Caleb Zimmer > Recent Status Updates

I’m not buying into Monique Wittig’s theory of sex and gender, but I get how she got there. It’s actually not too wild. What I cannot ascribe to is her idea that lesbians cannot be directly labeled as women or men.

Part 2 went over my head. It felt like Butler’s main focus was comparing different theories against the modern paradigm. She is, at times, susceptible to a literalist understanding of expression. I wish she had focused on her own perspective, instead of those of Wittig, Irigary, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault. However, I am thankful for her summaries. I am now determined to look into Luce Irigaray’s work next.

Little did Judith Butler know that she would be calling out the closeted homosexuality of men like Andrew Tate and Clavicular almost 50 years after she wrote this 😂:

“Disavowed male homosexuality culminates in a heightened or consolidated masculinity - one which maintains the feminine as the unthinkable and un-nameable.”

Part 2 has made very little sense to me so far. Butler delves into summary of Freud’s theory of bisexual gender orientation of the Ego & Id. I’m not a Freud fan, and I believe that Butler intends to criticize his theory. My question is: why focus so much time on critiquing a theory that presumes and upholds heteronormative ideas of gender binary, when that very binary is already refuted in her earlier work?

“This text continues… to [ponder] the possibility of subverting and displacing those naturalized and reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power to make gender trouble - not through figure[ing] a utopian beyond, but through the mobilization… and proliferation of… those categories that… keep gender in it’s place by posturing as the foundational illusions of identity.

“Gender is the repeated stylization of the body: a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”

“The unity of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice is through an exclusionary apparatus of production to restrict the relative meanings of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality…”

“A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is, in fact, only the mark imposed by the oppressor.” - Monique Wittig

1. Judith Butler moves FAST
2. I’ve noticed that the books about feminism that I’ve read are centered around philosophical discussion. It is surprising to me that the problem of unfair treatment towards those who are hoped to be supported by feminist ideals is more dependent on culture, thought, and belief, rather than the tangible bodies which are so often blamed and abused. I should not be surprised, but I am.

So far Butler has urged us that the regular goal of feminist work to categorize which types of people need it’s advocacy is not a good idea. She listed like a million good reasons why that’ll blow up in our faces. She instead posits that “paradoxically, representation will [only work] for feminism only when the subject of ‘women’ is nowhere presumed.” (Butler)

This book was not written for casual readers. I’m struggling to keep up with the slashing pace at which Butler rolls out her contingent paths of thought. I will often re-read paragraphs sometimes more than once. Judith Butler’s brilliance is so fierce that I find myself sometimes squinting or looking away to blink the spots from my vision before continuing.

Chapter 3 will begin with organizing popular conceptions about assigning sex and gender to human bodies. The second part will discuss how these conceptions are utilized within governing or representative politics.

Chapter 2 will peer into the incest taboo as the driving factor in limiting genders and sexualities within a heteronormative frame. Lotta psychoanalysis and shit. The incest taboo will be exposed to the critiques from chapter 1 about the influence of a sexist and masculinity economy on language and thought.

Chapter 1 will “reconsider the status of women as the subject of feminism and the sex/gender distinction.” Emphasis will be placed on phallocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality as dominant historical narratives against the questions of languages ability to represent ideas of “sex” and “the feminine”, respectively.

Emily Beresford’s voice sounds like a parody of Susie Myerson from “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” 😭😭😭

Emily Beresford’s narration is SO FUCKING ANNOYING 😭 I really want to make it through this book, but goddammit her voice is so fucking headass 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

“Here is the great secret: the world is other. I myself am other. And I am no longer alone in knowing it. Even better - someone taught me this.”
- Georges Gusdorf (on what love means to men)

“Woman therefore plays an indispensable and capital role in the consciousness man has of himself.” - SdB

“Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. Each lover will then experience [their]self as [them]self and as the other… For each of them, love would be the revelation of self through the gift of self…”

“When a sex or a class is condemned to imminence, the mirage of transcendence must be offered to it. It is to man’s total advantage to have God endorse the codes he creates.”

“It is understandable why (from this perspective), women objects to masculine logic. Not only does it have no bearing on her experience, but she also knows that in men’s hands, reason becomes an insidious form of violence.”

I think if I could snap my fingers like Thanos, I might wish for males to never have been necessary for human reproduction. I feel as though even the best individual relations between men and women do not provide respite for the horrible conditions that women are subjected to in a world ruled by men’s ideals. I mourn what safe and happy lives women could have lived if men did not feel threatened by them.