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
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.
For anyone wondering about what an abolition of gender means, I refer to the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto for a quick run-down of the basic premise. It’s important to understand that an abolition of gender does not mean the destruction of any one person’s relation to their body, but instead an abolition of gender as a means of class stratification and a division of reproductive labour.
The Manifesto in question: https://libcom.org/article/gender-accelerationist-manifesto
“Others, particularly Rosemary Hennessy, have written eloquently and incisively about the retreat from the radical political imaginary of the 1960s which coincided with the neoliberal ruling class offensive of the 1980s and 1990s”
“This era saw the deradicalisation of Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist theory which had been forged in the heat of a prior cycle of struggle. ‘Critique’ became increasingly academised and distanced from working-class struggle.”
“Butler’s scientific breakthrough coincided with what is often called ‘the linguistic turn’ – the ontologisation of language and the evacuation of other considerations from social analysis”
Lee criticises the lack of depth of Butler’s argument here, that due to the discourse of the time Butler fails to take a truly scientific approach and describes gender without consideration for the division of labour, social reproduction, class domination and struggle. By reducing gender to an almost purely linguistic endeavour, Butler’s analysis falls short of providing a complete model of understanding.
However, Lee argues that by understanding a paradigm as a shared metaphor on which a scientific model is based, Butler’s insights into gender as performativity can be applied to Marxist analyses of gender.
Hmm, it mentions The Logic of Gender by Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton, making a note to look into that.
Lee is explaining the use of the term “transsexual” specifically here. While transgender and trans are the more common terms these days, Lee wanted to use transsexual, which evokes medicalisation and pathologisation, to imply a state of direct and ongoing transition. Transition, Lee says, is about remaking yourself, wilful self-transformation.
“Far from being the solitary resolution of a pathology through clinical treatment, transition as a process can be considered a glimpse of the forging of new forms of solidarity that might breach a new mode of production”
“We must bring into view the social and temporal nature not only of gender, but also of the sexed body. We must incorporate our intimate understandings of this kind of self-transformation, this work of the self, into our theory. Social theory cannot exist segregated from the practical struggles, affinity circles and unlikely alliances we so often rely on”