Judith Butler Notes on Feminist Theory

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General Idea

Butler explains gender beyond heterosexual patriarchal ideals

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Speech acts and illocutionary gestures

. We may sum up Austin's theory of speech acts with the following example. In uttering the locution "Is there any salt?" at the dinner table, one may thereby perform the illocutionary act of requesting salt, as well as the distinct locutionary act of uttering the interrogatory sentence about the presence of salt, and the further perlocutionary act of causing somebody to hand one the salt.

Action theory

Basic action theory typically describes action as behavior caused by an agent in a particular situation. The agent's desires and beliefs (e.g. my wanting a glass of water and believing the clear liquid in the cup in front of me is water) lead to bodily behavior (e.g. reaching over for the glass).

Phenomenological theory of acts

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view.

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something.

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Idea of society attributing an idea on a person as an object rather than the person attributing ideas on themselves as a subject

Gender is not stable. It is in flux and changes over time according to social norms and acts.

Gender is performed through movement gesture and enactments. And through repetition.

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Gender is an idea that society has come to place on people regardless of their biological development. And people who have the idea placed upon them tend to act in ways that will fit with this social norm of behavior that the are expected to have.

But if gender is a series of repeated acts through time then we can escape these confines and you can redefine gender identity. Acting in a new repeatable way, or acting in different ways regardless of keeping it definable.

Argues against the phenomenological model of Gender being fixed and the idea that the acts or behavior a person exhibits are generated in solo accordance with their gender.

Reiterates that Gender is a performance and does not need to conform to biology consistently.

I. SEX/GENDER Feminist and Phenomenological Views

History of feminists criticizing social structures of sex and sexuality imposed on women.

Desire to separate Sex and Gender. And thereby dispelling the myth of females always needing to act "feminine" and by extension males needing to act "masculine".

Idea of the body as “an historical idea”

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The body is constantly embodying social and historical ideas of gender (which are in flux because of changing ideas through decades and across cultures).

And we can describe gender more truly through expanding our idea of phenomenology by including acts of performance and ascribing that content to gender identity separate from sex and biological development.

Not all embodied women/men have the same lived experience. Being a woman/man is not the same to every woman/man.

…...................Semantics...

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More on distinction between sex – biology and gender- cultural interpretation

sex = female gender = feminine

To have to fit yourself into an idea that may not actually represent you, limiting your potential.

Failing to do gender correctly leads to punishment / not procreating / not copying your genes?

But gender is really made up of those repeatable actions, and are unnatural and false since there is no singular way to express a gender.

Feminist argue that the personal is political... meaning a woman's subjective experience of being a woman is not only effected by society's idea of what being a woman/feminine is, but is, in return and by her actions and presentation she is helping to perpetuate that very social structure.

Is to be a woman to be oppressed?

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II Binary Genders and the Heterosexual Contract

The heterosexual system of marriage is normalized for the convenience of reproduction and continuation of the human race. Not necessarily because same-sex attraction is dominant in all species.

It is further perpetuating this system of hetero-normality to create a binary gendered system. Male/Female.

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Gender is an act.... quote

Repetition

Public display

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theatrical performance vs public display … playing with gender

Performance, just a play, not reality. Real life, danger, questioning.

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 QUOTE

"Genders, then, can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. And yet, one is compelled to live in a world in which genders constitute univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered discrete and intractable. In effect, gender is made to comply with a model of truth and falsity which not only contradicts its own performative fluidity, but serves a social policy of gender regulation and control. Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. That this reassurance is so easily displaced by anxiety, that culture so readily punishes or marginalizes those who fail to perform the illusion of gender essentialism should be sign enough that on some level there is social knowledge that the truth or falsity of gender is only socially compelled and in no sense ontologically necessitated."

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III Feminist Theory....

Basically she says that there is no singular point of view of “woman” but that they are for sure socially and historically constructed

Foucault quote on 530