an interview with Judith Butler August 20, 2007

Extracts from Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler taken by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, London, 1993.

RP: We’d like to begin by asking you where you place your work within the increasingly diverse field of gender studies. Most people associate your recent writings with what has become known as “queer theory”. But the emergence of gay and lesbian studies as a discrete disciplinary phenomenon has problematised the relationship of some of this work to feminism. Do you see yourself primarily as a feminist of as a queer theorist, or do you refuse the choice?

Butler: I would say that I’m a feminist theorist before I’m a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist. My commitments to feminism are probably my primary commitments. Gender Trouble was a critique of compulsory heterosexuality within feminism, and it was feminists that were my intended audience. At the time I wrote the text there was no gay and lesbian studies, as I understood it. When the book came out, the Second Annual Conference of Lesbian and Gay Studies was taking place in the USA, and it got taken up in a way that I could never have anticipated. I remember sitting next to someone at a dinner party, and he said that he was working on queer theory. And I said: What’s queer theory? He looked at me like I was crazy, because he evidently thought that I was a part of this thing called queer theory. But all I knew was that Teresa de Lauretis had published an issue of the journal Differences called “Queer Theory”. I thought it was something she had put together. It certainly never occurred to me that I was a part of queer theory.

I have some problems here, because I think there’s some anti-feminism in queer theory. Also, insofar as some people in queer theory want to claim that the analysis of sexuality can be radically separated from the analysis of gender, I’m very much opposed to them. The new Gay and Lesbian Reader that Routledge have just published begins with a set of articles that make that claim. I think that separation is a big mistake. Catharine MacKinnon’s work sets up such a reductive causal relationship between sexuality and gender that she came to stand for an extreme version of feminism that had to be combatted. But it seems to me that to combat it through a queer theory that dissociates itself from feminism altogether is a massive mistake.

sex & consequences: an anthropologist vindicates the traditional family August 17, 2007

By Peter Wood

Anthropology—hometown to cultural relativists and all-night diner for disaffected intellectuals—may not be where you would most expect to find good reasons to defend traditional American family values. But anthropology, in fact, guards a treasure house of examples of what happens when a society institutionalizes other arrangements.

Want to know what it really means for a society to recognize “gay marriage”? Or for a society to permit polygamy? Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears? Care to know what happens to a human community that tolerates sexual experimentation among pre-adolescents and teenagers? Are fathers and mothers really interchangeable? Anthropology actually has a large amount of empirical evidence on all these matters—and many others that are now on the table in the United States thanks to various advocacy movements.

The Leftist political convictions of many of my fellow anthropologists tend to keep them silent about some of the scientific findings that have accumulated over 150 years or so of systematic ethnographic study. But these findings strongly suggest that the family is a bedrock institution and that the kinds of modifications to the family advocated by gays, feminists, and others who speak in favor of relaxing traditional restrictions on sexual self-expression will have huge consequences.

Let’s take an anthropologically informed look at two of these proposed changes to the family: gay marriage and polygamy.

The Love Story Deconstructed August 15, 2007

by Allison Aubrey

Morning Edition, February 15, 2007 · Anthropologist Chris McCollum has always been fascinated by how people tell their stories of falling in love. But when he told his friends he wanted to write a doctoral dissertation on the subject, they thought he was joking.

“They were like, ‘You can get a Ph.D. in that?’” McCollum says.

But the teasing didn’t stop him. He pursued the research by interviewing dozens of married couples about how they fell in love. What he wanted to know was whether the stories people tell about how they choose their careers are similar to the stories they tell about finding a mate. He was drawing on research showing that people tell stories about intentionally pursuing a field or job.

But when it comes to finding a mate, McCollum found the stories to be very different.

“It was polar opposite,” McCollum says. Love stories “are not a matter of determination or seeking,” he says.

The stories people enjoy telling the most, he says, “are ones that really underscore the idea that something out of your personal control, something like romantic fate or destiny or chance meeting, is really what’s at work.”

Virginity Testing in Turkey: A Violation of Women’s Human Rights August 15, 2007

by Chanté Lasco*

In February 2002, Turkey issued a decree banning forced virginity testing. This followed an announcement in July 2001 by Turkey’s Health Minister, Osman Durmus, that midwife and nursing students were required to be virgins, and that testing would be used to ensure compliance. Although human rights groups and the international community welcomed news of the recent ban on virginity testing, it remains to be seen whether the practice of virginity testing will in fact cease.

As Turkey attempts to improve its human rights record in a bid for European Union membership, its government faces a tension between enduring cultural norms and international human rights standards. The prominence of certain cultural norms can cause conflicting results when the government tries to demonstrate progress by promulgating legislation without instituting additional measures, such as educational campaigns and enforcement mechanisms, to ensure that human rights abuses are not tolerated.

Virginity testing is discriminatory, highly invasive, and often involuntary. These tests involve the physical examination of a woman’s hymen for tears to determine whether the woman is still “a girl” (the term Turkish doctors use to refer to a virgin). Underlying the practice of virginity testing are cultural norms, which dictate that women who are not virgins may not be considered eligible for marriage and could bring dishonor to their families. This is especially true in rural areas of predominately Muslim Turkey. Virginity testing is thus used to prove a woman’s chastity and make her eligible for marriage. This cultural context creates a presumption that female virginity is a legitimate interest of the family, community, and ultimately, the state. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), an interview with a Turkish doctor revealed that if a woman does not bleed on her wedding night, she likely will be taken for “virginity control.” Although gynecologists maintain the status of the hymen is not determinative of one’s virginity, Turkish doctors nonetheless rely on such information when they perform virginity testing, and “passing” the virginity test is based on whether or not the hymen is torn.

