting about that is drag kind of points out it's a parody of a parody. It's simultaneously a performance that points out that it is a performance. And it does it in two ways. It points out that it's a performance by the male gender acting female. But it also points out that just being female or acting female is a performance itself. The very mere fact that they can inhabit it and perform as women in that way. It points out that these are men performing as women and also that women perform as women as well.

And so that's why it's just a great example. And so her strategy or what she's going to advocate is something along the lines of when you are in a discourse, a performative discourse that is driving you to behave certain ways, or you're creating your own self by virtue of repeating and habituating and performing, that what you can do is perform differently and do it consistently over time. The change should be to highlight via parody the thing that you want to emancipate yourself from or break free from. And by virtue of acting differently in a parodic way you'll highlight that the thing that you want to point out is in fact manufactured as part of this discourse and not something quote unquote natural.

And that she thinks that this is the way you open the possibility for change. That right now, without getting past that and at least having the visibility highlighting that these things are constraining us, there's no way to even create any other possibilities. So she's not thinking that you propose or oppose some kind of concept or idea against what is and then make arguments for it or whatever it's that you have to show that what is is contingent and not necessary. And then that will open the possibility to start looking at things differently or perhaps changing.

And you won't even know what possibilities are open by virtue of you doing that. But that's the strategy by which you can subvert the dominant paradigm.

44:32 Mark: We've said lots of times that she says it's performative. And you can kind of see from what we've said before why that might be. But just to give a few more of the quotes to prop that up, 178 she says gender is thus a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of these productions and the punishments that attend. Not agreeing to believe in them. The construction compels our belief in its necessity, necessity and naturalness and then, she says a little later, sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes existing in a binary relation to one another.

How does it hide itself? It's because it's this ritualistic repetition of a reenactment and re experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established. Drag kind of reveals this construction that

45:29 Wes: has concealed itself, right, by mixing up signifiers that are usually separated, right. Usually kept in their binary compartments. If it's a male dressed up as a woman, you might say, well, the conflict there is not between something which is unconstructed and something which is constructed. It's all signifiers. So it's just that we habitually associate the male sex with being a man having a certain gender role, and we associate certain clothing with having the gender role woman. But what you do when you show that you can combine and mix and match those signifiers, you show that the signifiers themselves aren't uncombinable, right?

There's no natural law that prevents them from being juxtaposed in that way, which is part of the parodies, part of showing that they're not inevitably apparent, part not inevitably binary. And if it's all discourse, that's all you need to show. If there's no underlying natural essence to things, then by doing that, you've quod erat demonstrandum.

46:35 Mark: So why would one want to object to this picture of it's not an inner fact, it's acting out things. And so if for whatever reason, and we already said that it's metaphysically problematic on her view of like, this is why she has to have a discussion of agency, of like. Where would the urge to deviate from this, where would that come from if it's not from an inner core or something?

47:02 Wes: I mean, there's a lot of critiques to be made of this point of view. I mean, structuralism and post structuralism are just as adventurous as idealism and other similar philosophical points of view. They're very speculative and they're subject to, you know, the same sense that they're implausible. Right. If you're a naturalist. One of the articles we read for the first social construction episode is by Mallon. It's a Stanford Encyclopedia article called Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction. The people who want to take that approach are very concerned about preserving the framework of thinking that is dominant in analytical philosophy and in the sciences, which is this idea that there is an underlying material Nature, so they wouldn't want to deviate from that.

And there are just. There are internal conflicts as well. So if you're talking about, well, gender is a performative, that's all on the surface, but we are bound to repeat them. Anytime you use psychological language, you're using language of interiority. So you can see the tensions inherent in the text. Why would be bound to repeat anything if there isn't an innerness, if there aren't these inner psychological rules that define us? She seems to want to go so far, and maybe she would rebut this, or maybe she might have evolved on this. But it seems like everything has to remain on the surface rather than be part of an inner psychology.

Because someone might come along and say, yes, gender is socially constructed and it's not in any way connected to sex, but it's something that happens as a developmental process very early on and then becomes inalterable and internalized. So much so, right. That we can get something like gender dysphoria. It becomes essentialized in the sense that it's psychologically internalized. If you want to say it's all performatives on the surface of the body and all that stuff, that's very counterintuitive. And it doesn't seem to jibe with the use of any psychological language.

