Let us be clear about the difference
Onward!
Lugones describes the process this way, and I quote: “Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call [hand goes up for an air quote] ‘the light side’ of the colonial modern gender system. Those on the ‘dark’ side were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual views of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites, or intersex, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.”
The claim seems to be that colonizers saw themselves as sexually dimorphic and indigenous people as not.
But as Paula Gunn Allen and others made clear, intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and Eurocentered [sic] global capitalism.
In other words there was confusion about intersex people, therefore indigenous people knew all about trans people while the stupid Europeans were still droning on about the sexual binary.
Persuasive stuff!
If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that such a sexual division is based on biology. End quote.
Aw yeah, who would be stupid enough to think sexual dimorphism is based on biology?
Similarly, scholarship on East Africa and Uganda has demonstrated that gender inequality was introduced through Christian missionaries, suggesting that traditional social relations were in some ways more variable and free than those introduced through civilizational missions.
[skipping ahead a bit]
Let us be clear about the difference. The anti-gender position argues that gender is the colonizing force, and that getting rid of gender will reverse the course of colonization that it represents and enacts. De-colonial and anti-colonial perspectives [pause to stifle a bit of gas] argue that colonization imposed oppressive gender norms and new forms of identity classifications that intensified the subordination of women and the pathologization of non-gender-conforming queer and intersex people who had previously had a form of belonging in their communities.
So we mustn’t get rid of gender, we must cling to gender like grim death; what we need to do is get rid of oppressive gender norms.
Ok then my question becomes: what’s the difference between gender and gender norms?
I don’t think there is one; I think Butler is trying to sneak a trick past us. When we gender skeptics talk about getting rid of gender it’s the gender norms we mean. (Without the norms what even is gender?) We don’t think there’s some ghostly or Platonic essence called “gender” wandering around, separate from its norms. We think gender is the system that says men have to play football and women have to get their nails done.
She’s trying to grab the credit for resisting gender without actually doing it.
I can almost sympathize with these gender-obsessed people, but at the end of the day, all I’m thinking is: have they forgotten we’re all just apes?
It’s true: we’re very complicated apes. We have these gargantuan cerebral cortexes (cortices? Irregular plurals irk me sometimes because they can break the spell of clarity in language to those less familiar, and I don’t like disadvantaging the less-familiar), and we construct elaborate social systems and we live most of our lives inside a world that’s mostly made up of metaphorical concepts and ideas we trade between each others’ brains. (Civilization or culture or whatever we want to call it.)
But we’re still meat puppets living on a wet, muddy rock, and all those elaborate concepts about “gender” are high-brain abstractions of whats’ going on down in our lower primate brains, and they’re all at the end of the day connected to our most basic functions as living organisms: sexual reproduction.
I say I can almost sympathize, because when you think about it, it’s not that surprising that the bounds around sex in humans have in some senses been blurred. The selection pressures on our sexual mechanisms have been lifted, or at least changed from what you see in wild animals. We basically domesticated ourselves when we started inhabiting our brain-based, metaphorical cultural landscapes instead of the hard, cold jungle of the wild world.
This meant that we aren’t subject to the simple Darwinian law of survival of the fittest anymore: now the kinds of humans who pass their genes on are not the physically fittest, but rather the smartest, or the shrewdest, or the most altruistic, or the most conflict avoidant, or the most conflict attracted, or just the luckiest… the genetic constraints that used to filter out sexual and behavioural irregularities have been lifted, leaving open plenty of room for a vastly expanded diversity of social and sexual behaviour within and between the two sexes of homo sapiens.
More than any other species, the social and sexual-behavioural distinctions between human males and females have a big, hugely overlapping spread. And our great big cerebral cortexes have also given us ideals like a sense of fairness and justice, which encourages us to ensure the females of the species don’t suffer more than the males do, and to celebrate the ways the sexes are alike, rather than different, for the sake of equality.
So I get where the genderists are coming from, in a sense. But I think they’re naive to forget that the top-level abstract layer of human life isn’t the only one, and the other ones still matter immensely. Females still have different bodies, on-average different instinctual behavoural drives, and different needs. True equality up in our lofty abstract, social world cannot ignore or deny that it rests on the substrate of our physical primate bodies.
