Friends! Comrades! Gentlethems! It’s time for the third essay in our Transgender Marxism series.
The PDF is here: https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
If you missed the intro discussion: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
This next essay is Judith Butler’s Scientific Revolution: Foundations for a Transsexual Marxism by Rosa Lee.
Rosa Lee is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine, a graduate from UC Santa Cruz and an active gabber producer.
You know the drill: pulling quotes and making notes.
Don’t hesitate to jump on in and join the discussion <3 Let’s all learn something together!
Edit: The discussion for the next essay by Jules Joanne Gleeson is here – https://lemmygrad.ml/post/402441
“The term ‘paradigm shift’, though these days invoked fairly colloquially, was first introduced as a technical term by the historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
It really does get used a lot.
Kuhn says that every once in a while there’re circumstances that push science to challenge or disrupt the assumptions that the theory and practice of normal science rely on. And that’s a paradigm shift.
“Donna Haraway, in her 1976 book Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, argues that the central characteristic of a paradigm is the reliance on a shared metaphor.”
The example given here is the Copernican model of a heliocentric solar system acting as a paradigm shift from the older geocentric models.
By changing that fundamental assumption on the framework of the solar system, all celestial science (theory and application) was shifted to account for this new understanding
“Similarly, we might talk about Marxism as a scientific paradigm structured by the mode of production as a central metaphor”
The study of the development of society using that understanding is what we call historical materialism.
Lee then says that much like Copernicus and Marx initiated paradigm shifts in their respective fields, Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble proposed a paradigm shift in gender.
“This paradigm, one we might today call ‘feminism as identity politics’, is what Butler calls ‘the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject’”
This is still the radical feminist viewpoint by and large, and is the backbone of most anti-trans feminism. This is also the basis for the whole girlboss nonsense, where representation is considered liberation (somehow). That a woman in power as the exploiter is seen as some sort of victory for women as a whole.
"“Instead of describing gender through the metaphor of being, they suggest that it be understood through the metaphor of linguistic performativity, what they call the ‘stylized repetition of acts’”
We’re mostly look at major themes from Gender Trouble here so I don’t want to spend too much time on it until we get to Lee’s specific arguments for applying it to Marxism. Might do a discussion on Gender Trouble itself sometime, there’s a lot to be gained from reading Judith Butler.
The main point here is that while most frameworks of womanhood assert that is something that is inherent to your personhood from birth, Butler asserts it is a construct of the actions you take.
“Cinzia Arruzza has argued, quite persuasively, for the Marxist resonances of this framing of gender as ‘constituted social temporality’. As she points out, this formulation neatly describes Marx’s analysis of capital as something always-in-motion and always-contingent, which comes to appear as its own substantive, original, and authoritative subject.”
The social reproduction of capitalism is likened in this way to the social reproduction of gender. Though it is always adaptive, through its reproduction it is asserted as a natural axiom.
Much like we see the application of a capitalist lens onto pre-capitalist societies, are presented with the claims that it is a natural phenomenon, so too is gender.
Lee here mentions that the idea of woman as a social construction is not new: Simone de Beauvoir said “one is not for a woman, but rather becomes one.” The idea though, is that the biological reality of female is constructed through social reproduction into the gender class of woman.
Butler, however, asserts that this is merely the metaphysics of substance, and instead argues:
"“Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not just to culture as sex is to nature. Gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”
What Butler is saying here is that the very idea of a sexual binary is itself a social construct, reproduced generation after generation as a natural authoritative truth, that exists independent of cultural norms.
“And so this is why, for a project of a transsexual Marxism, Butler is so central. Because it is her materialist assertion that not only gender but the sexed body itself is social rather than natural, that gender and sex, as constituted social temporality, are not permanent but changeable, mutable, and impermanent. This opens up the possibility of us seriously thinking through both gender and sex transition on a personal level – and the possibility of collective transition to communism as a process of undoing, remaking, or even substantively abolishing gender.”
Note: Judith Butler prefers they/them pronouns, but they also use she/her pronouns and the text in question uses both pronoun sets interchangeably when referring to Butler.