Judith Butler is wowing me with feminist philosophy, saying that gender is an attribute not a person's substance.
What's the difference? In class last week my prof said her prof used to hold up a piece of chalk and ask the class what it was. It's chalk, they said of course. And what are its attributes? It's white. It's dusty. It's breakable. Chalk is the substance. White, dusty and breakable are its attributes. (So what's the difference then? Isn't a thing just the sum of its attributes? If you take away white, do you still have chalk? Sure. There's colored chalk. If you take away dusty do you still have chalk? Sure, there's "dustless" chalk... but if you take away ALL the attributes? What's left? What is the essence of chalk? I don't know. I'm only on chapter 2.) So aside from that, what Judith Butler is trying to do is to get us to think about gender in terms of attribute versus substance. Here is a person. Here's their gender-parts. Is that person their gender or is gender an attribute of that person?
She says most of us, even/especially? feminists, think of gender as something inherent in a person's personhood. And that's wrong, see? Gender is an attribute. And to prove it, she uses psychoanalytic theory to help us understand how we begin to think of gender. That's nothing new; Freud did the same thing. And this is where I began to lament the fact that I didn't pay more attention to old fellow in my undergraduate psych class. (So fair warning: if you want to read Butler review your Freudian theory first!)
Freud, she says, got it wrong. Remember how the dude had this thing about the Oedipus and Electra complexes? Yeah, well, it has to do with that stuff. About the infant identifying first with the mother ('cause that's where the food comes from I guess) and then having to either disassociate himself from her if he's got male genitalia or to associate herself as similar to her if she's got female genitalia. Something like that, I think. Anyway, that's how Freud says we end up with particular gender identities and their respective gender roles and all that [apparently]. (How he explains how some people don't end up with gender identities that match their biological genitalia, I don't know). Well, here's what that online study guide says about Freud:
Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a
connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain
elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to
repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual
identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it;
only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex
you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud
would say that's because you REALLY identify with women.
That is, Freud would say that it's your feminine disposition --your identification with the female disposition-- that desires men, not your masculine disposition. For Freud, only opposites attract. (Why do you think he'd make such a silly assumption? ;-) When Freud's talking about the Oedipal and Electra complexes he's saying [I think] that the child not only has to choose between two object choices (male or female for the other) but between the two sexual disposition (masculine or feminine for herself).
Now she
started this part of the book by talking about Freud's thing about melancholia being the ego
taking on the attributes of the lost love. It internalizes the other.
At first I totally didn't get this but Butler says this has something to do with us taking on gender
identity when we connect it up with the incest taboo. Ok? Listen up: so the
boy-child is in love with his mom, right? But the incest-taboo says to him, no, kid, you can't do that. What does he do?
"In the case of a prohibited hetereosexual
union, it is the object [the mother] which is denied but not the
modality of desire [desire for the opposite] so that the desire is
deflected from that object [the mother] onto other objects [other
women]. But in the case of a prohibited homosexual union, it is clear
that both the desire and the object require renunciation and so [get
internalized].
The loss of the mother as a result of the incest-taboo for the
boy-child means he either internalizes her (identifies with her) or he
switches to identifying with his father and thus "consolidates" his
masculinity.
And that the choice, Freud says, will depend on the strength or weakness of the masculine or feminine within that person. Why? He doesn't really say. That's just that's the way that 19th century heterosexual white male saw things.
But that 19th century heterosexual white male also admitted he doesn't know what exactly this "feminine" or "masculine" essence is really.
This is where Butler jumps in. Is the masculine or the feminine is a result of the choice or an effect of it? "To what extent do we read the desire for the father as evidence of a feminine disposition only because we begin, despite the postulation of primary bisexuality, with a heterosexual matrix for desire?" She says that these masculine and feminine dispositions, as Freud calls them, have heterosexual aims, that is, they intentionally normalize heterosexuality and pathologize homosexuality. Why assume from the outset that the desire for the female object is not just as feminine as the desire for the male object?
At this point it reminded me of Adrienne Rich's essay On compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence, which I read as an undergraduate, and that was the first place I encountered the idea that it could actually be MORE natural for women to bond with other women and that it takes some work to get us to bond with men at all... -wait, was that that essay? or am I mixing it up? So I go and re-read that essay and it's there sorta, but I thought I remembered it being more explicit. I'm not sure. My brain is all muddy from thinking about this stuff.
Anyway, that was just part three of the 2nd chapter and I'm still not quite sure how this connects back up with substance or attribute. But she says that these so called "dispositions" are really just "traces of a history of enforces sexual prohibitions". Which means.... ??? [to be continued]
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