[atreestump]

Ok, so I have been on a rampage of reading over the past few days about this author and luckily, she does discuss all of the subjects I wanted to hear her speak of, including the case of David Reimer who was mutilated at birth by a doctor and the doctor told his parents to act as if he was a she, but it didn’t work and so this seriously challenges Judith Butlers view of gender performance, in this particular case anyway.

Butler has faced serious criticism from transgender theorists to which she responded:
 

I have never agreed with Sheila Jeffreys or Janice Raymond, and for many years have been on quite the contrasting side of feminist debates. She appoints herself to the position of judge, and she offers a kind of feminist policing of trans lives and trans choices. I oppose this kind of prescriptivism, which seems to me to aspire to a kind of feminist tyranny. If she makes use of social construction as a theory to support her view, she very badly misunderstands its terms. In her view, a trans person is “constructed” by a medical discourse and therefore is the victim of a social construct. But this idea of social constructs does not acknowledge that all of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions – or norms – that help to form us. We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones. For instance, gender assignment is a “construction” and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full. That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle. One problem with that view of social construction is that it suggests that what trans people feel about what their gender is, and should be, is itself “constructed” and, therefore, not real. And then the feminist police comes along to expose the construction and dispute a trans person’s sense of their lived reality. I oppose this use of social construction absolutely, and consider it to be a false, misleading, and oppressive use of the theory.”

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves. If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood. I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.
 After reading some more, I found this: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Salih-Butler-Performativity-Chapter_3.pdf where it cites the preface to the 1999 edition (the one I have) and Butler answers criticisms from transgenders who feel their approach to gender is more constantive and non-performative, to which she says performativity is insuffcient HOWEVER she starts the preface off by saying the point of the book is not prescriptive for a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text, rather to be open to possibilities in the field for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realised. Then, towards the end of the preface, she says if she was to write the book again under PRESENT circumstances, she would discuss transgender and intersexuality, the way that ideal gender dimorphism works in both sorts of discourses, the different relations to surgical intervention that these related concerns sustain.
She just hopes a ‘coalition can be formed based on the irreducible complexity of sexuality and its implication in various dynamics of discursive and institutional power, and that no one will be too quick to reduce power to hierarchy and to refuse its productive political dimensions.’ Also, ‘identity categories formed for politicisation always remain threatened by the prospect of identity becoming an instrument of the power one opposes.’ So I will have to read some of her more recent work to see how she has progressed on this matter, I just watched a documentary about Butler too. Here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q50nQUGiI3s&list=PL7431C65C01DDAB10This is the guy who rejects performative gender based on transgender: https://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20040/439/jay_prosser Right, this is getting more and more interesting, as it is in ‘Bodies that matter’ that Butler says transgender is where queer hits a limit. I should have got that book instead of the Wittig one, I will be going to Amazon. I found this, but I will be reading the book in order to have my own understanding of it:
 

Butler’s formulation of the transgender, and in Prosser and Halberstam’s readings of it: the image of the transsexual is set up in opposition to both nontransgender gender normativity [the normative male or female] and transgender gender ambiguity [the genderqueer]. This serves to create a clear hierarchy which values transgender identities more highly and ‘locates transgressive value in that which makes the subject’s real life most unsafe.’16 In this way the nontranssexed body is privileged eroding the queer potential of sex reassignment surgery.17 SRS becomes a tool of gender conformity and normativity: a not so queer moment.

Here’s the source: https://maxattitude.wordpress.com/tag/jay-prosser/

That brings me to the book I will be reading next in order to get to the bottom of Butler and what she has to say about Reimer.

Topic

[kFoyauextlH]

Wtf! Jeez! That sounds completely demented.

[atreestump]

Dr.Money was a piece of shit I have to say, forcing ‘her’ and ‘her’ brother to perform mock coital exercises with one another, on command.

[Socrates]

My first defence of Butler comes on page 69 of the PDF where the botched operation to remove a problematic foreskin which thwarts urination is described. It wasn’t until a whole year after the botched operation that the parents had watched TV and encounter John Money, who offered the chance for child sex reassignment that would then lead to socialisation as a gender different from the one originally assigned at birth.

If gender is performative and we learn scripts from an early age, some I have bought up before, for instance:

The idea that mimesis is an ‘automatic’ tendency present in humans from birth is supported by the pioneering work of psychologists Meltzoff and Moore (1985), who studied newborn babies of even a few hours old mimicking movements of tongue and lips.

Further evidence comes from studies of the ‘delayed imitation paradigm’ featuring infants of a few months old (Meltzoff and Moore 1999; Bauer et al. 2000; Nelson 2007:94). Here the psychologist shows a child, usually with a number of repetitions, a series of three- or four-step action sequences, e.g., moving some toys in a particular order. Some weeks or months later, the baby is brought back and given the same toys to play with. Nine month old children tend to repeat some part of a sequence they were shown a month ago. And children who were 20 months old at the start of the experiment can still repeat a sequence two years later. It seems unlikely that any conscious recall is involved here: these do seem to be cases of ‘implicit memory’, of unconsciously imitated patterns becoming incorporated over time.

One year is well within the time frame as these experiments have shown for David to have embodied being a boy/male/masculine, as the script performance was not introduced until after the surgery.

[Author]

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