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bloodygranuaileI picked up a copy of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble at the LPC recently and said something along the lines of “I’m probably not going to get around to actually reading this book until one of my book clubs makes me” and then, lo and behold, one of my book clubs decided to actually make me.
As has traditionally been the case when I try to read philosophy instead of just watching PhilosophyTube videos, this book left me simultaneously going “I really need to read more philosophy” and “Help I am never reading philosophy again.” For me, the problem with reading modern philosophy is that it’s always in conversation with older philosophy that I’m not familiar with, and the problem with reading older philosophy is that it’s complete nonsense that I can’t stand actually reading and it makes me want to skip right to the bit where more modern, less bonkers writers critique it into something sensible. So basically every philosophy book I read is just a very slow process of trying to work around my lack of background in Lacanian symbolism or whatever and going “Ugggh I should probably actually read Foucault one of these days instead of just reading about Foucault, shouldn’t I?” That said I actually find Butler to be a very sharp, precise writer, and the stuff they write that isn’t all poking logical holes in the arguments of weird French people I’ve never read is always quite clear and readable.
The copy I have is the tenth anniversary edition, which is fun because the introduction gives a quick recap of about ten years’ worth of critiques, expansions, and other intellectual developments on the ideas developed in Gender Trouble, and I know there’s been another 20 years of developments on top of that, so before I’d even gotten to the book itself my “I should read that too” list had already noticeably grown.
While the critiques Butler discusses in their introduction make sense once they’ve introduced them, really the biggest “issue” with this book is the same as affects most serious theoretical works--it uses a lot of very specific and technical language in order to say some very specific and complicated things, much of which you need at least some background in “what are we talking about” to really grasp the specifics of, and many of those words have since been ripped from their context of an actual field of trying to study stuff seriously and started being thrown about in general conversation, where formerly very specific language is made as capacious as possible in order to maximize the frequency with which people who have no familiarity with the subject in question can throw them around to make it look like they’ve done the reading when they haven’t. Hence the current vogue for using “performative” to mean “empty symbolism,” basically the opposite of what it actually means in speech act theory, the thing Butler is drawing from when they use it to talk about how gender is constructed (oh, and don’t get me started on how people think “constructed” means “exists solely as a half-assed idea that you can then drop the minute you realize it’s constructed and has no real impact on anyone or anything unless you are insufficiently enlightened,” like personal belief in God). This is of course not Butler’s fault anymore than the use of “emotional labor” to mean “any labor I have emotions about doing” is Arlie Hochschild’s. It does, however, make me extra cranky about it, now that I have put in the effort to work through all these challenges to the various theories of sexual development put forth by weirdos like Freud and Kristeva in order to get to the conclusion, which reiterates all of Butler’s major points and what they believe their political implications to be fairly clearly.
The bulk of the book is essentially a genealogy of other philosophers’ ideas about what gender is and how it works and how sexual identities develop, and boy is it a wild ride. Some of these folks had some very weird shit to say about how a person winds up gay and frankly even weirder shit about how a person winds up straight. There’s a pretty obvious strain of complementarian thinking through a lot of these theories, which posit heterosexuality as some kind of necessary precondition for anchoring a sense of self as a woman or a man. I’m sure this is true for some people, but as an ace woman I really can only be like, dang, that sounds like a dreadfully stressful way of existing. Imagine actually internalizing that shit; couldn’t be me. There is a lot of stuff about Lacan that I cannot follow at all because I have no background in Lacanian philosophy whatsoever. Other parts were easier to follow; Butler’s dissection of Foucault’s take on the life and writings of Herculine Barbin was interesting partly because Herculine Barbin was a real person with concrete autobiographical details to discuss, but also partly because I’d already read Julia Serano’s take on Foucault’s take on Barbin in Whipping Girl so I wasn’t starting from zero there and was interested in comparing the two critiques.
I’m really glad I read this, even though I kind of wish I’d read it at a time when I had less other stuff going on so I could really give it the full attention and focus it deserves, which I feel like I’m not quite up to right now. I think the discussion next week will be really good; I’ll have to remember to take another look through the chapter and section headings first to refresh my memory about what stuff I want to talk about since it did take me almost three weeks to work my way through it.
