I was watching onion videos and saw this one where a guy quotes Judith Butler.
What exactly does that mean? It was taken from Butler’s book ‘gender trouble’, but if the rest of the book is as heavy as that quote I doubt I’d understand it.
I was under the impression that certain gender roles may have been formed in our pre-human history, does this quote more imply it is a cultural situation?
I’m a gender activist type and I find that unnecessarily obscure myself.
I think she’s saying it’s useful to think of gender not merely as something that culture creates around sex, but as a process by which culture bangs out certain cultural realities.
But I could sure as fuck be wrong. I’m not entirely sure she isn’t promoting her new line of fragrances or something.
Sooo, did Judith win the Bulwer Lytton Contest or not? 
It doesn’t mean anything. That’s academic jargon on steroids.
It reads to me as if it’s using some sort of technical language which might make sense to somebody in the field.
But if it also doesn’t make sense to anyone else here, maybe that’s not it. I’m not even sure whether she’s making the same sort of distinction between ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ that I think is usually meant.
– Wesley Clark, I’m not sure what you mean about “certain gender roles may have been formed in our pre-human history”. I think that most of what we think of as being the role of one gender or another is assigned differently in at least one human society; and the patterns of gender relationships vary between different existing non-human primate societies; so that while pre-human hominims may well have had gender roles of some sort, it’s pretty hard to tell what they would have been.
What I think I glimpse beyond the jargon is that gender is not just a product of culture, in contrast with sex being a product of nature, gender is also an aspect of culture influencing us when we define what makes up the “natural” concept of sex.
I’d be curious to see more context as if I’m correct I’d expect that last sentence, “A politically neutral surface on which culture acts”, to be erroneous as it means our cultural concepts of gender influence how we define sex.
I think it’s a very roundabout way of saying that gender exists without culture, but that culture heavily influences gender roles and stereotypes.
My reading would be something like this, largely in agreement with naita’s:
Sex is an identifiable (though not totally simple or unambiguous) biological characteristic of individuals attributable to nature.
But gender is not merely a characteristic of individuals attributable to culture.
Rather, our cultural concept of gender also shapes our interpretations of biological sex, and declares those interpretations to be “natural” and empirically objective.
Here’s an example that seems to me to illustrate what Butler means, though I’m not aware of her specifically using it and any inaccuracy in my explanation is my own fault:
We think of human biological sex as “binary”, namely, having the two categories “male” and “female”. And we consider that binary division to be a natural, empirical, objective, scientific fact independent of whatever cultural constructions we come up with about “gender” categories. I.e., the existence of binary biological sex is “prediscursive”, meaning that it is more fundamentally real than any of the “discourses” we come up with relating to it.
However, in human biology there is also a small but persistent naturally occurring minority of intersex people, who have biological characteristics pertaining to both of the “binary” sex categories.
Yet we de-emphasize the existence of intersex individuals as somehow less significant, or biologically “natural”, than the binary division of “male” and “female”. Intersex biology is perceived as some kind of statistically unimportant anomaly or aberration from the more “real” binary classification of sex.
So, I think Butler would argue that that’s a way in which our cultural prescriptions about gender are shaping what we consider biologically “natural” or “real” when it comes to sex. Intersex individuals are of course just as physically “real” and “natural” as male and female individuals. But we live in a culture that has historically recognized a simple binary division of gender categories, and that cultural heritage influences our perceptions of the reality of biological sex.
Other primates show patriarchal attitudes which may have been formed in evolution before humans developed culture and civilization around 10,000 years ago.
You’re placing the origins of “culture” among humans as recently as 10,000 years ago? Paleontologists seem to use the term freely with reference to human societies as far back as the Early Paleolithic.
“Civilization” is another vague term that doesn’t seem clearly ascribable to this period, being more generally used AFAICT for early literate urbanized societies over half a millennium later.
As thorny locust points out, different primate species have evolved different patterns of gender relations. I’m not convinced that you can validly deduce a pre-human evolutionary direct ancestor for a particular type of gender relations among modern humans if the same ancestor didn’t produce the same type of gender relations among its other primate descendants.
39.95 to read the article. Didn’t do it.
I’m still not sure what you mean about “certain gender roles may have been formed in our pre-human history”.
Again, pretty much any specific gender role (who does the weaving, who does the farming, who moves to find mates, who owns the houses, who can initiate divorce, who makes the pottery, who elects the chiefs, and considerably etcetera), with the exception of giving birth and breastfeeding, is coded differently in different known human societies. So the fact of having gender roles might be built into human societies; but what those roles are is not.
If what you mean is that you think known human societies are to varying degrees patriarchal (in the sense of males making the major decisions and/or males routinely physically dominating females) because our pre-human ancestors were patriarchal, that’s a different sort of claim; but it runs into a serious problem, because what about those bonobos?
