Batou667 said:
Sure, the coal miner or firefighter can come home after a hard day at work and console himself that he does a difficult job. Perhaps his pals at the bar give him an extra bit of kudos for it. Maybe it's helped him impress the ladies a few times, the ladies who like a rugged man, anyway. But that's where the social power and influence associated with these professions starts and pretty much ends. Look at who's really at the top in capitalist, patriarchal society: the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians. People - mostly men - who quite notably don't get their hands dirty on a daily basis.
I don't disagree that a male coal miner does not get much privilege from being a coal miner (mostly a function of social class,) but he still gets privilege from being male. A female coal miner would suffer in a similar way due to her class as a male coal miner, coupled with and reinforced by oppression related to her sex. A female CEO would suffer in ways that a male coal miner would not because he enjoys male privilege, but her class privilege would insulate her from other forms of oppression that the male coal miner would suffer.
This notion is one of the pillars of third-wave feminism: intersectionality [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality]. Essentially, multiple systems of oppression or discrimination such as race, class, sex, gender presentation, sexual orientation, ability, etc intersect and reinforce each other rather than operating independently.
No question that rich men oppress poor men on the daily in our society, but it doesn't change the fact that poor men still have a degree of power that women of any social class do not. One could argue about which forms of oppression are "worse," but it's pointless, divisive, and stupid. It's making the same mistake as the "class-conscious" workers in the pre-WWI era, who argued that workers were united by their being workers, and no other distinction mattered. (Well, generally "working men." Also generally "working men but not black men omg no." But imagine even the least-racist of these folks saying to a black dude in the 1900s, "Forget about race, we're all workers suffering the same!")
So yeah, I get where you're coming from on the class argument, but it's only one facet of a larger system of oppression. I have some very... strong... opinions about the rich, to say the least, but we need to understand and confront all forms coercive power if we're going to get anywhere.
boots said:
Yuuki said:
I wonder what she will have to answer when asked whether the physical/biological differences between genders are also nothing but "a social construct" lol.
Or is she one of those people who tries to focus purely on the mental/psychological side and pretends that physical/biological differences simply don't exist?
I actually think she's one of those people who are capable of understanding the distinction between biological sex and gender identity/gender expression.
Gender Trouble was prolly one of the most difficult books I've read in my life, both because Butler's ideas are complex and her prose in her early works is needlessly opaque. So I won't pretend to fully understand it all, but...
Butler actually rejects the sex/gender distinction as it's commonly understood. She argues that the problem with presenting sex as "natural" but gender as socially constructed is that it would necessarily break the link between the two concepts. Setting up gender as discursively defined positions biological sex to be somehow prediscursive--described, rather than created, by language--and thus viewing
only gender as constructed serves to obscure the fact that sex is as well. In her view, the fact that gender is constructed by discourse coupled with the fact that bodies are understood in gendered language means that sex is necessarily constructed in the same way.
Basically she follows the post-structuralist notion that language isn't the medium through which we understand the world as it exists. Rather, reality itself is created through the process of describing it in language. Her notions of gender performativity also entirely reject the concept of gender identity. Foucault was much the same way--ironic that his ideas kickstarted so many identity movements when he thought the very idea of identity markers was a tool of oppression.
Prolly goes without saying that some of her ideas are controversial to say the least, lol. (Plus a lot of what she says about trans* folks in Bodies That Matter is really...
ehhhhhh.)
Edit: I'd post this in its own reply if not for low-content rules, but...
generals3 said:
me and other post feminists
hahahahahahahahahaha