Re: gender: Judith Butler's pseudo materialism and cultural feminism.(fw

In response to Butler lovers, let' me try last time why I do not agree
with her post-modern feminism as myself being a materialist (marxist
feminist).

1. Butler does not seriously challenge socio-biology and its sexist
consequences. Saying that gender is socially constructed is, of course,
okey, but what Butler does NOT consider is that discourses about gender,
sex and sexuality are not free floating discourses. They are systemic and
oppressive. Butler does not say anything about WHO oppreses women other
than discourses. "Gender system" is one of the key structures modeling
unequal social relations and cleary benefitting one group (men) to the
detriment of the other (women). The problem is that her feminism does not
radically challenge capitalist patriarchal order because it lacks a
systemic analysis of inequalities (class+gender).


2. Things that are "deemed to be biological" are socially constructed.
This means that "men" and "women" are social categories rooted in a social
division of labor "played out society in roles", creating, organizing and
reproducing the relations we constitute as men and women. Heterosexuality
is at the core of this gender system because sexuality, too,
is a social process "through which relations of gender are created".
Marxist feminism sees gender as socially constructed rather than
biologically determined, instrinsic to unequal social orders such as
capitalism, but historically contingent and changing.


3. Although Butler seems to graps sexuality and gender as social,
including erotic desire itself (following Mr.Foucault), she
does not see the essence of their determination as sexist social order
that victimizes women as females and empowers men as males. Women are
pushed beneath the level of signifigance since gender is radically
deconstructed and fragmented. Such a radical pluralist deconstruction of
identity valorizes women as a group and apoliticizes emancipatory
narratives such as feminism and marxism. That is why post-modernists are
mad at the words "emancipation" "equality" "socialism". They think they
are over-extension of power relations.  hence, according to them, we are
trapped in power. My critique of her is that is if were are trapped in
power and can not change power relations, there is no point in arguing
that "gender is a social construct"

4.*******HINT! Butler's analysis is also Eurocentric. She does not pay
attention to global capitalism, sexism, post-coloniality and voices of the
"other" women. She has no idea of what kind of sexist realities
non-western women are subject to: white, capitalist, male, global order.
See for this Gayatri Spivak's critique of Butler. By using a critical
deconstrucionist method, Spivak reads Foucault against himself and turns
many of his assumptions about sexuality upside down.

good night,


Mine