This continuation of the Makers of the Modern World series examines the theories of gender theorist Judith Butler on gender which stands behind much modern confusion on the issue.
Just and Sinner Podcast
Judith Butler's Ideology of Gender Performativy (Makers of the Modern World)
(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Just and Center podcast. I am your host, Dr. Jordan Cooper. Thank you so much for joining me once again on the program today. And I do want to just give you all a quick reminder that Just and Center as an organization is supported by donors. So we would ask that you would consider becoming a contributor to help out the work that we do here. You can go to Just and Center.org, go to our donate page there and help us out. If you haven't yet, make sure you do like, subscribe, comment, it really does help us as a channel to continue to grow, to bring about the materials that we are bringing to you. So we are gonna be continuing the makers of the Modern World series. It's been a little while since we have done one of these as we've been tracing modern thoughts, a lot of philosophers and other thinkers and looking kind of genealogically at how it is that one idea impacted another idea, impacted another idea on various areas. And some of the things that lead us to the point that we are at today with our culture. Now, of course, dealing with the realms of ideas and what's going on in the academy is only a small picture of how things change in the world. There are plenty of other factors as well that go into these kinds of things. But I'm dealing with the thinkers that have shaped the way that people tend to view the world today. And today we're gonna be looking at a thinker who is still alive and that is Judith Butler, one who is highly influential within the fields of feminism, particularly third wave and to fourth wave feminism, which is where we are today. And as well as the development of gender theory and a lot of contemporary gender ideology. So I have written a article on Judith Butler that you can find with the Christian Research Journal. It's online free, you can check that out. So I'll link that below if you wanna read that. And that is going to be a Christian take on Judith Butler and is focused more on critique specifically from a Christian approach contrasting the way that someone like Butler views humanity as well as male and female versus what a historic Christian view of those things would be. So if you wanna check that out, make sure you give it a read. All right, so let's get into the subject as we start discussing Judith Butler. We are, as I said, moving ahead, far ahead from where we had been last time that we left off here. Now, I do know that as these things go into the playlist, the order of them changes as I'm not always just recording these chronologically, but if you watch them in the playlist, they'll be chronological. So at least while I'm recording this, I haven't recorded anything that is really contemporaneous with Judith Butler. We just, last thing we did was looking at postmodern philosophers who are going to be a pretty significant area of influence on Butler. All right, so who is Judith Butler? Born Judith Pamela Butler in Cleveland, Ohio. She was born on February 24th in 1956. She was born in a Jewish household. Her parents were Jewish. One of her parents was a Reform Jew. The other was an Orthodox Jew. She was taught in Jewish schools from at least some within a more Orthodox community. And this is kind of interesting knowing her background because Butler has been in the news more recently for her anti-Zionism. She has been criticized for her, not that she has supported Hamas, but the way that she has framed some things involved in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, particularly with regard to Hamas, framing Hamas as a kind of resistance, which plays into a lot of leftist ideologies, which was often seen as a, seen by many as a kind of justification of the violent deeds of Hamas. So she's a rabid anti-Zionist, which again is interesting just noting her own Jewish heritage and background. She actually had a number of family members who died during the Holocaust. She studied for her bachelor's degree at Yale University. She actually transferred to Yale. She didn't begin there, but that's where she ultimately got her degree. She also would go on then to pursue further education at Yale where she would then complete her doctoral dissertation. Now, in her earlier academic career within her studies, her focus is really on German idealism, which is a bit of a shift from where she really ended up, though there are influences from German idealism throughout her career. She specialized particularly in the thought of Hegel and some of her earliest articles deal much more with Hegel than she does later. Now, if you want to learn about German idealism and Hegel, the specifics about Hegel, I have a separate talk on that as well. She has taught at a number of universities. So some of them, I think there are a couple others aren't even in this list. University of California at Berkeley, where she spent most of her career, she taught some at Columbia University. We've looked at Columbia before. This is where the Institute for Social Research comes in the United States with some of the critical theorists. And Butler is largely indebted to critical theory in the development of her ideas. She taught at the University of Amsterdam and Johns Hopkins as well. And really Butler is the premier academic with the establishment of both third wave feminism and queer theory. So while she's not necessarily considered the founder of queer theory, many of her ideas really do lay the foundation for a lot of the concepts there as well. So when you look at something like the intersectionality, and I will be doing another one of these programs on the founder of intersectionality, Kimberly Crenshaw and her ideas, but intersectionality is largely indebted to Judith Butler in many ways. Though she's not an intersectional theorist per se, herself, she has an impact on various realms of thought within these broader progressive academic disciplines that have developed within, especially the last 20 years, going back further than that to some extent, but I don't know, I guess blossomed in the last 20 years and presence in larger culture as well as presence at universities. So Butler is well known, not just for her writings. She is an outspoken activist. As are many of the leftists thinkers we've been looking at here, and so she is one who is on the public stage very often. You can find news articles about her and things that she said, particularly controversial things that she's said throughout the years if you just do a quick Google search. So the most recent things that she had said was were related to Hamas, as I mentioned, at least as I'm recording this, you may be watching this much later, and things are different, and that's not a point of discussion at the moment, but at least it is at this point in early 2024 as I'm recording this. But throughout the years, she has commented on all sorts of different political situations. She is also known for being quite outspoken against those feminists who do not buy into the kind of gender theory that she promotes. And she takes the, unfortunately, common tactic that many people in the public I do when dealing with anyone who disagrees with their ideas, she tends to refer to people as fascists when she disagrees with them. So unfortunately, that's the kind of level of discourse that we are at in our society today, but that's the case. And you find that with Butler. And I think it's a negative of a lot of these movements within critical theory is that things are framed in such a way that there really is no actually debating the merits or demerits of the ideas or the philosophical foundation of the ideas. There is merely, when you're, you so frame things in such a way that the kind of power dynamics, kind of overshadowed all of the