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
“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”
“In a different era, Marxists spoke of the construction of a ‘new socialist man’ as a crucial task in the broader process of socialist construction. Today, in a time of both rising fascism and an emergent socialist movement, our challenge is transsexualising our Marxism. We should think the project of transition to communism in our time – communisation – as including the transition to new communist selves, new ways of being and relating to one another.”
This was an alright read, had some things I guess I agree with, but I don’t particularly feel like I learned anything from it. Sorry Lee, appreciate you writing this, and I get the point was an argument that applying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to a wider practice of dialectical materialism could transform Marxism. I don’t completely agree with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and this essay didn’t really provide any insight in to how the theory could be applied to Marxism.
I also don’t really see how the distinction between transgender and transsexual really added anything to the ideas here.
It didn’t really shift anything in my perspective even after Lee explained why transsexual was chosen. I guess from Lee’s intro maybe it was for shock value or something? But I still know plenty of people who use the term transsexual to describe themselves, so it doesn’t really…evoke anything of what Lee was hoping it would in me.
This was a short one, but thank you everyone who joined me in learning a little something something tonight <3