But you cannot speak of any of this. It is forever tainted by its origin in the colonialist West, like data from Nazi medical experiments. We must unknow it forthwith and trust only in the purity of academic theoreticians, those who exist in the corrupt world but are not of it.
The frustrating part of much of this is that these fluffy-bunny views of aboriginal cultures do contain a key kernel of truth–the gender norms of such cultures almost certainly did not align with those of Western, colonial societies. Why would they? Hunter-gatherer societies don’t have the levels of specialized labor agrarian ones do, and thus, the notion that some jobs are ‘women’s work’ and some aren’t is just kneecapping your tribe–everyone needs to have multiple skill sets at a base level of competence, or your tribe is going to fail, badly, once there’s only one person who can, say, make a proper shelter or skin an animal, and that person gets a tiny cut on their foot and dies of sepsis.
So yes, women in tribal nomadic societies were generally taught to hunt, fish and even fight, just as the men were–at least, in the successful ones. Small community size also means you can’t afford to completely ignore someone who has wisdom, even if she has a vagina. And while they doubtless did understand that sex = babies, they would’ve lacked the overriding interest in making sure that all of the children in a particular household were sired by the (male) head of that household. But that doesn’t mean that women were not subjected to sexual violence–indeed, since having women in the tribe was ultimately a matter of survival, we know they were often captured as sexual chattel during conflicts between tribes.
Making the argument that the face of sexual oppression is based on the society’s needs is a necessary point in understanding how to unweave that oppression permanently. But pretending that some societies never had such oppression at all is folly that only serves to undermine any legitimate scholarly investigation.
Citation needed. Which colonizers? For how long? Over the entire span of North and South America? The colonizers were no more monolithic in their beliefs and practices than the people they were colonizing. Certainly Europe had a long history of travelers’ fantasticals tales of peoples in exotic, distant lands with unlikely to impossible physiologies or cultural practices (much like the impossible front page stories appearing on tabloids at the supermarket check-out line). Weird sells. People without heads, but with faces on their chests, had been staples of travel writing since Roman times, and were alleged to be present in the Americas as well. The folks at home might have been quick to gobble up astounding wonder-tales, but the colonizers on the ground in the “New World” would have realized soon after contact that the peoples already living there were flesh and blood humans like themselves, maybe damned to hell for not accepting Jesus, but human nonetheless. They could see that with their own eyes. Similarly, the peoples of the Americas would have quickly and clearly understood that these people from across the sea were humans too, not gods or demons, horses and firearms notwithstanding. Also, supposed “hermaphodities” are not the same as “intersex” That little “or” is a bad faith, sneaky move. (See more below on “intersex”.)
Here we have a change in meaning and terminology in a single sentence; “intersex” is, as far as I know used by genderists as the politically incorrect term for DSD, Disorder (or Difference) of Sexual Development. DSD conditions and terminology have been appropriated by genderists simply for the tactical use of the formulation “assigned [SEX] at birth” employed on the rare occasions (in the past?) where DSD infants were born with ambiguous genitalia. The modern understanding of “intersex” is different from the “third gender” concept she’s desperately trying to elide it with. We’re seeing a nice little progression here of “hermaphrodite=intersex=third gender” concepts, as we move (as she hopes, fingers crossed) seamlessly from a physiological claim to a cultural one. (I think the “Hermaphrodites” of the previous section are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, as this particular imagined trait is being glommed onto in a way other exaggerated or unreal traits imputed to American Indigenous peoples aren’t. Why isn’t she as concerned with thetestimony from colonizers that Indigenous people had no heads? Or is she reluctant to suggest that skulls and cervical vertebrae are Western , colonial constructs imposed on happily acephalous native cultures?
(And as far as “…intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization, without assimilation to the sexual binary,” I seem to recall a commenter here, in looking at the “third gender” beliefs of some First Nations peoples, finding a correlation between the prevalence of “third gender” roles and the strictness of hierarchical gender roles within that given culture, and that there was less likely to be any recognition of “third genders” in societies in which women exercised a higher degree of power and influence. So these oh so vaunted, progressive-vanguard “third gender” (Two Spirt?) people were more likely to be found in societies which had strict gender rules and hierarchies.)