other conversations that you're going to be having, then there isn't really room for challenging anything because the power dynamic becomes primary. So if you are challenging an idea that is supposed to be representing an oppressed group, you have now become an oppressor and you are one who is exerting your own power or authority to marginalize some other group of people. So it leaves off the ability to really have a productive, productive discourse. And I think that is quite unfortunate in the era that we are in. And I think you see that with the interaction of some of these more third wave into fourth wave feminists who are even interacting with very adamant, second wave feminists that you can't have an actual conversation without simply shutting one party off. And for the record, Butler has dealt with hate speech in an academic sense as well. She's done some writing on that particular issue. Well, Butler is influenced by a number of different thinkers. So she is one who, when you're looking at her work, there's no kind of direct genealogy of, she takes primarily her ideas from this figure and then applies them in this particular context. So someone like Karl Marx, it's pretty easy to identify him with Hegel in a very particular sense, not that he completely adopts everything that Hegel says. I mean, his materialism makes him significantly different from Hegel, but there is no kind of looming singular figure in the background for Butler's ideas, but there are a number of thinkers that form many of the concepts that she is going to be dealing with throughout her writings. Okay, so the first of these is Hegel and Hegel is the focus of her early studies. So it's pretty clear that Hegel is going to be one that is significant for her writings as well. She is indebted largely to the study of phenomenology. Phenomenology, if you're not familiar with that, if I haven't yet done a program, specifically in phenomenology before this comes out, phenomenology is a movement within philosophy, which is focusing on phenomena. And this is going to be significant for Butler, so it's worth at least explaining briefly. Now, Immanuel Kant has the distinction that he makes between the numina and the phenomena. So the numina is what he calls the tingonsec or the thing in itself. These are objects or things that we encounter in experience that actually exist that we have objective access to. We have access to what their actual nature is. Phenomena, in contrast to numina, is the way that I encounter something. So the way that it impacts me and my senses and my experience. So if I walk up to a tree and I touch that tree and I feel the bark of that tree, the phenomena is that kind of feeling that I get touching the bark or what I see with my eyes. I'm talking about how it is that I am experiencing this thing that I am identifying as a tree. The numina would be what the tree is in itself. So the question of what exactly is a tree? What is the universal of the tree? And Kant made this distinction to say that we don't really have access to knowledge of the thing in itself. What we do have access to is the phenomena, how it impacts me, how I experience the objects around me. Kant did believe that the numina, the thing in itself, there wasn't objective world. He did believe that that existed and Kant certainly did believe that that objective world stood behind our experiences, but we didn't really have access directly to that objective world. Now, some of the phenomenologists focused on that phenomena to a point that they said, well, why, if we don't have any access to the numinal realm, why even assumed that the numinal realm exists? Maybe this external world of objects as they exist in themselves, apart from our experience, maybe that's not actually real. Maybe there is no actual thing in itself. Maybe there really is just our human experience of things. So Butler is going to draw on some of those ideas of phenomenology and some of the shifts that moves from objects in themselves into then the questions of how do I experience these things. And we'll see this with the way that the gender ideology develops so that there is no essence or thing in itself of what is a male or what is a female. Simone de Beauvoir is going to be a significant influence and Butler's written a lot on Simone de Beauvoir. She's one of the primary figures that she interacts with, especially in her earlier writings. And de Beauvoir is probably the most significant theoretician developing second wave feminism. The second wave feminism as a movement really comes after the publication of her work but largely draws on de Beauvoir's ideas. So we'll be talking a little more about some of her ideas. Michel Foucault, we have discussed him already. If you want to learn more about Michel Foucault, watch that video. He's a significant influence on Butler as well as the development of queer theory as a whole third wave feminism, fourth wave feminism, intersectionality, pretty much all leftist movements post Foucault largely rely on Foucault pretty much more than anybody else. French post-structuralist philosopher. Karl Marx is certainly an influence on Butler. Butler is not an explicit Marxist, though Marx does impact some of her ideas. And interestingly, there was a treatise of Marx that I dealt with in here that I think is very important. That's his thesis on Foyerbach. And those theses are cited by Butler as one of her most significant influences there. So you can watch the video Marx if you want to see that. So it's not just an issue of economic theory. That's not really Butler's primary area of interest. But there are other ideas from Marx that she certainly does draw upon. Jacques Derrida, another French postmodern post-structuralist thinker, and his approach to textuality and the nature of language and how language words relate to other words is going to be quite significant in the way that Butler approaches gender and gender performativity. John Austin, he is a speech act theorist. He develops the notion of speech act theory. We'll be talking a little bit about that as we get into this, is impactful upon this notion of performativity that she draws on. Jacques Lachan, who is a Lachan, is a psychologist who, a psychotherapist who relies on critical theories. Kind of part of that critical theory school in Frankfurt. Lachan is an interesting figure that I actually would like to explore in some more depth, maybe at one of these videos in the future. And then critical theory as a whole is influential upon Butler. She teaches explicitly within the area of critical theory. Though critical theory develops in different directions than it had in the past with someone like Judith Butler. Okay. With all of that being set up for who Butler is, the feminism of her influences. We do now, before we even get into specific ideas, 'cause we have to understand how she's dealing with these other ideas. In the primary move that is made with Butler, we really can't do that without having a conversation about feminism as a whole. What is feminism? What are the waves of feminism? And how does Butler fit into that? Because what you have with Butler is moving from a second wave to a third wave feminism, which is really a radical changing of what feminism actually means. And again, I'd love to do more programs. I wanna do one on Mary Wallstonecraft, and I would like to do also one on Beauvoir as well as Betty Frieden. I don't know what I'll be able to do in the series in the future, but I probably have too many things that I would like to discuss. But okay, first wave feminism, 1840s to the 1950s. So what was, at the time, just called feminism. It's not until the 1960s that people start identifying waves of feminism. So there was just the feminist movement. Feminist movement was largely said to have begun in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention for Women's Rights in Seneca Falls, New York, right near where I live. And Mary Wallstonecraft is the primary thinker behind a lot of