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unpopular opinion but i think, or at least hope, that the popularity of Butler in trans communities will go the way of the “born in the wrong body” narrative in a few years.
i think Judith Butler’s current popularity is attributable to the same things that caused many trans people to actively perpetuate the notion that we were “born in the wrong body” – we’re desperate for a language that describes our experiences and this seems to be the only one available.
but much like the conception of being “born in the wrong body” i think there are far too many truly fundamental problems with Butler’s approach that render it of very little use to us in the long run, and i think we’ll eventually realize that. What i would hope is that when we do, we don’t just latch onto someone else’s framework just because it’s the nearest thing again.
Since a few people asked, i’ll elaborate on this a bit.
Butler has certainly popularized the concept of gender as a performance, a concept which i feel is indeed very useful, but she was hardly the first to advance this concept and moreover there are details within her theses which i think cause grave problems.
First of all, although Butler correctly argues that sex is a socially produced category, and is a category that could not exist without gender (the standards of gender performance clearly influence the criteria we use when we sex bodies), she concludes from this argument that sex is “always-already gender,” that sex is simply one of gender’s aspects.
This is troublesome because, in the first place, even on a sheer logical level it does not immediately follow that if sex is socially produced and interrelated with gender, that it can be simply collapsed into gender. On a more practical level, in my view, collapsing sex into gender leaves us unable to explain where the boundaries of categories of gender performance (masculinity and femininity) lie, and why the boundaries lie where they do. Moreover, collapsing sex into gender leaves us incapable of explaining why it is possible for men to adopt feminine practices without becoming women, and for women to adopt masculine practices without becoming men, while at the same time, there is indeed a “tipping” point” where one’s sex and gender categorizations can clearly change. In other words, if we view sex as “really gender all along,” we cannot determine why certain changes in gender practices do beget a qualitative transformation of one’s status within patriarchy, while others do not. For these reason i think Butler’s work cannot explain trans people’s experiences. I also think that, since Butler’s framework has difficulty explaining why the boundaries of masculinity and femininity lie where they do, and why these categories exist at all, this poses a broader problem that it provides at best an extremely vague and shallow basis for the formation of political strategy, i.e. how do we get rid of patriarchy?
Another major problem i have with Butler’s work is that it is part of a tradition which seeks to justify a refusal to address women’s issues on their own terms, and in which feminist questions can only be addressed if they are subordinated to or reduced to other questions. Hence, Butler’s theory and similar post-structuralist approaches enable a great deal of ostensibly “left” feminist-bashing, which i feel is precisely why it is popular in academia.
What i mean is that Butler and others have repeatedly argued that because women are divided by class, race, nation, etc., that there is “no coherent women’s experience” and that to make the category of “women” the foundational category to one’s analysis is inherently homogenizing. Moreover, Butler has stated that because gender interrelates so thoroughly with other categories, the “gender part” cannot be analytically separated.
The first thing that strikes me about these sorts of arguments is the blatant inconsistency with which this logic is applied. To even say that women are divided by class, race, nation, etc. is to presuppose that class, race, nation, etc. are themselves coherent categories of analysis, a presupposition that few if any of the theorists in Butler’s school of thought call into question. The fact that women are divided by class is supposed to jeopardize the category of “women” itself, but the fact that classes are divided by gender apparently does not mean that we cannot use class as a category of analysis. If we were to apply the logic of Butler and others consistently, we should say that any attempt to analyze populations on the basis of collective categories such as gender, race, class, nation, etc. is inherently homogenizing and is thus compromised, because each is divided by the others and hence there is no coherent women’s experience, nor any coherent experience as a person of color, nor any coherent experience as an oppressed nationality, etc. If this logic were applied consistently we would be left with individuals as the only legitimate categories of analysis, one of the ways in which post-structuralist approaches are essentially the mirror-image of empiricism.
But of course, this is not the conclusion that Butler and others in that problematique reach. So in order to make these argument that “there is no coherent women’s experience” and therefore that feminism centered on the category of “women” is untenable, but not to apply this logic to all revolutionary politics, is to specifically make every category but women exempt from this logic, to give every category but women a higher logical priority. It is unproblematic to discuss conditions in the global South with some specificity, for example, but it is apparently indefensible to treat the so-called “woman question” with the same care. To even talk about women at all, we have to subordinate “women” to some other category of analysis—e.g. we can talk about working class women or Third World women, but we cannot talk about what is common between women as women, despite the fact that we can clearly talk about what is common between workers and between people in the Third World. To me this kind of side-lining of women’s issues is the same old shit that anti-feminists have always done.
I have seen trans women attempt to apply Butler’s sort of approach in arguments for why trans women should be included in women’s spaces. The argument is that trans women’s experiences should not be dismissed as “not women’s experiences” because, apparently, there is no coherent women’s experience anyway and who are you to say?
The problem is that “trans women should be included in women’s spaces because who can say what a woman is” is just an utterly horrendous and self-defeating argument. It is absurd to argue for inclusion in a space whose boundaries cannot be determined, and to argue that the fact that the boundaries cannot be determined is why we should be included. On that basis we cannot explain why trans women and not men should be included in women’s spaces and so forth, or why such spaces should exist at all.
On a related point, some of Butler’s followers, noting the practical difficulties in refusing to accept that there is a coherent group identifiable as “women,” have argued that it may be politically useful to adopt a sort of “strategic essentialism,” to employ the (presumed to be untenable) category of “women” when it is politically advantageous to do so.
Unfortunately, as Gunnarsson has pointed out, if it is impossible to analytically distinguish the category of “women” as Butler and others argue, then it is also impossible to determine when is a politically useful time to employ “strategic essentialism.”
Perhaps most fundamentally, it must also be stressed that to acknowledge that there is such a thing as “women’s experience” that can be distinguished from other experiences in no way implies that there are no meaningful differences between women. Further, the fact that some feminists have used the category “women” in homogenizing ways does not mean that the use of the category “women” is inherently homogenizing.
Gunnarsson writes,
[T]he awareness that women are different far from necessitates a rejection of ‘women’ as an analytical category. Sayer reminds us that the search for commonalities actually presupposes diversity, which in turn becomes meaningful only from the perspective of some kind of sameness. He points out that ’[t]he nature of the difference between various groups of people is more interesting than the difference between people and toothpaste partly because the former have some things in common’…
Finally, Butler has played a large role in the popularization of the view of sex and gender as primarily linguistic constructions. In Butler’s own words, gender is a “regulatory fiction.” I find this and the broader trend of assuming that what is “socially constructed” is “not real” to be immensely frustrating, not least of all because it just whole-heartedly accepts the empiricist problematique that what is real is only what is static and “natural.” Moreover, if overthrowing patriarchy were as simple a matter as ridding ourselves of certain “fictions” then we would be free by now. The reality is that sex and gender are all too real and are the product of political, economic, cultural, and ideological practices which exist materially and must be combated through political struggle, not merely at the linguistic level.
I could go on but i’m getting tired. I hope this gives people an idea of why i hope Butler’s work fades out of vogue at some point.
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