Kind of a long footnote to something I’d written in the “No More Ms. Nice Bitch” series. I updated the post, Essentilizer Bunny #2, with this, which I’d forgot last night because I was a little bleary-eyed:

It was late, and I was tired, so I forgot to preface this with something that ought to make it more clear what Lienert’s claims are bustagut funny. When poststructuralists criticize rad fem essentialism, they are not attacking biological essentialism. Rather, they are criticizing social constructionist thought, itself. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble makes that very explicit. She’s asking how it is that an essentialism sneaks in the back door of social constructionist thought, in spite of the insistence on the part of social constructionists that they are not reducing claims about women’s identity or women’s culture to a biological nature. More on that later, if I have time.

So, some excerpts from Gender Trouble. I will try to intersperse these with some explanations since, so often, people complain that Butler is unintelligible.

Also, quick note at the top. Belledame pointed me at an interesting article and thought I’d already seen it before. No, so thanks for sending. A lot. It’s quite good. If Belle thinks she’s seen traces of that critique in what I’ve said, it’s more likely that I’ve just been influenced by post-colonial feminist theory — even though I had about a two year long debate with a guy who insisted I’d never read a lick of it in my life!

The author of this article, ‘Western Feminists ‘wounded attachment’ to the third world prostitute’ is criticizing white, Western feminists’ use (and abuse) of third world prostitution from the position of postcolonial or third world feminist critiques of Orientalism. Such an approach actually silences the voices of third world women in its insistence on speaking for an Other and on importing our frameworks for thinking about oppression onto to the lives of other people. Below, Butler outlines this critique as a generalized response to radical feminists’ claims about the universal, cross-cultural, and transhistorical character of women’a oppression.

That aside, back to Butlering along with cultural essentialism. The reason I’m posting this is because I’ve always wanted to inflict a lengthy Butler text on y’all. No. Really. Seriously. It’s because I’ve wanted to archive these sections, but also because I want to show how, at least with respect to Butler (a “po-mo”), one can see that contrary to Tania’s Lienart’s article, this particular “po-mos” is actually criticizing social constructionism. (Yes, “po-mos” is how they spell it because they want to encourage you to say it like you are afflicted with a speech disorder. oh more rudeness!)

Honestly. There’d be little reason for them to criticize biological essentialism. It has been done to death already! It would hardly be what made pomo so hot hot hot in academia if you could find the same thing being said by, uh, well anyone in academia with a functioning pair of brain cells to rub together.

Yikes. I’m ranting. Anyway, yeah, so this excerpt is meant to highlight the fact that Butler is criticizing social constructionist thought. Did she have to type the word construction, constructionism, and constructedness yet ONE more time for Lienart and others TO FUCKING GET IT? I mean, how many times does she use variation on the word in the excerpts, below? Christ!

It makes me mad — and I don’t know how Rapping felt — because you can’t believe educated women are that stupid. So, you have to believe they are doing it on purpose. And if that’s the case, then that kind of sucks doesn’t it? Because I neither want to believe people are stupid — I don’t believe anyone is stupid. I can’t I wont’ I refuse to. It’s not the case. I plug my ears and sing loudly — nor do I want to believe people would purposefully elide the real debate. Why? Why why why?!

“The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of patriarchy or masculine domination.

Notice how Butler makes a distinction by using two phrases, “patriarchy” OR “masculine domination.” This is, I assume, because she recognizes that there are (at least) two different ways of conceptualizing a feminist critique of women’s condition where those who use the term “patriarchy” believe that womenasaclass ($1 to Anthony Kennerson) are oppressed by menasaclass: i.e., radical feminists. I have tried to explain before why this matters. To claim that women are a class and men are a class is to draw on Marxist claims about the way class works — that one group benefits from the exploitation and oppression of another group — and import it into the analysis of women’s oppression. Thus, in theory, one has to show the logic behind this domination. I will have to look up posts where I’ve explained this further. For now, though, I want to focus on what Butler’s saying.

