03-31-2012, 05:37 PM | #21 | |
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04-01-2012, 07:52 AM | #22 | |
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yes she does... on the video in this very thread, at time stamp 1:11 .."we act as if ... it is a fact no body really is a gender from the start .. thats my claim.." through 1:35 and at timestamp 2:30 ... "its my view that gender is culturally formed" --her words-- and my life experience does not agree. I know gender is variable, not a fixed point... gender roles and gender expression and gender pressentation are all cultural... internal gender awareness, is a product of our body via the brain and hormones and biological sex. How we interpret our internal experience is cultural... social culture... is a system of chosen behaviors ... hence culture is choice, or better said cultural expression is a choice.... if she used the term "gender expression" instead of only stating "gender" ... I would agree with most of what she says. But "gender' and 'gender expression' are not the same thing.
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04-01-2012, 08:37 AM | #23 | |
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**although i am cisgendered and i would never presume to speak to what transgender "is," which is what i would be doing if i went toe-to-toe on her assertions which is precisely my problem- Butler does not let her cisgendered perspective stop her from making assumptions about what transgendered individuals are thinking and feeling I particularly don't like the way she takes the David Reimer case and decides for herself what led him to report that he "felt like a boy"
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04-02-2012, 02:17 PM | #24 |
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I have learned about gender issues because I had to understand in order to survive. I make a diliberate effort in include all the various gender expressions when I talk about gender... or I try to remember to place the correct quailfiers on my comments.
The variations are endless.... for anyone to make statements based on their own perpective of their own experience, ...to the effect of being "more correct" than someone else. Well, ... There are so many people who are searching for the words to discribe and explain who they are, and are looking for some point of connection with another human who shared some part of their path in life. To feel less alone and a place to 'fit in' ... to find such a slanted view of the issue, (as Butler presents) that is heartbreaking to me, ... I keep thinking of the trangender kid who is trying to fit into the social construct of what they should be... (being sarcastic here) .. because according to Butler, "gender is culturally formed" ... and can not make themself "fit" into the cultural form, ..because it is not a choice.. it happens and we have to learn to deal with and live with it... hopefully they can find someone who understands that gender issues, are a wide and far reaching spectrum... before its too late for them to find peace and happiness with who they are inside.
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04-02-2012, 03:15 PM | #25 | |
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added: by anti-assimilation I mean that some people feel transgender males have divorced themselves from the feminist community by "assimilating" into the heterosexual world. NOT ME! But "some people" |
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04-05-2012, 10:18 AM | #26 | |
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if you look back up there I did the mea culpa thang...........I got the judith mixed up..............menopausal moment is my excuse....uhhhhhh......reason thanks
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04-06-2012, 07:32 PM | #27 | |||||||||||||
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I actually have her Bodies That Matter beside me here for a current essay I'm writing, so I'll quote a little of what she says on essentialism vs. constructivism to try to better demonstrate her point: Quote:
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That being said, Butler's approach to gender performativity is really half way between essentialism and constructivism, in that she sees gender as an unconscious performance that cannot actually be changed (much like sexuality). What a person likes/is what they like/are, and they cannot change that, only seek to suppress it (as is encouraged in a society that prizes heteronormative relationships over other forms of sexuality and interaction). But a person does grow up seeing certain gender cues that they relate to themselves. And so boys who are taught to be masculine from a young age emulate the masculinity that most speaks to them, while boys who find themselves at odds with masculinity might emulate another gender presentation that most speaks to them. Quote:
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There are obviously problems with Butler's theory as there are with any theory. I particularly have an issue with her failure to let go of the oedipal model. I would think by this point most theorists would have moved into a more post-oedipal understanding of gender. The whole theory is quite bogus, imo, though the formation of gender at an extremely young age does make sense. As a mixture of biology and early experience of the self in relation to other people, though not necessarily the parents. It does make sense that gender would form through the way a baby experiences itself through its relationships with the world around it. Butler doesn't argue that this is a choice a person makes as even a 4 or 5 year old, or even a choice at all, and as such there is really nothing one could do to alter the gender formations the baby makes. |
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04-06-2012, 07:49 PM | #28 | |
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04-07-2012, 04:53 AM | #29 | |||
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we learned in class that to be called an "essentialist" is the worst thing you can hear as a theorist However, as I understand it, the reason we reject essentialism is not because it cannot exist, but because we cannot access it directly that is a good reason not to speculate about it, but not a good reason to reject it, and not a good reason to elevate constructivism Quote:
constructivism is appealing because it puts everything in our control, at least unconsciously, but it is no more provable than essentialism, because we would have to prove it against essentialism, and we cannot access essentialism Quote:
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04-07-2012, 08:32 AM | #30 | ||||||
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Personally, as I stated a few times above, I approach the topic with biology and social relationships as an infant as the source of the production of "gender" and sexual preference. In a similar way that modern psychology has more lately determined personality traits as neither fully biological nor environmental (the old nature vs. nurture debate). Quote:
