Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: an analysis (part 2)

If you’re new here, I am making some sort of attempt at analyzing and critiquing Judith Butler’s essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (that’s a PDF file). Last time around, we went over the introductory section of her essay. Well, it turns out I was just cutting my teeth, because this next part’s a doozy. I don’t think I want to go through it with a fine-toothed comb because I think I’d need three posts for that one section just to break up the monotony. But I’ll do my best to summarize. I make no promises.

The first section of the body of Butler’s essay is entitled, “I. Sex/Gender: Feminist and Phenomenological Views” and, if you’re following along in the PDF, that starts on page three. Now, I don’t know how Butler defines feminism and whether that’s important here, or if she just assumes some writers and thinkers are feminists or takes them at their word. As for the other, if you recall from last time, phenomenology is the study of people’s lived experiences. You’ve probably heard the term lived experience uttered by “woke” activists. Same concept. This is not about reality but about how people live through and interpret that reality. So what we are doing here, according to Butler, is examining how feminists and People Who Study Lived Experience view sex and gender.

It seems, from the essay text, that Butler’s views are heavily influenced by the aforementioned (in my previous post) author Simone de Beauvoir and also a phenomenologist named Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Now, I’ve never heard of the latter until now and, similarly, I think I’ve skimmed a little bit of Beauvoir’s work, but other than that I have no experience with her. But I can tell you something both writers have in common right off the bat: they are/were French people, and therefore wrote in French. Most anglophone (English-speaking) people who discuss these works are probably not fluent French speakers, hence they would interact with these writers’ works by way of published English translations. As far as I’m aware, there is no central certifying body for French-to-English translation, therefore some translations will be better than others. You also have to consider the changing uses of language even over a span of decades — centuries will see even more change, so a word or phrase or sentence we take to have one meaning now might have had a wholly different meaning fifty years or more ago. With all this in mind, are we sure Judith Butler is interpreting Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty correctly? Would we be willing to stake our lives or the direction of society for the next several decades on that assumption?

I’m not.

The rest of this seems mainly to be a long slogging jumble of hot garbage, mainly because Butler uses ten-dollar language when fifty cents would do. There are times she pops up with something that actually makes sense to me and that I can agree with. For instance,

It is… clearly unfortunate grammar to claim that there is a “we” or an “I” that does its body, as if a disembodied agency preceded and directed an embodied exterior.

I’m agnostic and don’t believe in souls, so I actually agree with this and it’s really odd to see her say it, considering how many of her followers subscribe to the “gendered soul that does not match the body” concept. But I don’t think Butler really gets into gendered souls. Rather, she seems to argue that sex class, which in this essay (and probably everywhere) she refers to as “gender,” is something you just act out. I admit to confusion about how she now seems to believe the body is real when in other places you see her sort of arguing that it’s not. But maybe she’s confused too. Probably is.

Especially with the next sentence:

More appropriate, I suggest, would be a vocabulary that resists the substance metaphysics of subject-verb formations and relies instead on an ontology of present participles.

…wat?

Okay, I know what ontology is (the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being) and I know what present participles are (a present-tense verb form usually ending in -ing). What I don’t grok is how Butler proposes to put them together. She’s talking about using accurate language to describe existing as an embodied self, but I can’t wrap my brain around how she proposes to do that. It would have been helpful had she listed some examples of what she meant. But I don’t think clear explanations are her kink, exactly.

Probably not important; that jumped out for me in the midst of a bunch of word salad.

She seems to agree with Beauvoir’s alleged (see above) distinction between sex as a physical fact and gender as a cultural interpretation of that fact but, as we saw in the first paragraph of this section, Butler confuses gender with sex class and believes that woman is a gender. So she’s making the same mistake the gender-identity activists do when they say that sex and gender are not the same thing. Obviously sex and gender are not the same thing but because they believe woman is a gender, they’re saying that being a woman is entirely separate from being female. I grant that these are not exactly the same thing; girls are female, after all, and girls are not women. But you can’t have womanhood without femaleness, because female is a sex and woman is a class of people who all have the female sex in common. In order to fit into the category “woman,” femaleness is one trait you can’t discard. It’s a prerequisite. Like learning how to count before you learn algebra. Womanhood has no meaning without the female sex being involved. Leave femaleness out, and womanhood is just a costume.

Which seems to be what Butler thinks. This whole section seems to be her droning on about how womanhood is something that the physical body acts out and, in turn, has imposed upon it by the rest of society and, in fact, if a body doesn’t woman correctly, it is often punished by society for its substandard performance. And I will say AGAIN, as I did in the previous post, that if she really were talking about gender here, not only would she be correct, she’d be stating an obvious thing that we’ve all been saying since time out of mind. (I wonder if that’s the real reason she sticks with ten-dollar words. It wouldn’t do to be seen as unoriginal if one wishes to build an academic career, amirite?) The problem is that she doesn’t mean gender, she means sex class. She seems completely incapable of separating sexist stereotype from the very real sexed body that that stereotype describes and limits. It’s as if she’s listening to patriarchal men saying something like “real women get tit implants!” and then, instead of recognizing that as gender and hence a sexist and unrealistic standard, she’s decided that getting tit implants really is a “woman” thing and that getting them is how you become a woman.

I am reminded of those idiots on Twitter who called women getting tit implants “gender-affirming surgery.” Yes. They really did. Same mindset.