Chimpanzees and bonobos split after the human lineage split from the chimpanzee/bonobo lineage. So the same pre-human ancestors gave rise to both the chimpanzees and the bonobos, as well as to us. And the chimps and the bonobos have such wildly different approaches to both gender roles and sex that a) making any assumptions about what approach their ancestors took seems unwise and, possibly more importantly, b) obviously the descendants of those ancestors don’t have their gender behavior so firmly baked into us that it couldn’t change in later generations.
Examples would be the fact that males try to control the sexual behavior of females in other primates and likely happened in our pre-civilization period and I’m sure pre-homo sapien period.
Plus since a man can have far more kids over his lifetime than a woman can (since a woman is limited to maybe 20 children over her life), this makes men more disposable and culture reflects that by pushing men into more dangerous vocations and shielding women from those vocations. However that is not universal, various groups in modern society use women in combat roles in the military for example. However soldiers and police are overwhelmingly male, and were even moreso in the past (then again these vocations excluded other out groups historically too like racial minorities from their ranks). This is possibly a reflection of the fact that eggs are rarer than sperm, so men are culturally pushed into more dangerous vocations since their sex cells are more expendable. If from an evolutionary POV men evolved to try to monopolize capital as a way to control female sexuality, that would also explain why men are more likely to hold political power than women. Doesn’t make it morally right, but it does seem to be pretty consistent historically.
My understanding is chimps and bonobos are different because the congo river split one group in an environment with abundant natural resources and put the other one in an environment where there was heavy competition with gorillas. The bonobos didn’t need to compete as much to survive so their culture became more egalitarian. Which kind of validates what I was saying, evolutionary pressure can affect modern behavior. A society of intelligent bonobos will be naturally much more predisposed to egalitarianism than a society of intelligent chimps or babboons.
The article mentions examples where removing females from peer support resulted in more sexual coercion, male attempts at monopolizing resources and examples of how they happen in other primates. Granted we can’t know what our particular evolutionary history is from other primates since they all have their own evolutionary background.
But even if there are evolutionary pressures that doesn’t mean we can’t try to rise above them.
Women are so often killed by men, in war and otherwise, that the theory that the reason for patriarchy is to Protect The Precious Egg-bearers appears to me to have a large hole in it.
Our particular evolutionary history is shared with both chimpanzees and bonobos. Therefore, that common ancestor was most likely carrying both potentials.
On your last sentence, we’re in agreement.
Except that few male “vocations” are anywhere near as dangerous as the quintessentially female “vocation” of childbearing. And, of course, the hazards of violence to women in patriarchal family structures. ISTM that a society that truly sought to “shield” women from physical danger in order to maximize their childbearing output might be structured somewhat differently from pre-modern patriarchal societies.
I think your analysis sort of illustrates what Butler seems to be talking about with regard to using our ideas of gender to construct claims about allegedly “prediscursive” aspects of sex. You’ve got a particular cultural pattern of gender roles in mind, and you want to explain why it exists, so you hypothesize its cause in a supposed “pre-cultural” phenomenon of “human nature”.
Thank you for that. I agree there is an issue in using evolutionary psychology to justify pre-existing social structures the same way we used to use evolution and psychology to justify white supremacy, however there is also the fact that our social structures could be formed by our innate attitudes that are shaped by evolution.
While its true women die in childbirth all the time, there really wasn’t anything people could do to avoid that until recently. However avoiding sending women to war seems to have been fairly common across cultures.
And yes women are often targets in war, but they are many times targets by the opposing military. If the goal is survival of the in-group of which you are a part, then the women of a different in-group (or a hostile in-group) should be largely meaningless as their survival or death does not affect the survival of your in-group one way or another.
Either way this is kind of getting off topic and I’m not sure what Butler meant still. I can’t tell if she is saying all gender roles are sociological in nature, or if there are innate differences between the sexes and our cultural values are extracted from those or something else.
I don’t think that’s it, because people with nonbinary gender are a lot more common than people with nonbinary physical sex. If anything, it’d be the binary division of sex that influences us to see gender as binary.
As for men and women vs. dangerous jobs, a culture can’t relegate the dangerous job of childbirth to men, so there could hardly be any pressure to do so. And while there are women on the front lines of modern militaries, being a soldier in a modern military isn’t actually all that risky a job. But there’s still a tendency against it, because evolved behaviors (both genetic and memetic) are slow to change, and it’s only recently that soldier has become a safe job.
As for men killing women, I think that’s a side effect of other consequences of males taking dangerous jobs (and I use “males” rather than “men”, because the pattern of males doing dangerous jobs extends far beyond humans). Because males take dangerous jobs, we tend to have traits that make us better suited for those sorts of jobs. Those traits include greater physical strength and a greater tendency towards aggression. But being strong and aggressive also makes it more likely that you’ll beat up those weaker and less aggressive than you, in order to get your way.