Bill Posters said,
quote: IMHO these theory people want us to stop thinking in terms of gender at all, just like when I was five and I didn't know how to think in terms of race. I think these theory people want us to think of people as, well, people. Some may be able to reproduce and some not; some may have beards and some be smooth; these things are just minor physical quirks and shouldn't matter. The theory people are pissed because they do matter.
There's a lot going on here to disagree with.
First, the use of "these theory people" is clearly a dismissive, reductive label that feels--to me--like it was designed to provoke general grumpiness on the part of people who like to think and like to read philosophical works. It stinks of anti-intellectualism, and the later invocation of a masculinist-tinged reference to the "hard sciences"--even with the "arggh"-- contributes to the general sense of "WOI, these soft-headed effeminate types are just too benighted to deal with, but let me simplify and distort what they're saying so you can see, with me, just how befuddled they are."
Well, I'm a theory people and proud of it.
I say: The above explanation of what gender theorists want is completely fucked. Gender theorists have all read Nietzsche and they are not a particularly nostalgic lot; they do not harken us back to some non-existent utopia where "people can be just people"...
Second,
quote:For example here in the UK until recently a 'woman' got to retire and draw a state pension five years earlier than a 'man'. How massively unfair was that?! And just because of a tiny little variation in genital forms!
Jesus. I don't know your previous posts well enough to be sure where you are coming from, Bill, but this, when read in combination of everything else in your post smacks of the kind of right-wing, antifeminist rhetoric that implies: "see, women have really had it better all along . . ." Since I believe you referenced Irigaray in a later post, I'm going to assume that you understand that people culturally identified as "women" have been massively discriminated against in the economic sector, and that jobs, far from following a female life-trajectory are based on a masculinist life pattern. Was the comparison to the red-headed sailor supposed to be ironic?
quote: . . . I just can't apply Butler's theory to my sex life. The trouble with you cultural studies crewe is you're too either/or in terms of what you read and are scared of the contribution 'hard' (arrgh!) science has to make. . . . Sorry crit. theorists, but there's more to it than Butler reckons, at least for some of us at this point in where we are sexually.
I am not "afraid" of hard science, thank you very much, and I agree with an earlier post that Butler is 1992. Nevertheless, this post completely misunderstands the underlying point of Butler's and others' critiques. (And, btw, who exactly is trying to "force" people like Bill to apply Butler's theory to his sex life?)
But even if he does not want to "apply" the theory to his sex life, he should at least be willing to questions the assumptions that shape his conceptions of sexuality, gender, and, yes, "hard science." That means to understand the theoretical claim that "science" is a discourse. Science does not have an unmediated access to "reality": it is in a privileged relation to reality in our current culture, and that privilege masks the degree to which it is both product of and inextricably related to other cultural discourses.
The history of the cultural positions/roles assigned to scientists and, even more important here, medicical professionals is, after all, part of the problem that some folks have with psychiatrists and psychiatric classification systems--as Ria and Rosa's posts suggest. As Ganesh clearly realizes, there can be *no* diagnosis of disease--or "scientific" classification of human beings or human sexuality--that can occupy some rarified realm of "pure science." That's the foundational fantasy of science which has been used to mask the violence that has been associated with scientific power/knowledge.
Such a fantasy implies that psychiatry can, for instance separate itself from its history, and from the cultural implications of such classifications as "healthy" "normal" and "unhealthy" and "deviant."
HOWEVER, critiquing the role of science and/or the medical profession does NOT mean that psychiatric discourses, practices, and knowledge are inherently USELESS. There *is* no "inherent." Psychiatry occurs within a system, and needs to be very aware of its relation to that system, the power that it wields within that system, and the real possibility for abusiveness that accrues to the position because of that power.
</sermon>
but I agree, in the end, that the goal is to encourage more complex thinking about gender, to realize the degree to which all our thinking is predicated on a binary system which is in itself problematic. |