And actually, I blame social conservatives for this too because how long have they been mistaking their own gender standards for actual womanhood? God, I don’t know… it’s been since way before MY time, and I’ve been here half a century. The great breakthrough that feminism brought us was the radical notion, not only that women are people, but that woman is not a social role. Society’s refusal to accept this fact is one of the great failures of both social conservatism and patriarchy, and has led us directly into this mess.

Remember that next time you see some guy on social media blaming women for said mess because we were too nice to trans-identified people.

Here’s another snippet I’ll tackle.

Considering that "the" body is invariably transformed into his body or her body, the body is only known through its gendered appearance. It would seem imperative to consider the way in which this gendering of the body occurs. My suggestion is that the body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time. From a feminist point of view, one might try to reconceive the gendered body as the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural, or linguistic.

Confusion about sex class vs. gender again.

Bodies are “his body” or “her body” from conception onward. The only time we think of it as “the body” is when we don’t know which sex that body is. (Or when we want to distance ourselves from the fact that someone we know has passed on. I’ve seen people doing this too: making the body into a thing that is not the loved one we have just lost. I suppose it’s a coping strategy.)

This is not a gendered body. It is described via gendered language (language, being a set of sounds and symbols, does not have a sex), but the body itself is sexed. There is no “gender” to “become.” Girl and boy and woman and man are sex classes, not genders. You are born in the girl or boy sex class and you grow up and move into the woman or man sex class. Whichever one biology puts you in, you stay in.

So, no. I do not believe I will be “reconceiving” the [sexed] body as the end result of a bunch of acts that collect over time. It is definitely a predetermined structure, essence, and NATURAL fact. Thanks anyway.

Here’s another one.

Indeed, one ought to consider the futility of a political program which seeks radically to transform the social situation of women without first determining whether the category of woman is socially constructed in such a way that to be a woman is, by definition, to be in an oppressed situation.

I agree. Happily, we have already made this determination and we have found that a woman is an adult human being who was born with ovaries, no more, no less, and that she could stop being oppressed tomorrow and, whoopsie-do, she’ll still be a woman.

Glad I could help.

Oh, here’s a fun one.

In a culture in which the false universal of “man” has for the most part been presupposed as coextensive with humanness itself…

Language is not Butler’s strong suit. Given that in today’s English, man means adult human being who was born with testes, or “adult male human” for short, yes, it is a false universal to speak of “man” and mean “humanity.” But, fun fact? Man used to mean human in older versions of English. If you wanted to specify male human, you said werman. If you wanted to specify female human, you said wifman. I don’t know how the usage changed or why, and certainly it is being used in sexist ways now, but there’s a reason that the word “men” continued being employed as a universal. Happily, we have other options now, like humanity or humankind. Normally I use those.

Oh, wait, uh-oh. Butler had a point. You’re not going to like it.

…feminist theory has sought with success to bring female specificity into visibility and to rewrite the history of culture in terms which acknowledge the presence, the influence, and the oppression of women. Yet, in this effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category feminists run the risk of rendering visible a category which may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women.

Butler is talking about how, because the use of man as a universal was taken literally by modern English standards to mean the adult male people, all we ever talked about was men’s existence and men’s experience, and the work of the feminist movement has included calling attention to women’s existence and experiences and, yes, our oppression. But Butler’s got problems with this, because we might be doing it wrong. I’m curious. Exactly how does Butler believe feminists would make women visible and, at the same time, make the wrong sort of women visible? Women are women. Either you’re making them visible or you’re not. There’s only one kind of woman in the world: an adult human being who was born with ovaries. This covers every other sort of variation a woman could possibly have.

Also, Butler’s hilarious. So concerned about representing the “concrete lives of women” when she’s just got done in this whole academic spewfest claiming that woman isn’t concrete (possessing a real, material, physical existence) but rather just a collection of acts and cultural mores and historical attitudes. WHICH IS IT, BUTLER

Indeed, if gender is the cultural significance that the sexed body assumes, and if that significance is codetermined through various acts and their cultural per- ception, then it would appear that from within the terms of culture it is not possible to know sex as distinct from gender.

YES, BUTLER, IF YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT GENDER AND NOT ABOUT SEX CLASS. Woman is a sex class, not a gender! And you’re just as guilty of confusing sex and sex class with gender as the larger culture is!

Argh.

“Woman” is not “the cultural significance that the sexed body assumes.” Woman is an adult human being who was born with ovaries. “The cultural significance that the sexed body assumes” is the set of sexist stereotypes the culture imposes on us in order to regulate our behavior and our place in society which is, of course, a place inferior to that of men.

This is Feminism 101 stuff. Butler should know better.

Should.

And finally…

…the more mundane reproduction of gendered identity takes place through the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the deeply entrenched or sedimented expectations of gendered existence. Consider that there is a sedimentation of gender norms that produces the peculiar phenomenon of a natural sex, or a real woman, or any number of prevalent and compelling social fictions, and that this is a sedimentation that over time has produced a set of corporeal styles which, in reified form, appear as the natural configuration of bodies into sexes which exist in a binary relation to one another.

I wonder if Butler believes that the sex of a horse is a “peculiar phenomenon.” But here, again, she is arguing that women are not real. Even worse, she’s arguing that it is cultural norms which produced the sexing of bodies. Why. Where the hell does she come up with this crap.

Okay. End of section. You can try reading it yourself, but you’ll probably cuss me later.

Next section soon. Probably tomorrow. I make no promises, but I peeked ahead and at least it’s shorter.