these ideas. John Stuart Mill, his vindication of, or Mary Wallstonecraft rights, vindication of the rights of women, 1792. But John Stuart Mill also writes a volume on the rights of women that is going to be highly influential within the development of feminism as well. So Wallstonecraft, though, is usually said to be the primary figure. Well, first wave feminism, as it is now called, was really focusing on particular issues of rights. And so there was concern that men had certain rights in society that women did not have and that there was no reason for that to be the case. So there are things like universal suffrage, voting rights for women, property rights being given to women, there were issues related to parental rights and a number of other really law and policy issues within society. There is, first wave feminism does show up in a number of different countries in different ways, but primarily what I'm thinking of here and Seneca Falls Convention, of course, is the United States context, it's where I live. So, of course, those are gonna be the ideas that I'm thinking about, though, male is not in the United States. But the ideas that are discussed here then have a significant impact on many Western European countries as well. So primarily we're talking about issues of rights, especially voting rights and the role of women in public society and policy, those kinds of issues. Now, second wave feminism comes out of, I think, very different concerns. They are related for the record, but, and I don't wanna say first wave feminism is not ideological because there are ideological underpinnings behind these things as well. But I think for a lot of women, it wasn't primarily ideological, though when you look at someone certainly like Mill, there is a very strong ideological component behind that. So second wave feminism, though, is much more ideological than first wave feminism was. And it arises due to a number of factors. Some of those are just the developments of reproductive technologies. There is a divorce between sex and procreation that was never possible before. And, man, I would love to talk all about this and what that means for human nature and how we understand ourselves, but I don't really have time to do that 'cause it's just quick overview. But, okay, so we'll save that for another time. But the ideology of second wave feminism largely comes from two sources. The first is Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex." And the second is Betty Frieden, and she had read Beauvoir's work, first "The Feminine Mystique." And there were some studies that were done with women at Smith College that leads to the development of second wave feminism, which I find interesting because Smith College is a place that I have spent some time in Western Mass. And there are still a very extremely progressive universe and one of the most liberal in the country. And so, Betty Frieden and de Beauvoir essentially make a distinction within second wave feminism between the sex or the idea of what a female or what a woman actually is, and then the social roles of women. So, it's argued that there are differences between what a woman is biologically, and then the expected social role of women. And so, the argument is we can't just assume that women have to fit into these kinds of stereotypes that are put on us by culture and are not inherent. So, I mean, if you think of the, I don't know, stereotypical, women don't have to shave their armpits, that's something that society just says women have to do to be beautiful, so we're not gonna shave our armpits, you know? You think of that as a lot of the hippie movement in the '60s, there's rebellion against these kind of expected social norms of things like that. So, you have this divorce, yeah, again, between biology, there's still an essence of what a woman is, and it's understood that a woman is different from a man. However, women shouldn't be required to follow the social expectations that were placed on them by the patriarchy. That's the essence of the argument. But what I think really is the most damaging part of a second wave feminism here is, and damaging it in many ways, I think this has just been such a disaster for society as a whole, it's been a disaster for all of us. But, and that is this divorce between sex and reproduction. It is something that we haven't been able to do as a race in the past. And there is a move away from the family as the kind of primary social expectation of what woman is to do with her life. There's more of a shift, women moving into the workplace and all sorts of other things. But, you know, I think the damaging thing about this ultimately is the notion of free sex and free love that divorces sexuality from the marital context, from a commitment kind of context, and makes it a means of pure pleasure, that has no consequences. And that is the result of a lot of different things going on, but second wave feminism pushes those ideas. All right. Then we have third wave feminism, and this is from the 1980s into the 1990s, but really is largely defined by the work of Judith Butler in 1990. And so she writes her book Gender Trouble in 1990, and this work is a move away from a feminism that is strictly gendered. This is the significant shift. So there is a move away from a feminism that you find in second wave feminism that says, "Yes, there are women and there are men, but social roles are subjective, to some degree, but biology is not." Butler seeks to move and other third wave feminists beyond gender. So they want a feminism that is a non-gendered feminism, not bound to biology or not bound to the sexes or gender at all. And this is where you now have these very public debates between figures that are second wave feminists and those who are third wave feminists, and the third wave feminists try to paint the second wave feminists as, well, he's the language of TERFs and all these other things, but betrayers of women and not keeping up with progress and all sorts of other things, but that's where this distinction is coming in. So they're very different movements while there are certainly some of the same roots, and you can see some of the roots of that within the ideologies that we have talked about. Third wave feminism is very much indebted to postmodernity. And the idea that the categories that we create, the categories that we work in, the language that we use, is all essentially socially constructed and does not have anything objective behind it in the way that you see with someone like Derida or Foucault. So reality in some ways can be boiled down to power dynamics, a la Foucault, and then social and linguistic interaction, Derida. Intersectionality is part of this, arises as part of this third wave of feminism. And then we have fourth wave feminism today, which begins in the 2000s, and that's what we see around us, just in popular culture, that there is this focus on proper representation of women. Okay. So at the roots then of this movement into the third wave of feminism with Butler's ideas is an anti-essentialism. And that's really key to everything else that is said. So again, the book here, gender trouble, feminism, and the subversion of identity, 1990. Butler's later work largely is just an expansion of this one. When the book was published, it was criticized extremely widely. Philosophically, many just did not take it seriously. It was rejected in the way that Derida is rejected. I mean, you can go and read many of the reviews from analytic philosophers, say who make the argument that Butler's writing is essentially gobbledygook. I mean, I'm not a sophisticated way of saying it, but that is the argument. And we looked when we did the program on Derida at what some of the criticisms of, say, some analytic philosophers had written about Derida. Butler gets a lot of the same criticism as not really being a serious philosopher. During that out, for whatever that's worth, feel free to read the book yourself and make your own conclusions