As has traditionally been the case when I try to read philosophy instead of just watching PhilosophyTube videos, this book left me simultaneously going “I really need to read more philosophy” and “Help I am never reading philosophy again.” For me, the problem with reading modern philosophy is that it’s always in conversation with older philosophy that I’m not familiar with, and the problem with reading older philosophy is that it’s complete nonsense that I can’t stand actually reading and it makes me want to skip right to the bit where more modern, less bonkers writers critique it into something sensible. So basically every philosophy book I read is just a very slow process of trying to work around my lack of background in Lacanian symbolism or whatever and going “Ugggh I should probably actually read Foucault one of these days instead of just reading about Foucault, shouldn’t I?” That said I actually find Butler to be a very sharp, precise writer, and the stuff they write that isn’t all poking logical holes in the arguments of weird French people I’ve never read is always quite clear and readable.
The copy I have is the tenth anniversary edition, which is fun because the introduction gives a quick recap of about ten years’ worth of critiques, expansions, and other intellectual developments on the ideas developed in Gender Trouble, and I know there’s been another 20 years of developments on top of that, so before I’d even gotten to the book itself my “I should read that too” list had already noticeably grown.
While the critiques Butler discusses in their introduction make sense once they’ve introduced them, really the biggest “issue” with this book is the same as affects most serious theoretical works--it uses a lot of very specific and technical language in order to say some very specific and complicated things, much of which you need at least some background in “what are we talking about” to really grasp the specifics of, and many of those words have since been ripped from their context of an actual field of trying to study stuff seriously and started being thrown about in general conversation, where formerly very specific language is made as capacious as possible in order to maximize the frequency with which people who have no familiarity with the subject in question can throw them around to make it look like they’ve done the reading when they haven’t. Hence the current vogue for using “performative” to mean “empty symbolism,” basically the opposite of what it actually means in speech act theory, the thing Butler is drawing from when they use it to talk about how gender is constructed (oh, and don’t get me started on how people think “constructed” means “exists solely as a half-assed idea that you can then drop the minute you realize it’s constructed and has no real impact on anyone or anything unless you are insufficiently enlightened,” like personal belief in God). This is of course not Butler’s fault anymore than the use of “emotional labor” to mean “any labor I have emotions about doing” is Arlie Hochschild’s. It does, however, make me extra cranky about it, now that I have put in the effort to work through all these challenges to the various theories of sexual development put forth by weirdos like Freud and Kristeva in order to get to the conclusion, which reiterates all of Butler’s major points and what they believe their political implications to be fairly clearly.
The bulk of the book is essentially a genealogy of other philosophers’ ideas about what gender is and how it works and how sexual identities develop, and boy is it a wild ride. Some of these folks had some very weird shit to say about how a person winds up gay and frankly even weirder shit about how a person winds up straight. There’s a pretty obvious strain of complementarian thinking through a lot of these theories, which posit heterosexuality as some kind of necessary precondition for anchoring a sense of self as a woman or a man. I’m sure this is true for some people, but as an ace woman I really can only be like, dang, that sounds like a dreadfully stressful way of existing. Imagine actually internalizing that shit; couldn’t be me. There is a lot of stuff about Lacan that I cannot follow at all because I have no background in Lacanian philosophy whatsoever. Other parts were easier to follow; Butler’s dissection of Foucault’s take on the life and writings of Herculine Barbin was interesting partly because Herculine Barbin was a real person with concrete autobiographical details to discuss, but also partly because I’d already read Julia Serano’s take on Foucault’s take on Barbin in Whipping Girl so I wasn’t starting from zero there and was interested in comparing the two critiques.
I’m really glad I read this, even though I kind of wish I’d read it at a time when I had less other stuff going on so I could really give it the full attention and focus it deserves, which I feel like I’m not quite up to right now. I think the discussion next week will be really good; I’ll have to remember to take another look through the chapter and section headings first to refresh my memory about what stuff I want to talk about since it did take me almost three weeks to work my way through it.