It becomes, like I said, there seem to be analogies to behaviorism.

49:03 Seth: Yeah. And Mark, I wanted to address that question you raised about, like, where would the urge to escape or whatever come from? I think the way she characterizes it, you have this dominant discourse that is constructing bodies, and yet you come out with a body that doesn't fit, or you somehow adopt a position. What you feel you want to do versus what is being forced upon you are not conceptual. You're a woman and you're told you you want the penis, but instead you don't want the penis, you want the vagina. Right. So you're being told you're wrong, and you're like, wait a second, why does it have to be.

But either that thing that makes you not want the penis either is something interior or comes, or it's produced by the discourse as well. And so the discourse produces discontents, maybe for the purposes of reinforcing. You know, it's like we have to have exceptions so we can prove the rule, or we have to have deviance so that we can establish what the norm is. Right. So, yeah, I feel like you do have to commit to the idea that the motivation for change or for disruption and emancipation there has to be some natural basis to it, or it has to be within the structure of the discourse already of its own overturning.

And I feel like Butler in this book, even though. And we talked about this, even though it sounds like she's a social constructionist and saying social construction goes all the way down. I'm not sure that she's fully committed that there's anybody who's reasonably up on the latest scholarship and science and biology and so forth can go a long way towards social construction without giving up at least a few biological bases. I think it's reasonable to think that there's some elements of both to give

50:52 Mark: a little bit of her bit on Agency, page 187. Maybe it sounds like we've been accusing her of being a cultural determinist, but she says for an identity to be in effect means that is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary. We shouldn't get entangled in these free will versus determinism debates. There's something sort of obsolete about that as a philosophical problem. She says construction is not opposed to agency. It is a necessary scene of agency. The very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible.

She's giving one of these like compatibilists about free will do that, you know, you might say, of course, you know, everything we think is determined by biology, by character, by whatever. But because there are some fields like our ability to deliberate and think reasonably, and we can contrast that ability with when we act rashly or when we're really drunk and act that kind of thing that like, that's what creates agency. So what Jenny was referring before as kind of playing in the margins, is that what she. Of what you've culturally inherited, that there's enough give.

The cultural force is not one law, even though it's described metaphorically that way. A lot of times it seems like it's commandments coming from a lot of different directions, some of which conflict. So it's like if you're working at a company where you have a very weird structure such that you have five different bosses, like an office space, then you can take advantage of the fact that the commands from people who are sort of co. Equal, where it's not clear which one of them has priority. If those commands conflict, then by sort of choosing between those, there's some agency there, even though you're acting.

I don't know. What do you. I think of that analogy.

52:36 Wes: The model of agency she's operating under is really about social emancipation. So I think for the compatibilist at least the sort that I subscribe to. You say, yes, everything's determined, but there's also the capacity for reason, being able to be responsive to reasons, for instance, among other things. And that's underwritten by deterministic natural forces. But in this case, it has nothing to do with the individual per se. Agency has to do with how strong oppressive social forces are and the degree to which those have been cast off. And that's something that's solved by collective effort.

Even if the individual involved in that collective effort is being sort of carried along in many ways, they might be part of an emancipatory project, and their level of agency is determined by culture. It's not that anyone has the individual ability simply to just go against the grain and be the emancipated agent fighting against all the oppressive forces. They have to be part of a movement.

53:39 Mark: Maybe no Buddhas, no independent bodhisattvas. That's what I mean.

53:46 Wes: Yes. To the extent that they're a manifestation of what's going on in the discourse.

53:50 Seth: Yeah, exactly. I think what this points to is, as Wes said, a movement that, since you're talking about practice and performance and repetition and habituation, that it's, you know, an individual can raise the question by acting individually, you know, a David Bowie in the 70s, during his, you know, whatever, Ziggy Stardust phase or what have you. But it's the adoption by others of that new discourse and the people taking it up and the repetition and the instantiation and the performance of it that ultimately essentially creates new reality. Right.