based on your, well, if you know philosophy, much at all. Okay, so there are a number of things that we could discuss in this book. And I'm not going to get through everything here. I chose to focus on this because this is the primary basis of her other ideas. This is the book that cited more than the others. And the basic ideas here are developed in the other books. I'm doing a one talk here on Butler. I can't get through all of her thought. So we're going to mostly focus on some of the core ideas here, but we're not even going to focus on all of the ideas there because that's not possible to do all of that here in this talk. There's one particular quote there that I think is within this text that she says this in relation to Bufuah's work that she's commenting on in the beginning. It's in the first chapter of the book where she defines the goal of feminism as the divorcing of biology from destiny. And so what she's talking about here, first in Bufuah's sense, is she's saying that just because, you know, say just because you're a woman biologically does not mean that you have to have children and that you have to spend your life taking care of children. So we can take power over our bodies and I can use my body how I want, right? My body, my choice. We see this kind of rhetoric used very consistently. And what Butler says here, though, is we need to go farther than what Bufuah did. Because even though Bufuah is saying that we have control over our bodies, as she's saying, or women have control over their bodies. So women, you know, make whatever choices they want for their body, nobody can control their destiny. Butler's saying, well, we need to go farther and say, instead, that womanhood isn't tied to biology at all. So you can biologically be what is categorized as female, but actually be male and vice versa. So she goes much farther than Bufuah does and she kind of sees the roots of her ideas in Bufuah, essentially saying that there's really no, it's kind of the logical conclusion of where Bufuah started. That's her contention, anyway. And so she critiques these earlier feminists and second wave, first wave feminists, she's largely dealing with second wave feminists, though, 'cause they're the more recent ones at this time. But she criticizes earlier feminists as believing that there is some kind of core essence of womanhood that can be distinguished from social expectations. So Butler says, essentially, no. Like there is no core essence of woman that you can somehow find that can be abstracted from these different expectations socially of attributes of woman. So you can't say, here is the core essence of womanhood and here are the kind of additional attributes that women often have, like they often wear dresses or they often are gentler or these different expectations that society has upon women. Butler does try to tie her ideas in Bufuah, as I said. There is a very famous phrase from Bufuah where she says one is not made but rather becomes a woman. Now, in the context, and I've read through second sex for the record, and it's a long book and not a fun read, in any way, it's just dense prose and it's not a fun book to read. But nonetheless, reading Bufuah's book, when she says one is not made or other becomes a woman, she's really not talking about womanhood in its essence, she's really talking more so about expectations. Like society says, oh, you're a girl therefore, these are the expectations of you as you grow into womanhood, you have to do these things or those kinds of things. And so Butler grabs onto that though and says, hey, well, why is it that this isn't applied in a broader sense? Why is it that biology in any way determines womanhood in some core essence or in social expectation? This is part of Butler's criticism of what she refers to as a metaphysic of substance. And essentially what we're talking about here is a more realist ontology. She takes this critique of a metaphysic of substance from Nietzsche, as well known that he does this. And essentially, essentially, I always do that when I'm talking about realism, I always say essentially, I don't know, it's not on purpose. So there is no universal essence or core of what humanity is. There is no objective universal essence that we all share in that makes us objectively and really and truly and universally human. And so what she criticizes is this idea that there is a universality of what it means to be a human. And then within that universal category of human, there are particular attributes that are given to certain groups of people. So within the broader category of human, some people are given X number of attributes and another group is given Y number of attributes and you take this group with the X attributes and say, well, these are men and the Y attributes and say, okay, these are women. But there is no universal at all. And so there is no distinction then between essential properties and non-essential properties. An essential property would be something that is essential for one to be a woman, right? So that there are, you could say that certain reproductive organs are the essence of what makes one a woman. And for the record, I think that's a bad way to go because I don't think any of us want to say that if a woman has her say ovaries removed for medical reasons, she's no longer a woman. So I don't think you want to go that route. But if you were going to say that, right? That's an essential property. And if you have that property, you're a woman, but there are not essential properties that are not necessarily within all women. That would be things like, I don't know, you have longer hair. Well, that can change and you're still a woman. So there are no essential and non-essential properties. She throws out that distinction altogether because there are no essences at all. So there is no essence of what makes a woman a woman, which is why it becomes very difficult for people to answer that question within modern academia, speaking about the nature of gender. When you ask, well, what is a woman? They don't really have an answer. There's a reason for that is we'll talk about a little more. There's a particular ideology that Butler develops that essentially says that there isn't a definition and that's part of that is shown here. There is a strong post-structuralist influence here. If you have watched the previous programs, there are three that I did on post-structuralism. The first was on structuralism with Socior. And then we looked at post-structuralism with Roland Bart, Jacques Derrida, and then Michel Foucault. But the structuralists, in the post-structuralists, define reality essentially by the structure of social interactions. And that can be through the use of language. It can be through kind of ritual that is agreed upon by different people. It can be through dynamics of power and depression. But the thing that kind of unites the post-structuralists is that reality is essentially seen through these broader societal structures and that we don't really have access to some kind of objective universal reality outside of those structures. So we're talking about the definition of what a woman is. We're speaking about really what is more of a social category than we are an essential category. Because it's just a matter of social categorization rather than something that has actually a core objective essence and existence. So this shift here that we see with Butler in terms of how she understands gender, the nature of male and female, really begins with a rethinking through what the human person is, specifically the human subject. And when I say subject, I'm talking about the ego, the internal eye. So I'm not just talking about the physical body, but the internal thing that makes me me. What we usually think of as the soul or the core part of human consciousness and identity and unity, that means that you are a single person and a single person that exists consistently through time. So that I can say in some real sense, if I live