luka
Well-known member
the wisdom of version
Judith Butler and the new identity politics?
- Thread starter malelesbian
- Start date
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, the notion that men should "embrace femininity" depends on the femininity good/masculinity bad paradigm, which is precisely what the likes of Tate feed on in the first place.
Isn't this basically the mainstream liberal position on masculinity and precisely why Tate gained so much traction? You still have guys like The Rock and Jason Statham in Hollywood, but a big part of celebrity and media culture now seems to involve playing with gender norms and deconstructing masculinity, e.g. Harry Styles.
So yeah go ahead, but no Marxist worth their salt has any duty to take you seriously.
malelesbian
Femboyism IS feminism.
@thirdform Who wrote that? Why does it fittingly describe Butler? Which of those three groups does she fit into? I think Butler's theory and marxism are compatible. Do you think identity politics and marxism are incompatible? Butler's work integrates Marx through Althusser. She has her own theory of ideology.
Yes, Butler does in some ways simply describe modern life. I think her work is more relevant in the context of current changes in gender norms. I think Hollywood has not gone far enough in fighting the male fantasy that people like Tate endorse. The male fantasy is so tempting to Tate's fans that they forget he's a pimp and nothing more. What about the female fantasy? Can you give examples of works that represent it? I aim to represent femininity from a male perspective. Where do we see the feminine perspective in our culture? In a gender-equal society, an androgynarchy, to coin a term, we would have equal gender representation and thus have access to a third, androgynous, relational perspective and fantasy that contain the other two fantasies in it. I atleast promote an alternative fantasy. How do we get a critique of Tate more radical than promoting an alternative?
Finally, I want to respond to @Mr. Tea , who affirmed a "masculinity bad/femininity good paradigm." First off all I think femininity has been traditionally treated as the morally inferior of the two. As a feminist I promote the normative equality of masculinity and femininity: both genders have the equal value. The problem is that femininity has traditionally been underrepresented or repressed by mainstream society. Masculinity tries to block out femininity, following Luce Irigaray. I prefer to think of the distinction like this: masculinity correlates to instrumental value, while femininity correlates to unconditional, final value. Instrumental value is important for inventions, innovations, and social progress. But life would not be living without atleast one thing valuable as an end in itself. We can't rank either type of value as superior or inferior to the other. We need both to live. Historically we've been deprived of the feminine and following the Frankfurt School, I do think capitalism promotes instrumental value at the expense of final and intrinsic value. Thus capitalism sides with masculinity, just like Irigaray said in her studies on Marx.
Yes, Butler does in some ways simply describe modern life. I think her work is more relevant in the context of current changes in gender norms. I think Hollywood has not gone far enough in fighting the male fantasy that people like Tate endorse. The male fantasy is so tempting to Tate's fans that they forget he's a pimp and nothing more. What about the female fantasy? Can you give examples of works that represent it? I aim to represent femininity from a male perspective. Where do we see the feminine perspective in our culture? In a gender-equal society, an androgynarchy, to coin a term, we would have equal gender representation and thus have access to a third, androgynous, relational perspective and fantasy that contain the other two fantasies in it. I atleast promote an alternative fantasy. How do we get a critique of Tate more radical than promoting an alternative?
Finally, I want to respond to @Mr. Tea , who affirmed a "masculinity bad/femininity good paradigm." First off all I think femininity has been traditionally treated as the morally inferior of the two. As a feminist I promote the normative equality of masculinity and femininity: both genders have the equal value. The problem is that femininity has traditionally been underrepresented or repressed by mainstream society. Masculinity tries to block out femininity, following Luce Irigaray. I prefer to think of the distinction like this: masculinity correlates to instrumental value, while femininity correlates to unconditional, final value. Instrumental value is important for inventions, innovations, and social progress. But life would not be living without atleast one thing valuable as an end in itself. We can't rank either type of value as superior or inferior to the other. We need both to live. Historically we've been deprived of the feminine and following the Frankfurt School, I do think capitalism promotes instrumental value at the expense of final and intrinsic value. Thus capitalism sides with masculinity, just like Irigaray said in her studies on Marx.
It describes you, not Butler. Who is in any case none of my concern. and you fit into the third group. moderniser.
We already have a resident feminist here who holds anti-trans views, we don't need another one. now if you want to destroy all genders and become pure roaming machine, we can perhaps entertain you. otherwise...
malelesbian
Femboyism IS feminism.
Hey, I just want to say I'm a pro-trans feminist. I'm also not a gender abolitionist. My philosophy does depend on a utopian vision of ideally equal male and female androgyns. But surely I am guilty of modernizing Marx, if by modernizing you mean combining him with Foucault, Merleau Ponty and Levinas. I can never think about just one thing anymore, everything I do is a hybrid.
sus
Moderator
Awful parenting strategy, all politics aside.You read that recent article on him and the effect he was having on teenage boys and their parents?