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Yet Butler is, by no means, saying that Butch and Femme don't exist. Everything "can" exist, however, there is no evidence I've ever read that proves gender essentialism. We have to understand why certain categories have become important to us in society. Why is the identity of queer or masculine or feminine important in relation to bodies that have traditionally been approved as "bearing" these identities, and those that have not? Queer, lesbian, gay, pansexual, bisexual, why are these identities important? There is no "gene" for any such fluid concept, but we use them because of oppressions that have occurred and continue to occur as far as monstracising and making invisible certain bodies participating in certain sexual acts with certain other bodies. Same with gender. Does that make these identities any less important to us? No. They are important, and we need to get this idea out of our heads that just because something is not 100% essentialist, that it makes it any less real, truthful, valid or important. It might be helpful to look at it through the lens of race as well. Race and ethnicity are also social constructions, and yet in an age where racism is still rampant, identities such as POC, black, first nations etc are extremely important. Yet just because race is not something that has always existed socially, does make the POC community, its identities and activism any less real or valid. No, sexual preference and gender are not choices, but neither does that mean they are entirely biologically pre-determined. I bring up this quote again, because I think it's extremely important to emphasize when talking about gender: Quote:
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04-07-2012, 09:44 AM | #31 | |
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like I said in the OP, I didn’t have time to follow up on Butler like I wanted to b/c I am in the middle of writing a paper on “On Truth and Lying in a Non-moral Sense” Our assignment is to trace the influence of Nietzsche’s rejection of the correspondence theory of truth It looks to me like Nietzsche’s rejection of the” thing-in-itself” was based on our inability to perceive it, and not on whether it existed or not Its like if my shih-tzu went out and tried to convince all her friends there is such a color as red She would be basing it on hearsay and the other dogs would laugh at her and she wouldn’t be able to prove it and they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it even if she could But she would not be wrong
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04-07-2012, 09:58 AM | #32 | |||
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i was making the jump to straight guys throughout my life who, in the process of hitting on me and getting shot down, thought it was funny to tell me "i am a lesbian trapped in a man's body" when i am pretty sure they really are not i would not want to gate-keep against pre-operative transexual lesbians, but i DO want to gate-keep against Dan the perv who sexually harassed me when i was 19 but like i said, another thread
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04-07-2012, 11:39 AM | #33 | ||||||
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Again, I would argue that is entirely incorrect and does not at all encompass the argument against essentialism. The argument against essentialism is against the meaning and implications of essentialism (essentialism is ideological, as is everything, it does not represent any kind of defense of "biological fact," but the production of knowledge and its representation as objective "fact"), not an argument against biology. You cannot divorce any aspect of humanity from its interaction with the world around it. Quote:
Looking at it within its context of other of Nietzsche's works helps with perception of what precisely he is saying. If we jump to his premise in Beyond Good and Evil, that "good" and "bad" can only exist within particular social contexts, that they do not exist otherwise. Linking this to his premise expanded upon in Will to Power: Quote:
Essentialism is an understanding of certain facets of supposed "human nature" that claims to be absolute. It holds the same problem as any absolutist ideology. The challenging of any absolutist ideology results in a similar response described by Nietzsche when he discusses the reaction of humans to the idea that their value systems, previously believed to be absolute and inherent, are a matter of perception and social construction. People then defer to the belief that, because something is based upon perception or is partially the product of social interaction, that the argument is that these things are "meaningless" or that they do not exist. This is entirely incorrect. Constructivism, on the other hand, is not limited to an absolutist idea that certain human traits are solely socially constructed. It does not absolutely contest the possibility of a partial biological contribution to human traits, but, instead, seeks to examine the ways in which identity and the essentialist concept of "innate" identities in relation to certain bodies is, itself, an issue of social actualisation through repetition. Essentialism denies any possibility beyond innateness. Constructivism, despite perhaps being poorly named, does not. As such, your shih-tzu analogy does not really directly correlate with the debate. Both the shih-tzu and the other dogs in your example are trying to assert the absolute existence or inexistence of something. The debate, if we relate it back to Butler, is about the essentialist belief that gender is purely a biological construction that is fixed/unchangeable and, thusly, "natural" via its limited definition of "natural." Essentialism does not allow any other option and takes a simplistic view of gender construction. Butler's perspective is not the exact opposite (again, if you look at the quotes I've provided throughout this thread) - meaning that she is not denying the possibility that gender may be influenced somehow by some biological component, but that gender is developed within the child within the first year of birth...not as a result of being voluntarily constructed, not as a construct that can be controlled in any way, not even as pure construction at all, but as a factor that is influenced by the complex intersections of the child's interaction with the world around it. In fact, there she does not even exclude it as "natural," since natural must not be simply defined by biological fixedness. In fact, there is nothing that says certain intersections between biology and early social interaction do not result in what we understand as "gender." Otherwise, one would be able to argue for "masculine" and "feminine" animals, when animals do not bear gender presentations nor sexualities. Humans might place their own understandings of what "masculine" and "feminine" constitute upon the animals, but that has little to do with some innate animal "gender" or "sexuality." Quote:
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04-07-2012, 12:20 PM | #34 | ||
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I felt like it was absolutist. I am willing to take your word for it if it is not, though, as I am not likely to go much deeper into theory after this semester Quote:
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04-11-2012, 12:25 AM | #35 |
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hmmm.... this is all a bit disturbing for me. While I know part of what has been said is true I'm not in agreement with all of it. The fact of the matter is, gender identity is based on estrogen and testosterone. These hormones influence the brain in utero. If one feels like a girl or a boy or both or neither....it will be because of the individual's hormonal balance and because of hormonal levels in utero as well as hormone levels while growing. Why do men have such a difficult time understanding women and vice versa? It's because gender is significant, because of the action of gender-creating hormones. Now there is no normal....but there is gender.
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04-11-2012, 11:34 AM | #36 | |
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Pure stereotype. The stereotype of "men don't understand women" is one that is cultivated into a child since the beginning. It's self-prophesising. In some languages and cultures there is no concept of gender, only sex. The differences in the approaches to trans rights in English and French Canada are a very good example of the above. |
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