“The notion of a universal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists. Where those various concrete cultural contexts have been consulted within such theories, it has been to find ‘examples’ or ‘illustrations’ of a universal principle that is assumed from the start. That form of feminists theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a “Third World” or even an “orient” in which gender oppression is subtly explained as symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism.

Here, Butler annoys me the exact same way MacKinnon does. In fact, when I first read Gender Trouble I was so pissed off that I wanted to just write it off. Where is the frickin’ footnote to tell me which feminists are saying what? Damn, that pissed me off. It especially irked me that she did not cite sources from sociology and anthropology that supported her thesis. I’ve come to see that latter criticism as childish, but nonetheless it irked me at the time. If I was expected to be well-read and do a thorough literature review, what gives with Butler, huh?

Anyway, more substantively, Butler is pointing at the critiques of radical feminism put forth by Third World feminists: their complaint is, basically, that in order to make a political argument about the need for women’s liberation in the West, they turn to other cultures to show how all women are oppressed everywhere. In doing so, they do not attend to the voices of Third World Women — not in their diversity — but attend only to that which illustrative of or exemplifies the argument radical feminists (and others) were advancing.

This critique is what undergirded brownfemipower’s criticism of the Red Burka campaign: Western feminists, in their urgent need to call attention to their specific struggle, appropriate Othered women and liken their own oppression to those Others. (A more cynical example of such Orientalizing discourse is what the conservatives did in the lead up to Afghanistan. All of a sudden, they were obsessively concerned with the oppression of women. All of a sudden, the systematic rape of women and boys mattered to them. You go guys!)

Anyway, continuing with Butler:

“The urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism’s own claims to be representative has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorical or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce women’s common subjugated experience.

Although the claim of universal patriarchy no longer enjoys the kind of credibility it once did….

Aside: She was getting ahead of herself, eh?

the notion of a generally shared conception of ‘women,’ the corollary to that framework has been much more difficult to displace. Certainly, there have been plenty of debate: Is there some commonality among ‘women’ that preexists their oppression, or do ‘women’have a bond by virtue of their oppression alone? Is there a specificity to women’s culture that is independent of their subordination by hegemonic, masculinist cultures? Are the specificity and integrity of women’s cultural or linguistic practices always specified against and, hence, within the terms of some more dominant cultural formation? If there is a region of the ’specifically feminine,” one that is differentiated from the masculine as such and recognizable in its difference by an unmarked and, hence, presumed universality of ‘women’? The masculine/feminine binary constitutes not only the exclusive framework in which that specificity can be recognized, but in every other way the ’specificity’ of the feminine’ is once again fully decontextualized and separated off analytically and politically from the constitution of class, race, ethnicity, and other axes of power relations that both constitute ‘identity’ and make the singular notion of identity a misnomer. [4]

Oooo! I spy a superscripted number in the text. Awww. She doesn’t list for me a bunch of texts to which she’s referring. Rather, she only cites Sandra Harding’s ‘The instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory,’ in Sex and Scientific Inquiry.

Anyway, here, Butler is rehearsing the various debates that have plagued feminists at their conferences and in the pages of their books and journals and such places as The Women’s Review of Books.

I think the passage is self-explanatory, but she’s saying that there have been several debates:

1. Is there a stand-alone woman’s culture or nature?

2. Or is it that this women’s culture or nature exists by virtue of the fact that women are oppressed?

3. If it’s the result of oppression, what is it about this oppression that creates this women’s culture and how is it that such a woman’s culture is something all women share?

4. What are the common sources of oppression and how does that commonality get turned into a commonality of experience and, thus, culture? If it does at all?

5. Can we really separate oppression as a woman from racial oppression? Can we really suppose that oppression as a lesbian is one thing, and oppression as woman another?

As to the last, when lesbians experience sexual harassment, they often do so in quite different contexts _as_ lesbians. For instance, the very common tendency for men to say, “Oh hey baby, you know, if you just got a taste of the right meat, you might not be lesbian at all.” That is quite different is it not? And that sexual harassment discussions rarely, if ever, raise this issue unless the woman speaking and writing is herself a lesbian is interesting if not also quite annoying because — well, lesbians feel just a wee bit erased eh?