I can believe it, but it also reads like the author may have made some of it up and attributed it to fictional people. This feels like someone taking the piss,
As Tate was blowing up, Ruby made the connection and grew concerned — even more so when Charlie told her that Tate was being interviewed on Tucker Carlson and suggested they watch together. She and her husband said “no.” “I’m like a Brooklyn, far-left person. If Tucker Carlson interviewed Barack Obama, who’s probably my favorite person on earth, I wouldn’t watch that,” she says.
sus
Moderator
These people use words like an EDM girl wearing kandi or a teenage boy scribbling band names on his binder. It's all about building an associative structure of identity; they don't actually know what the words mean, or expect a coherent ideology to emerge. It's "decorative."
sus
Moderator
I think this is an issue with decolonization and anti-patriarchal efforts generally. At some point, if you shit all over someone's demographics/identity/cultural heritage long enough, resistance will form. I want to think that, strategically, you can pre-empt the rubber-band snap-back reaction of Western Christian traditionalism by acknowledging that just maybe European culture contributed some useful things to the world, while also having some real drawbacks/limitations/blind spots (cue the value of non-Western cultures, rituals, epistemologies).
sus
Moderator
For instance, a lot of contemporary queer epistemology looks at categories, labels, words—"digital" culture generally—as this imprisoning, limiting cognitive structure. And that's true! Structure really is limited and reductive and limiting! But it's also exactly what enables all communication and cooperation between people, it's what lets us talk to begin with. It is both the source of all our power and the origin of all our limits, because all power is by definition limited, and to be one way is to preclude being another. That's what it means to be an adult! You pick a life path and slowly that sense of infinite possibility fades. But the alternative—refusing to pick—is a thousand times messier than any choice.
sus
Moderator
I think they can, I think it would just take a paradigm shift. I agree that it was a negation to a structure that has disappeared, but all political tribes were at one point something other than they are today. Change is the nature of reality. Environments drift and causes reinvent themselves.
And in fact I think recent left-leaning STS/anthropological/evo-biological emphasis on interconnection, interdependence, symbiosis is a good starter kit for where the left could go. Thinking in terms of global networks, ripples of causality, "no man an island" hence we're all responsible for this shit; liberal individualism's gotta go and laissez-faire capitalism with it. (Etc etc)
The real split within the left would start to be over issues where promoting one or more of the above values clashes with/comes at the cost of other said values. E.g.
- globalization of governance, "new world orders," which stamps out local heterogeneity but improves our ability to coordinate on a planetary scale
- Singerian "utilitarian" reductions of value-holisms in service of marginalized demographics (e.g. non-human species)
And in fact I think recent left-leaning STS/anthropological/evo-biological emphasis on interconnection, interdependence, symbiosis is a good starter kit for where the left could go. Thinking in terms of global networks, ripples of causality, "no man an island" hence we're all responsible for this shit; liberal individualism's gotta go and laissez-faire capitalism with it. (Etc etc)
The real split within the left would start to be over issues where promoting one or more of the above values clashes with/comes at the cost of other said values. E.g.
- globalization of governance, "new world orders," which stamps out local heterogeneity but improves our ability to coordinate on a planetary scale
- Singerian "utilitarian" reductions of value-holisms in service of marginalized demographics (e.g. non-human species)
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm naturally very suspicious of discourse that talks about "masculinity" and "femininity" as if they were two objectively well-defined things with stable, universally recognised definitions, in much the same way that a physicist might talk about "the atomic nucleus." And purported associations between masculinity and one particular thing, and between femininity and some other, opposed thing, may work just fine in the context of Taoism, but I personally have very little time for that way of thinking. Jordan Peterson, for example, does this by associating masculinity with order and femininity with chaos. He's coming at it from a decidedly anti-feminist perspective, but I don't find any more value in feminist positions that rely on the same way of thinking.
To take the last thing you mentioned as an example, I don't think there's anything inherently masculine about capitalism, beyond the fact that capitalism has historically been dominated by men, but then everything has historically been dominated by men - such as music, for example, and nobody says that music is inherently masculine. Perhaps this is meant to be consequent on capitalism being based on competition, but I'd counter that anyone who thinks women can't be competitive obviously hasn't met many women. And the other half of this dyad must be that socialism is inherently feminine, which I'd say is self-evidently untrue.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
One thing I can't figure out is the huge proliferation of flags to represent every conceivable sexual orientation and gender identity, which seems to epitomize exclusivity and labelling, when the original rainbow flag was chosen for the exact opposite reason: to represent inclusion and diversity.
Exactly, political tribes. No ones denying that the left can constantly reinvent itself in the arena of politics. But does this mean anything at the level of civil society? Mostly, not at all.
At the end of the day, the left can only act within the bounds of politics as necessitated by global capital, because it has no programmatic content at the level of society to achieve. It is trapped by political reason precisely because it is political, and not social.
I'd have thought the best way to increase the representation of femininity and the female fantasy would be to increase the representation of women and let them speak for themselves.