to be 95 years old, that I can say I am the same essential eye that I was when I was five years old. You know, developed a lot and changed a lot, but still the same ego, the same self that exists. And this denial of the existing self or the continuously existing self will usually call traditionally the soul. I've said many times throughout this series that that really is the core of what shifts in the modern world in general. Like this idea that there is no soul has such a profound impact in how we view ourselves and others and the world around us. And we see another example of that here. And I think she is somewhat at least relying on Marx's Thesis on Foyerbach in this regard. So she refers to what she calls a radical rethinking of philosophical models of the human subject. And so she rejects both Cartesian dualism as well as a Christian conception of the soul. And so Cartesian dualism would be this idea, and again, we looked at this in Descartes in two parts, that there is a human body and a soul that make up a person, and that there is some fundamental self that is not identical with our physical makeup. There's something more transcendent and eternal and some core identity that is not just physical. So she rejects that kind of Cartesian dualism. She talks a lot about embodiment and embodying. So the body becomes far more central than something internal 'cause she doesn't really believe that there is that. Foucault does something very similar in his focus on bodies as well as his notion of bio power, the control of the bodies and the resistance to that. Well, essentially Butler denies that there is a continuously existing subject. So she denies that there is some kind of internal self that exists over time and persists over time. She claims this. She says notions of the self are, quote, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. What she's saying there is that, first of all, it's socially created, the idea of the self and socially maintained, but it's a way intelligibility means that it makes sense of things. So if there are simply, this is similar to what David Hume does, for example, when Hume is talking about impressions, we have impressions of things. I feel things, I see things, I hear things. In Hume's sense, there's really no way to make that leap from there are impressions to there is an actual real, coherent, existing individual who is receiving those impressions. Perhaps we just make up this idea of the self in the mind to make sense of things, 'cause it's the only way the world is intelligible is to think of us as an individual self. And that's similar to what Butler is trying to say here. She's not so maybe internally focused as someone like David Hume, but comes up with a similar concept that essentially that it is the only way that the world makes sense is through this concept of the self. So we create the self. There is no actual self. There is an influence of Derrida on this here. So Derrida, when Derrida speaks about deference, which he's referring to two things there, which is difference and deferral, Derrida says that when we are using language as signs, and you have this sign and signified distinction that's there within structuralist and post-structuralist authors, but Derrida speaks about words or language as signs that don't really point to anything beyond themselves. They simply point to other elements of the linguistic system. It's kind of like a game. So if I identify something as a particular object, then what I am really doing is not, there's nothing that is inherent in say the noise, if I make the sound computer, I'm looking at my computer 'cause that's what I'm recording on right now, right? So if I say a computer, there is nothing that inherently connects that word computer, the sounds that make up what you're hearing with the thing itself. And language therefore, for Descartes is arbitrary. It doesn't have this connection to the outside world per se, and it's more of a system of signs that is kind of like a game that other people play as well. They know what signs to say, to relate to my signs, and it's just kind of how things are structured. So if I were to define a computer, and I started defining it, I would say things like, well, a computer is a mechanical device and I can go on about the specifics, but you could take any word at that, right? Mechanical, what does that mean? Okay, you can define that while you're using other words. Essentially, words simply defer meaning by pointing to other words or ideas. They don't actually convey inherent universal objective meaning. That's Desdarida's conception of language. And further, their difference means that they differ. They're often when we use language, we are referring to things by way of their opposite. So I speak about, say, black is that which is not white, right, it's the opposite of them. And male is the opposite of female, that's where this is gonna be important here. So that we have these what are called binary oppositions, male versus female, and these are constructs, social constructs, both of language and just broader signs within cultural interaction and to personal interaction that we create, that don't have any objective validity outside of themselves. It's a language is essentially a self-referential system. Okay, so this is very key for Butler. Now, what Butler's going to argue then that there's a kind of individual identity that really arises out of these communal relations. So your individual identity as self arises from what are these just social interactions or the use of these different signs in this kind of social game that we're all playing in some way. So giving a count of oneself, another way to work for his 2005 talks in detail about this element of her theory here. Okay, if the human subject is linguistically and socially constituted, then so is gender. That makes sense, that's kind of the logical conclusion. If I don't have a universal human essence that we all share in some way that is somehow unchanging, then of course, nothing about us does either. That's just the logical conclusion of all of this. And so here's a quote from Butler. She says, "A biting substance is a fictive construction "through compulsory ordering of attributes "into coherent gender sequences." Yes, that's how she writes all of the time. And that's how this book is. So just so you know what you're getting into if you do decide to read this work. So essentially what she's trying to say here is that the notion of any kind of abiding self or continuously existing person or subject, it's all fictitious. It's basically we take attributes or things that we see and kind of force them into different patterns or sequences that we see in the world to kind of make things up. So that gender is basically made up. It's socially constructed. There was nothing inherent about it at all. So as a society, we look at certain things and just kind of say, well, we're squeezing you into this category, we're squeezing you into this category because it's all about intelligibility. And it just makes the world more intelligible. This is how we create intelligibility. This is how we have a society that can actually function is by just making these kind of standards and norms that we interact in and through. Then we get to the primary idea here, gender performativity. So there is no being in itself or thing in itself, conseding on sick, it's the cons thing in itself. So there is no being in itself. There are only social and linguistic relations. And I keep saying social and linguistic because Butler talks about both of those. She's not so concerned with language as she is with kind of unspoken language really, a signals that you give socially. And there's things certainly are important, as important as the speech that we use in many ways in human interactions. So since there is no being in itself, there are only these social and linguistic relations. That means the gender itself must be a sociolinguistic category. So gender itself, as everything