Creates a new discourse. So it feels like the transition from parody to politics is really the transition from the individual to the mass or the group. And maybe there are unique individuals who have the power to make change just by virtue of their own existence, but really it's about the individual who raises awareness in others and motivates them to change their performance as well.

54:50 Wes: Yeah, so it sounds very Hegelian in some ways, because it's. It's like discourse has its own internal development. You know, it's not individuals who ultimately subvert, although they do, but the discourse speaks them. Right. It's not that David Bowie speaks the language of gender bending. It's that the language of gender bending speaks. David Bowie creates that sort of subject, and so he participates in that. But that's a little wrinkle that happens within the dynamics of discourse as it evolves. And that begins to sound like a kind of Hegelian directionality. Those sorts of implications are actually hard to Resist. That's kind of inherent in her position.

55:29 Mark: So when I was earlier saying what would one object to about this? I didn't actually mean what would one object to about her theory? Because, of course, she's taking some very aggressive positions and there's lots of places you could jump in and object. But I guess I was thinking more in terms of the practice of gender fluidity that she seems to be advocating of just not being offended when you see someone who seems androgynous, who's acting, who's doing David Bowie, who's in that period, comparably. I remember at freshman orientation in college, they were telling us basically, like, don't be homophobic.

And I brought up as a, you know, as a. As raised your hand as an overly, like, too philosophical for my own good at age 18 or whatever it was, I was asking, like, the issue that I have with homosexuality at that time is because it didn't seem to teleologically make sense. In other words, you can talk about how evolutionarily there would be things in favor of reproducing, but, like, where does being gay fit in with that? And, you know, the woman who's leading the session rightly just shot me down, said, look, the way that psychologists see it now is just.

It's a factor. In other words, you're a little amateur philosopher. I'm going to rule this out as an admissible category because I don't understand it theoretically is a bunch of bullshit. And I feel like even though it's, you know, it's funny, of course, Butler's talking a lot about Lacanian psychology and trying to give in some of the chapters we didn't talk about, like, the origin of desire itself and why one might desire something as opposed to something else, and bringing in incorporation and identity. But can we use the Oedipal model to explain, you know, why we would desire a certain sex because we're identifying with the father who also desired women or what, you know, she really gets into this inner stuff.

But ultimately, if you think all this stuff, both the status quo and the way it could change are a matter of discourse. Discourse is much more surface level. You know, you could just throw, you know, try to say something else. If you can make it work in the language game, if you can expand the language game slightly, then it doesn't even matter what the psychological source of all this stuff in terms of, like. So my question about, like, why would we object is more of reflecting on what I, as somebody that age was thinking is that, man, it's annoying to me when I'm walking around in my 17, 18 year old stuff.

Sense of just basically trying to look at all the women's asses, like as a. Like it's so irritating when a dude has long hair and then I find I'm looking at an ass and then he. It turns around, it's a dude, man. That shocks me.

58:12 Wes: So it's like the wrong ass, not the ass for you.

58:17 Mark: It's this sort of entitled sense of I want, you know, the world to correspond to my mental habits of how I view it, how I gaze upon things. That's at least part and parcel with the rest of not only homophobia, but just any sort of negative reaction to somebody that doesn't adhere to gender norms that you could give whatever explanation you want of like, oh, you know, we had to as a society breed and so we have evolutionarily built into us. Like those kind of descriptions are interesting but a little beside the point when we're actually talking about the political actions themselves and what we should be striving for.

58:56 Wes: I think in Butler's discussions of this though, she gets at very deep reasons why we would have those sorts of reactions. Because just to give one of them, like binary distinction, she thinks is pretty critical to people's sense of identity and to their sense of internal coherence and that's why they're threatened by it. It's a very deep thing and it's not easily solved. I think even though she's against on one level this interior stuff, I don't think people's reactions to these things are as easy as a sensitivity course, for instance, because people treat this stuff as an existential threat. Their identities are very tied to these sorts of distinctions.