Pornography/prostitution/trafficking are connected to other violence against women August 13, 2007

It is not possible to separate prostitution from trafficking, or prostitution from other kinds of violence against women. Incest usually precedes prostitution, pornography teaches men how to treat women, and johns try out on prostituted women what they later subject their wives to. Since johns like “something new,” they buy trafficked women. This article by Bob Herbert connects the misogyny in US popular culture with the murders of schoolgirls in Pennsylvania.

Andrea Dworkin Abortion (Excerpt from Chapter 3 from the book: Right Wing Women) August 13, 2007

[...]
Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.

The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that girls should want to be fucked–as close to all the time as was humanly possible. For women, alas, all the time is humanly possible with enough changes of partners. Men envision frequency with reference to their own patterns of erection and ejaculation. Women got fucked a lot more than men fucked.

Alex Callinicos on changing the world without taking power August 12, 2007

The huge wave of anti-war protests on 15 February were an astonishing demonstration of just how formidable a movement of resistance to imperialism is now developing around the world. But we should have no illusions about the power of our enemies. Politically, Tony Blair has never been weaker. But he still presides over a state that has formidable coercive power.

The Metropolitan Police may have been on their best behaviour on 15 February, but the tanks at Heathrow were a piece of political theatre designed both to frighten and to intimidate. Elsewhere the message has been less subtle. Anti-war activists in Egypt have been arrested and tortured. In New York on 15 February the police penned the demonstrators in and beat them up when they protested. These were just small glimpses of the concentrated violence that every state can deploy against those who challenge it.

Werner Bonefeld on changing the word without taking power (part III) August 12, 2007

III

Negation is the only path towards emancipation

(Agnoli)
Holloway”s critique of fetishism is excellent. It sets him apart from both Althusserian structuralism and Negrian ontological being outside capital. His book expresses however more than just the frustration with these approaches. Fundamentally, his critique shows capital as a form of human social relations and thus as a form that exists only in and through labour. In short, his book is subversive.

Werner Bonefeld on changing the word without taking power (part II) August 12, 2007

Now-Time (Jetzt-Zeit): blasting open the continuum of history

(Benjamin)

In structuralist conceptions, now-time is and is not the time for revolution. It is not the time for revolution because for revolution to be made effective, conditions have to be right. This view contains an element of banality. Revolutions indicate that conditions were right and the absence of revolution indicates that conditions were not right. Behind this banality, however, lurks a question that is as unfavourable to human self-emancipation as the mirror image from which it is derived, the bourgeois principle of the political leader: who decides when conditions are right – better: who commands the revolutionary battlefield? This question derives from conceptions of the working class as a thing in-itself. Condemned to reproduce capitalist structures, class struggle is firmly embedded within the project of capital as the subject and opposition to capital is thus seen to breath in bourgeois ideological clouds of freedom, equality and Bentham. Working class struggle can, as Lenin had it, only produce economic consciousness, or trade union consciousness. Political consciousness of a revolutionary kind is presumed to be structurally impossible and has, thus, to be brought to the workers from the outside. This revolutionary conception takes its cue from Engel”s notion of revolution as “humanity”s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom” (Engels, 1973, p. 226). This conception of revolution as a leap depends thus on the introduction of a new subject that competes with capital for the directorship of the class struggle, that is, the party. The party becomes the theoretical guardian and organisational embodiment of the historical role of the working class to make socialism. Lenin”s idea that the masses by themselves are incapable of revolutionary consciousness denies the possibility of revolution as the self-emancipation of the working class and, instead, confirms that revolutionary change can only be brought about from above, forcing, as it were, the working class to ‘leap’ into communism. In this struggle between two subjects, capital and the party, the seizure, retention and employment of power becomes the sine qua non for either the continued existence of the working class as a structure reproducing agency or its transformation into socialist Man – a Man of standardised issue and thus a Man who, no longer exploited by the owners of the means of production, becomes an object of technocratic planning in the workers state that regulates the economy ostensibly on behalf of the workers. In this conception, Now-Time is a continuum of power that leaps from one historical form to another on the basis of time as (economic) measure, that is, labour remains the measure of all things and thus a resource.

Werner Bonefeld on changing the word without taking power (part I) August 12, 2007

Truth has not harmed anybody, except the messenger

(Adorno)

Marxists agree amongst themselves that class struggle is the motor of history. Yet, controversy rages over the question about the social constitution of class struggle – should it be derived from the objective laws of capitalist development, presupposing class as a thing in-itself that requires transformation into a class for-itself with the help of the party? Or is the world of capital divided between an already existing revolutionary subject, now reformulated as the bio-power of the life-world of the multitude, and the capitalist system that, like a machine, seeks – and this ever more unsuccessfully – to contain the multitude within the parameters of capitalist command? The former conception belongs to the history of structuralist approaches that Althusser focused and summarised; the latter to the autonomist tradition that Negri represents in ever more distorted forms.