else, is a category that we create a kind of intelligibility as a society through the creation of these categories so that the world is intelligible or it makes sense to us. You're gonna see this word discursive show up a lot and this is very common in postmodern writings. And they're gonna talk about a lot of the discursive roots of gender identities. And this is essentially that history is kind of this story of discourses. To some degree this comes from Foucault's notion of genealogy, but there are these discourses and these discourses are determined largely by power structures and power and how power relates to other, to oppression. And through these discourses we create these categories because it makes sense essentially within our discourses. So you see how this can be used within like a feminist reading of history that would say that well, there is this discursive necessity to speak about women as those who say have a nature that is more submissive as a whole than the male nature because it creates this power structure that you can then perpetuate through this continuing discourse. So discourse is more than a conversation. We're talking in a more broad sense of discourses and conversations and ideas interacting over long periods of time within society. There is essentially here no distinction between doing and being. And this is something that seems to just happen in the 20th century. Heavens in all of these fields. Happens in the field of theology. This is something I've criticized significantly within the field of theology. Actually some similar ideological influences here. But there is no distinction between doing and being. To be something is to do that, okay? Doing in other words is being. Gender distinctions are defined by social roles that are determined by ritual behaviors, appearance and speech. So this is what gender is. And what's so odd about this is that in a lot of kind of transgender communities and discourse that you see today, there is a almost stereotypical view of what makes a man a man and a woman a woman. So that when someone takes on a gender identity or claims a gender identity that is not that which aligns with their biological makeup, they often do it in a very stereotypical way of say someone says, well, I like dresses and dolls and perfume that smells nice. It's like, okay, well then you're a woman, right? Why is it? This is a question a lot of people have and I certainly have this question. It's a good one, which is, but why function with such a rigid view of gender roles? 'Cause isn't the whole point of it that you're moving against what are rigid gender roles and it's almost buying into the, what's often criticized is well, the 1950s have these very strict views of what a man and what a woman is. Well, it's really, there's a reason for this and that's because in Butler's view, those things are what actually determine gender because it is a socially constructed category. So it isn't defined by something actual, internal and essential. So in that view, you're being a male or female is not some inherent deep sense of self or internal thing that's far more rooted than questions of what colors do I like and what do I like to wear. Instead, gender is those things. It is basically those surface level external things because that's all there is in this view. So men are men because they act in manly ways and women are women because they will act in womanly ways. So it is these ritual behaviors, appearance and speech. These are the kind of things that determine one's gender. So gender is that's not a thing, it's not an essence, it's instead a series of performed actions. Essentially, you do a gender, right? It's something that you can do, not just something that you are, though she wouldn't say it's not something that you are, but you have to understand this connection between doing and being. You kind of become that through your doing rather than the other way around. So one who engages in ritualized behavior of what is gendered, what your particular society says is gendered, whether it's a woman or something else, then it is identified with that gender. So if you take on the social role of women with repeated behaviors, then you are a woman. And so this is why there isn't a clear definition of woman. You see this because it's something that is performed. There is no essence of what a woman is. It is just saying I am a woman and acting like a woman, whatever that may be. But even in terms of ritualized actions, we're not talking about a list of you do X, Y and Z things, these are essential things that a woman has to do. Because it's not really an objective category in the first place, it's just socially constructed. And so if all we are are social constructs and everything we do and define ourselves as a social construct, it just kind of is, there's no, you can't point from woman to universal essence of woman. So what you have is, you say you are that, so I guess you are. The clarification here that's important, this is in Butler's bodies that matter in 1993. The behaviors that are ritualized that we're talking about here are often, they're often subconscious. It's not something that you are always thinking about all the time and their continuous actions. And so I don't know what, and I haven't looked into her comments on this recently, all the material I've read is pretty much 90s stuff. You know, I've looked at a couple more recent videos of her, but at least in the past, she was clear that this is something that is over the long term, right? So we're not talking about waking up one day, thinking you're one gender and then the next day saying you're something else. Now that is where the discourse has gone, and that was a criticism she actually received initially was that it would lead to this, and I may it did. But this idea of like gender fluidity where it's like, oh, I feel like a man, no, I feel like a woman, no. I don't actually know what her take on that is. Someone maybe can point me to that. I haven't looked to be honest, so. But at least by the time she writes this book in 1993, she's certainly not making that kind of argument. So what I want you to see here then is this. Contradiction, a contradiction between two different competing approaches to gender that are both at work in the discussions that are going on in our culture today. And a lot of people just kind of grab onto whatever, I guess. And like a lot of the rhetoric is totally just grabs onto things that are completely contradictory. You see this a lot in the media or in a lot of journalism. And journalists are not academics, and that becomes apparent when you read certain things. But what you have is basically these two completely different views of how this works within those who are progress. I'm talking about those who are progressives who believe that gender is something that is not tied to your biological makeup. That's how I'm defining this, 'cause these are two very different things that you find here. So there's Butler's view, and then what I'm calling the existential view, which is what you find in some discourse. So Butler's view is this. There is no inherent essence of gender at all. And that's clear. It's just a social category, doesn't really exist. There's another view that's popular today, and this is what I'm calling the existential view, is that there is some inherent essence to male and female that is known by inner feeling, right? This idea that, well, I know in my inner self who I really am is a man or is a woman. It's not Butler's view, Butler's view contradicts that. Second point, there is no inner self which belongs to any gender at all, 'cause there isn't any inner self, not in any coherent sense. It's something that's created for the sake of creating a kind of intelligibility and coherence of the external world. And the second view though that we often see is that essentially the inner self is that which guides who we are in finding gender identity. So it's again, contradictory here. The