59:40 Seth: So that's interesting. I think that's definitely true. And it's been a maturation process for me over the years to become less and less threatened. I find myself less threatened by breakdowns in gender categories, I guess right now than in other sorts of things. But there's definitely something curious about the experience of feeling ill at ease around somebody who doesn't fit the dominant paradigm. But the one thing it does strike me that's interesting too is this does sort of give a place and underwrite how creative types are oftentimes at the forefront of these things.

So. And what I mean by that is like, I'm really good at working within the existing paradigm. That's kind of like I'm a great monkey with the organ, you know, organ grinder monkey or whatever, sausage maker. I'M very good at turning the crank. I'm not so good at challenging dominant paradigms. And we have a lot of creative people in our lives. And you think about the way somebody, an artist or musician sees something or wants to say something in a way that isn't consonant with what, you know, somebody who develops a new style of expression or breaks through a norm, any kind of discursive norm, to do something new.

And then, of course, that changes the trajectory of the discourse. I'm up. I'm. I won't say obsessed because I don't think I'm obsessed by anything, but I'm fascinated with this idea that creativity is a personality trait. I think of myself as not being creative, and I'm envious of people who are creative, who can create music or create art or write. And I'm wondering if I feel that way in part because there's a power to creativity, an emancipatory power or a discourse altering. It's not simply that you can create an artifact like a painting, but you can actually alter the way that we talk about things, which is to say, you can actually alter the structure of reality by virtue of creating things.

And I find that really fascinating. And I'm envious, and I don't want to live my entire life hoping in envy. I'd like to experiment with some of those things I sell. But anyway, sorry, I got totally became biographical for no reason whatsoever. You guys get my point though, right?

1:01:53 Mark: Yep, yep. We've violated our own conventions here by creating something that is neither a legitimate addendum to the previous episode nor a full episode in itself. So I don't know how we'll label this.

1:02:08 Wes: Well, what do you mean legitimate?

1:02:11 Mark: It's just we've talked a long time. It's good.

1:02:14 Wes: Oh, I see. Okay. It's right. Okay, I get. Now I'm getting the joke as well.

1:02:21 Mark: All right, man. This is along with just a couple closing announcements. As we've mentioned, in this episode, we are going to be interviewing Judith Butler herself, and we're going to be doing it about her brand new book, the Force of Nonviolence. So we are going to connect that very specifically to the current discussion you've just heard, but it's obviously a very different topic. So we'd also plan to read Walter Benjamin's essay, Critique of Violence, which is a foundational source for Judith in the new book. But since we just recorded this continuation of the gender Trouble discussion, we don't actually have time to do the Walter Benjamin right now.

So we will be doing both of those sources coming up next, possibly in the same conversation. All right, second issue, we know that this episode did not actually treat of the social construction of gender in such a way that we could actually say something about current debates regarding trans issues. We've tried at a couple points here, but we would really need to read a different, more recent text and we'd need to find an appropriate guest, somebody maybe in the trans philosophy community, somebody who can speak to the trans experience but is not purely an activist, can also do the lawyerly analytical thing, you know, like a philosopher.

So I did already reach out to some people matching that description and could not get them to respond to me. So I'm throwing this out to the listeners to recommend someone who might be able to help us deal with such a more current text in a careful way. Third, and relatedly, our closing song is I'm A Boy by Lys Guillorn, whom I interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 44. Check it out at nakedly examined music.com and yes, this is a cover of a song by the who. Thanks, everybody.

1:03:55 Seth: Good night. Good night.

1:03:57 Wes: Good night.

1:04:05 Jenny: One girl was called Jean Marie Another little fellow was Coffee Felicity Another little girl was Sally Joy the other was me and I'm a boy My name is Bill and I'm a head case they practice making up on my face yeah, I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear Spend evenings taking headbands from my hair I'm a boy, I'm a boy but my mind won't admit it I'm a boy, I'm a boy but if I say I am I get it. Put your frock on, Jean Marie Plait your hair Felicity Paint your nails little Sally Jo Put this wig on Little boy. I'm a boy, I'm a boy but my ma won't admit it I'm a boy, I'm a boy but if I say I am I get it. I want to play cricket on the green Ride my bike across the street Cut myself and see my blood I wanna come home all covered in mud. I'm a boy, I'm a boy But I won't admit it I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy am a boy I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy I.