[…]

Butler moves on to address the focus of the book. First, she speaks to ‘the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire‘:

Although the unproblematic unity of ‘women’ is often invoked to construct a solidarity of identity, a split is introduced in the feminine subject by the distinction between sex and gender. Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.

She is talking about the emergence of what we now take for granted: the claim that there is biological sex (male and female) and then there is cultural gender (men and women).

Sex over here on one side.

On the other side, we have gender.

We don’t talk much about the sex part and focus on the gender part. Here, people tend to take the view that, while biology certainly plays a part in our lives, the issue as feminists is the political or cultural arena. So, we can rather just assume that everybody knows that, sure, women typically menstruate and go through menopause and men don’t. But we also argue that there’s nothing about having a vagina that determines that you will enjoy knitting, housework, serving others, and wiping baby bottoms. Few people actively believe this anymore. Our struggle is really elsewhere, in the more subtle forms of sexism.

So, there are biological differences but they are so negligible compared to what culture does to us. Biologyl underdetermines the differences between men and women. Biological differences are there but they are weak and hardly have much of an effect, not nearly as great an effect as cultural practices and social relations we call ‘gender.’

Culture doesn’t just determine us. In fact, culture is so powerful that it overdetermines us. There is nothing about having a penis an overgrown clitoris, more testosterone, etc. etc that determines that men suck at housework but are good at math. But there is a lot — too much in fact — about the social (society, politics, economics, culture) that tells us every day that if you have a penis an overgrown clitoris, then you should be good at math and suck at housework. There are so many messages coming at you, it is a wonder we are not all alike huh?

Ahhhhhhh. But we are NOT all alike are we? We are very different. And that is why we have to start wondering about the overdetermination thingaroo. Are we really that overdetermined? Because if that’s the case, why are we different? What in fuck is going on? is it that there so many messages that we can pick up on some more than others? Is it that there are so many messages that they are contradictory? What?

And now we are right back at the discussion we had, albeit briefly, about lipstick and feminsim over at Definition and Alas. And there was another great post criticizing what I said but I’m damned if I can find it now and I’m pissed for not bookmarking it. I commented briefly on it. If you’re reading, remind me so i can link to it. You wrastled through my claims and insisted that you do believe that there is a self outside the social….. Anyone else know which post I’m talking about?

While the sex/gender distinction (most famously put forth by Gayle Rubin) was revolutionary at the time and while we might need to make this distinction to talk about the socially constituted characters of the genders men and women, there is something going on here when we say that there’s biology, male and female, over here and upon these unmarked bodies cultural processes unproblematically and quite uniformly inscribe themselves. Thus, she writes:

“the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming… the stability of binary sex (Bitch: assuming that there really is such as thing as merely two sexes and Butler’s not so sure….), it does not follow that the construction of ‘men’ will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that ‘women’ will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.

*ding*ding*ding*

If you hadn’t read Butler or these debates before, now that you’ve got an inkling, think about the debate over the Michigan Women’s Music Festival and transwomen.

This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems. Can we refer to a ‘given’ sex or a ‘given’ gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is ’sex’ anyway? is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such ‘facts’ for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Wat are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ’sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.

It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex…; gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexual nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. … This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?

*ding*ding*ding*

What Butler is saying is that, by creating a binary opposition between male and female, man and woman, we do so by saying that there is gender — which is the realm of the cultural or discursive — and then there is biology.

Gender is not natural, it’s social. It’s cultural. It’s political. It is created by social practices and discourses that are shot through by relations of power. And this gender is overlaid, in this view, onto bodies that exist prior to culture. These bodies are “prediscursive”. They exist outside of culture, outside of society, outside of discourse.

And yet.

And yet, these bodies magically bear the *mark* of gender — they are marked by society, by politics, by culture. Culture inscribes or writes on bodies as if they are blank slates.

But this very progressive way of thinking about it has its problems, says Butler. Are we really sure that bodies exist before culture, society, politics, history? Are we really sure that this way of thinking isn’t just an artefact of — you got it — discourse?

Here, what she’s saying is that our very way of thinking of and talking about gender over here and biology over there *is* discursively creating biology as