I’m guessing that Christian missionaries brought and imposed a different gender inequality, rather than introducing it altogether. Given what’s already been attempted, I wouldn’t trust any of these people at their word regarding the nature of gender hierarchies in pre-contact or pre-colonial societies. There’s probably a lot of shitty stuff hiding behind that “in some ways,” given Sastra’s Indian examples of the ban sati and the introduction of education for females under the British in India.
Well, gender is a colonizing force; look what it’s doing to women Women are having their rights and safety compromised by men demanding access to and “inclusion” in spaces never intended for them, using the banner of “Gender Identity” as their pretext. Getting rid of gender will go a long way to reverse the course of that colonial process.
Again, (I’m guessing) in some instances, it was likely just different forms of oppression and subordination, not brand new oppression in societies that didn’t have it at all. I don’t think can be an across the board thing over both, entire continents. We’ve got a lot of broad brush generalizations going in both directions here.
The relationships between the original inhabitants of North and South America and the different imperial powers jockeying for position in the “New World” were varied, complex, and changing, with the tides and fortunes of empire ebbing and flowing on these “new” continents and in the rest of the world. Indigenous peoples were drawn into these Great Power disputes, but were also, at the same time. trying to use these new, powerful allies and trading partners to further their own ends in relation to each other. Trade goods could include weapons, which were used to pursue their own pre-existing goals and ambitions, as well as to maintain their positions alongside and against these new, acquisitive interlopers. To paint these cultures as being one big progressive wonderland of gender-identity exploration, openness, and acceptance ruined by Western colonialism is hopelessly naive and insultingly anachronistic. It’s The Noble Savage dressed in rainbow beads and pink and baby blue buckskins. The kinds of gender relations and standards these peoples practiced cannot be removed from their contexts and plopped into the present fadish understanding any more than current, recent ideosyncratic understandings of sex and gender can be projected into the past like some kind of universal, heroic, rans-flavoured, Whig history.
The modern, Western confection of “non-gender-conforming queer and intersex people” did not exist in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Hell, it didn’t exist at all twenty years ago. This is pure projection, with the past rewritten (again) to justify another (another) ideology. This is an attempt to implant a false cultural memory, projecting their formulations into the past and then turning around and using these “discovered” projections as evidence of a history that doesn’t exist; like salting a mine, except they’re salting it with fool’s gold.
They’re fighting against “dominant narratives” while trying to erect their own, desperately attempting to give it an ancient history and distinguished pedigree when it only came into being at half-past last Tuesday. We’re required to believe that Trans People have been around through all of time and space. Sure, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Given the content related here in this transcription, that pause should have been a lot longer, as there seems to have plenty of gas she didn’t even try to stifle.*
*No, I’m not too proud to resist a cheap shot when I think it’s justified. I think Butler earned this one.
It is certainly true that Christian ideas & missionaries were (and are – eg Uganda) largely responsible for the laws against homosexuality and sexual ‘deviance’ one finds in some post-colonial societies that were, before the advent of colonialism, more tolerant of differences in sexual behaviour. (Japan is not a post-colonial society, of course, but St Francis Xavier was shocked to his very core that homosexuality was pretty well publicly accepted there, and railed against it.) But these facts are well-known, and I wonder what this academic essay brings to the subject that is in any way new, apart from a few banal but fashionable prejudices.
What a dog’s breakfast, I can’t imagine how dreary the full text must be.
Guess who else knew about intersex conditions! Go on, guess!
…
Brace yourselves!
…
The ‘West’. Europeans knew of intersex conditions going back to antiquity. Starting on a plain error is bad and I definitely don’t have the fortitude to keep fisking.
Too many of us are under the illusion that we’re a self-made species. The bioenergetic basis of life itself is treated by economics, for example, as an externality that plays an uncredited background spear-carrier well behind the supposedly central and crucial roles of capital and human manipulation and modification worked upon the inert, passive resources of a hypothetically infinte planet inhabited by rational actors who are always making the very best decisions consistent with their own self interest.