third, gendered performance determines gender. So we're talking about acting, addressing like a female or a male. This other view says gender performance grows out of an inherent internal psychological reality that accords with the inner self. So that I start behaving in a certain way because that's who I really am internally in my core essence. Finally, there is no inner self in Butler's view. And on the other side, the outer self must align with the inner self. So this other view says, well, if I am internally really a man, I need to make sure that my body looks like that. If I'm really internally a woman, I need to make sure that I align with that in the way that my body is. So I just want us to be, I think it's important to be aware of these contradictions because often people jump back and forth between these ideas. And people aren't really thinking through consistently what do these kinds of things mean. And so it is really Butler's view, rather than the other view, that is the one that leads to things like the non-binary identities. Because in Butler's view, there's no inherent essence at all. The other view is one that would be used to argue for particular cases of gender dysphoria, which wouldn't necessarily even be opposed to the gender binary. Because it's still saying that they're essential, but that there can be this disconnect between the brain and the body, is essentially what you're saying, or the soul and the body or something like that. But that's really not the view that is being promoted today. The view that's being promoted today is really this view that gender does not exist at all. And that it is just complete social construct and that's it. Okay, then next figure that we want to talk about here and his influence on this is John Austin. And John Austin is an interesting figure in the field of linguistics. He's one that I have interacted with a bit because of his influence on certain Lutheran theologians. But Austin impacts a lot with this pretty short and kind of simple book, a series of lectures, that is called How to Do Things with Words, published in 1962. And he developed this idea of called speech act theory. So the language of performativity that Butler uses really comes from Austin. So, what does John Austin do? Well, he is part of this, what's called the linguistic turn in the 20th century. So philosophy in general moves toward the field of linguistics. A lot of reasons for that. We have focus on metaphysics and classical philosophy. Then we move to in the Enlightenment era, starting with Descartes, the birth of modern philosophy. Focus on knowledge, epistemology. How do we know anything? And then you get the development of linguistics because you've been asking these questions of how do we know that recognizes that the way that we often know things is by speech and the way that we impart information is through speech so that we have these kind of coherent linguistic systems that really shape how we view reality, they really shape how we view the world in this kind of profound way. And the structuralists are part of this linguistic turn, Wittgenstein is part of this linguistic turn, and the postmodernists are a development of this linguistic turn, but Austin is part of that as well. So what Austin does essentially is that he makes a distinction between constitutive speech and this performative speech. So a constitutive is speech that simply states things. It is a delivering of information, imparting information. So, you know, I could tell you, you know, my wife, my wife and I got married in 2010. Okay, that would be a factual statement. It's the year that we got married. That is not, that's delivering information to you. That's the purpose of my speech, but it's not creating some kind of new reality or social situation. That's very different from the words that I actually said to my wife at the altar. I made vows. I said, I do. And the pastor that married us proclaimed that we were husband and wife, and this created a new reality. That's performative speech. So when my wife and I got married, we took vows. We, a reality now existed, did not previously exist, and that is that we are a married couple. And that was not the case before. Consitive speech would just be me telling you about something that happened. And, you know, for the sake of time here, maybe I won't go into the location, a location per location distinction here, but to summarize this, maybe I'll do a separate thing on Austin, but to summarize this, essentially, social realities can be determined by speech. Okay, speech can actually create new realities by itself. And we see that within a wedding ceremony, within people making promises to one another, we see that within a judge in a courtroom, for example, they're all sorts of examples of this, where a reality is actually created through speech. So Butler grabs onto this notion of social reality being created or formed by these performative words, or performative speech. But she's not really talking specifically so much about what is said, what is verbal, but more social ritual. And then this, there are multiple elements of this, which are locution, elocution, and per locution. The next part is resistance. And Butler's an activist, unsurprising. Just like a lot of these thinkers are activists. And when you look at the Marxist thinkers, as well as the postmodern thinkers and leftist thinkers in general, really since Marx, they're pretty much all activist movements. I mean, these are all activist movements. They have their root in action and doing something and overthrowing the oppressive current order in one way or another. Though this takes on different forms and there are different notions of oppression that develop over time. But leftist academia is pretty much always there for the sake of some kind of resistance or overthrow of oppressive regimes in one way or another. And this shows her alliance with the thinkers of critical theories. She certainly grows out of that school of thought. So how does this exactly work itself out within her system? Well, performative bodily acts can be used as instruments of resistance against patriarchal hegemonic culture. I put Foucault in parentheses here because this is what Foucault does. Foucault essentially says that the way that society tends to oppress is by oppressing bodies. This is what he calls bio power. And so we need to be instruments of resistance against the man. And we do that by being transgressive with our bodies. And we can resist power by engaging in deviant sexual actions. Butler does something kind of similar to that in her idea of the performativity of gender. You're resisting the kind of like the cages that society has put you in in terms of what gender is by say doing something like being a man with a large beard, wearing a sundress around, right? You're being rebellious. You're being like the New York Dolls or something. You're rebelling against the gendered norms. And this is an instrument of holy resistance or something. I know that they would call it holy, but you get what I mean. So this also is true that using the gendered pronouns that are chosen pronouns that do not accord with biological reality, that is instrument of resistance. Because it is saying, when you use a pronoun that doesn't accord with someone's body, you are essentially resisting what is the gendered binary and the accepted social norm historically of a distinction between male and female. So to use your words to express things that are that don't accord with biological reality is really to engage in an act of resistance against patriarchal hegemonic white Christian culture, however you're phrasing the enemy as, people like me. All right. If gender is discursively created, and we've talked about the discourses, right, that ideas come out of these discourses, discourses that are power and oppression largely, if gender is discursively created, then resistance to these accepted gendered acts can reorder the discourse. And so you're