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

  • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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    51 year ago

    “I’ve subtitled my piece ‘Foundations for a transsexual Marxism’, a choice of words I know may cause a stir for many readers who’ve opened this collection.”

    I am positive that a bunch of people were immediately uncomfortable reading that

    • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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      61 year ago

      “we must transsexualise our Marxism”

      This is just a great line, love it

      Anyway, Rosa’s argument here is that “transgender Marxism” gives the impression of trans people doing Marxism. But in much the way that Marxist feminism is the application of Marxism through a feminist lens, transsexual Marxism is a Marxism that is itself in transition, refracted through an analysis of gender and sexual transition.

      • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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        51 year ago

        “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.

        • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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          41 year ago

          “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

          • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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            41 year ago

            “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.

            • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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              41 year ago

              “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.

              • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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                41 year ago

                "“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.

                • Seanchaí (she/her)OPM
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                  31 year ago

                  “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.