Those of us in wealthy countries are fundamentally disconnected from those things where we do come into limited contact with what we consider the necessities of life. Food doesn’t even come from a farm any more; it comes from a supermarket, or a delivery service. Similarly, clothing and shelter arise as they are bidden, as if from the void (or, the next best thing, cyberspace). Light and water appear at the flick of a switch and the turn of a dial through human-made infrastructure.
At the intellectual end, we are trapped within our minds, limited to the models of the world we cobble together in our heads from what little bits and peices we somehow filter and sift out of what would otherwise be an unending, incoherent torrent of meaningless sensory overload. But we are not some alien species different from all the other inhabitants of the planet. They must have similar models too, as their senses are more or less the same as ours, dependent (with some variation) on a broadly similar range of electromagnetic, chemical, and motor-tactile pressure sensitive inputs. We can’t be so special as to be the only organisms with such mental models; we might have ones that are more complex, or more recursive with regards to our apparent reliance on theory of mind, but that’s surely more a matter of degree than of kind. And all those models must have some general correspondence to the “real world” from which we are supposedly forever barred access, otherwise the creatures in which these brain-models arise or are assembled wouldn’t have survived long enough to be ancestors of anyone or anything.
These internal, mental models must be tied to something “out there” beyond the sense receptors that receive the data from which the models are made (and the filter systems that cut down and edit the flow of raw data to a manageable volume that lets the model be “small” enough to be useful). There just aren’t enough vats on the planet to hold all those brains that are being fooled into thinking there’s an outside world when there isn’t.
It’s said that there are no atheists in foxholes, but gods don’t make humans; humans make gods. Yet we cannot pick up and wield for ouselves the powers that our imagined gods were believed to posess. There are limits to what we can actually do.* Humans don’t make the Universe; the Universe makes humans (and everything else). We can’t shape reality to the degree that some philosophers seem to believe. Not every viewpoint or world view is equally valid. It’s not true that they’re interchangeable, or just a matter of the imposition of one arbitrary narrative over another through pure power. It’s impossible to maintain some lofty, non-judgemental impartiality; whether you like it or not, or know it or not, if you live in the “modern” world, you’ve already surrendered yourself to a narrative, and rely implicitly on its veracity. Any pretense otherwise is an empty pose. “There are no cultural relativists at 30,00 feet.”
* Or as Douglas Adams put it in the explanation of the Babelfish:
YNnB:
That’s their typical projection asserting itself again. Their operating premise is that all knowledge is just the result of an exercise of power, so that is exactly what their project constructs. It’s not “everyone else does this, and we don’t”, it’s “everyone else does this wrong“. This time the dictatorship will be benevolent because they’ll be the ones in charge.
re ‘colonisers imposing gender binaries’ – in my experience, what happened in a lot of colonised places is that the European colonisers started giving money/responsible roles to some males in the populations they colonised, which changed both relationships between the sexes as well as community norms. (They also organised their newly colonised populations into families with male ‘heads of household’ and tribal groups with male leaders, which had similar effects.) So now in many places in Africa the only work considered appropriate for men is paying work/work that interacts with the imposed European culture and economy, and if that work isn’t available the men basically sit under a tree drinking palm wine and shooting the breeze, leaving women to get on with continuing to do the work that actually supports the community.
The paper by Maria Lugones is available on the public web. I haven’t had time to read it yet.
I recommend Martha Nussbaum’s article on Butler, The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler to anyone who hasn’t read it.
Nightcrow @10, Snap! https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/introducing-dimorphic-idealism/
I also highly recommend it. :)
YNNB #7 wrote:
The deceptive comforts of modernity responsible for this would not be complete I think without what appears to have ratcheted the illusion up to 11: the disembodied avatar worlds of the internet. While the theories of postmodernism and post colonialism formed before the average person had at least one personal computer, the plausibility of a human nature detached from its evolved biological origins no doubt got a major boost from a large part of the population—especially the younger part of the population — getting comfortable with entire worlds where we could be a magical elf. On our computers we have created species, we’ve re-created ourselves, and we’ve lived in intellectual spaces where the sex binary didn’t exist unless you asked Ziggybottom34 whether they were male or female.
I don’t know if this has affected Judith Butler and her academic acolytes, but I’ll bet it’s a reason fewer people are laughing at the more unbelievable parts.
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