trying to, by using words and ways that are not consistent with the historic western traditional view of, say, men and women, if you're doing that, then you are trying to reorder the way that this discourse is away from oppressive powers. And so this is where you have this focus on offensive language today, because everything really is about the discourse. And if oppression is through this discourse, what you want to do is change the discourse. That's so you get rid of oppression. So when you think of little things that, you know, this word is offensive or that word is offensive, things that like you, I don't know. Like I saw somebody recently who was complaining that someone was complimenting them and called them a pioneer because they had done something positive and this guy was very offended and went on a rant about how he doesn't want to be called a pioneer because that's colonialism and oppressive and all this other stuff when like, dude, just take a compliment and calm down. But that kind of thing shows that this is the way that you change the world is through changing the discourse. And so that's the tool. That's what they're trying to do. So if you do not believe in these progressive ideas, then you shouldn't be using the language because to engage in the discourse in the rules that they're giving you is really to say you're right and is to resist with them. You're saying you're right and I'm also going to resist the power structures of patriarchal hegemony or whatever it might be. So it's not really consistent. You have to kind of make a choice. Okay. Then to act in ways that fight against traditional gendered acts is an active resistance. Okay, so that's what I was talking about before that this is acting as a non-binary way or a way that is mixing up gendered ideas of this or that. That is an act of resistance. Then we have drag. Course drag goes up here. It's so weird to, and maybe I'll be offensive, and I probably will, that's fine. I'm sure this whole thing is offensive to some people, but it's so weird that when you read academic literature that's just talking about the drag shows as some sophisticated, intellectual phenomena, it's so just weird. But drag is brought into this as this is resistance and it's because it displays by men kind of mocking women in the way that they're acting. They're really portraying the reality that this is all just a performance. The gender doesn't really exist. It's all just a performance, and so it's this great act of resistance. I just don't get it, but okay. Then adoption of behaviors which accord with other non-male or female genders is the creation of new discursive identities, which resist old power structures. So you're trying to change the discourse by creating new genders, and genders are created by discourse and only exist within discourse. And so the way to break up what we call this binary, and remember, binaries are tools of oppression because I have this person versus this person or this group versus this group, you need to break up the binary to resist and stop the oppression. So if you start to break up that male/female binary by adding these distinctive gender identities all in the middle and you've broken up the discourse and you are now stopping that kind of binary gender depression or whatever it might be. So let's then talk briefly as we end here just about the influence of Butler. Why is she influential? Well, she essentially is, if you could credit her with any one thing, the creation of a feminism that is beyond gender. That's the most significant thing that she does. Now, the idea of feminism beyond gender is so bizarre because feminism is a gender term. Is it really feminism at that point? When you get to third wave feminism? I don't know how you really do that, but it is what's done. Because the feminism is no longer really about women, but it's simply about -- it's not even making a claim about women really at all. It's really saying there is no such thing as women, there's no such thing as gender, there's no such thing as even human persons. There's just social structure and social interaction, and that's it. I don't think you can consistently live that way, but second, she's really the most influential thinker within what we call third wave feminism. And I think third wave feminism is really the last feminism that has had productive -- productive in a sense. Not that I am saying their arguments are good, but it has the development of some new ideas. I think it becomes very difficult because feminism and a lot of left is movements again. They exist based on resisting. And so when you don't have something to resist or change happens or so much, like more change happens, you have to find oppression somewhere because that's how the system works. That's what you're looking for. You're learning how to find oppression. And so it becomes so much more particular and so much harder to find oppression as time goes on, but you still have to have oppression. And this is where I think fourth wave feminism just -- it's kind of grasping at things to make arguments. This is why you've moved from things like first wave feminism where -- I mean, I would say that there were things in society that were not fair to women in U.S. law. So, you know, I -- for example, should women not be allowed to own property? Do I think that that's a good thing that women couldn't own property? Or do I think there were things that were with divorce laws? And I'm not one for even holding to no fault divorce in any way is a good idea. But divorce laws certainly did at times favor men over women when the men were say abusive. You know, like, there are things that people, I think, from almost any perspective would recognize as -- these were positive changes that happened and these were real -- there were injustices, right, in certain areas. And speaking as broadly and generally as possible. So -- but you see how you move from that to now you've gotten to a point of your biggest concern is, like, I don't know -- this movie franchise hasn't had enough female directors or something. That's kind of where we've ended up, which, you know, at that point, you're really fighting oppression, or you're just looking for things to feel oppressed about. And I think that's certainly where we've gotten today. But this would be a much broader discussion about first-way feminism. And there are plenty of issues of the first-way feminism as well, to be clear, ideologically, some of the ideas in someone like Mill, I think, are rather damaging. So another discussion, though. Butler is influential in instrumental in the development of queer theory. So she's not, you know, the founder of queer theory, but a lot of queer theory really depends on her ideas in many ways. She's just been a very vocal public voice on various social and political issues, as I mentioned at the beginning of this. And she's probably the one who, more than anyone else, more than any other figure, is probably the cause of the currently adopted idea of gendered pronouns being something that is a personal decision. And this expansion of pronouns beyond male and female toward neo-pronouns and all sorts of other things. I think this really does more than anybody else really come out of the ideas of Judith Butler. So thank you for watching. I try really hard to just, and I know I have negative comments throughout, but I'm trying to limit them as much as possible because the goal really more than anything else is to get you to see where these ideas are coming from. The goal of these talks is not just to give extensive critique, though there is clearly some of that there, as you can tell, as you walk through this series. But hopefully you found this interesting or helpful, at least, in discovering the roots of some of the ideas that have led us to where we are. So make sure you subscribe and like the video, comment in the video as well. And we'll see you in the next one. God bless. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]