>her philosophy often was more descriptive and and deconstructionist

Yeah that's roughly my understanding as well. I don't really remember Butler saying anything along the lines of "you should all act your gender like this!", though there is a kind of prescriptivism at the heart of any descriptive enterprise (i.e., what I'm describing is true and should be seen as such, or something like this).

>About how we can look individuals that don’t act in the binary and try understand their gender role

Not only that, but also about how to understand oneself when one is unable to identify with some such classification. It really is a work that moves in the direction of some limited kind of liberation.

The distinction between sex and gender as indistinguishable is exactly why people criticise her for smuggling in tabula rasa for her theory to work.

Yesss exactly, because many people point to butler as the godmother of wokeism.

And if I remember correctly, her philosophy often was more descriptive and and deconstructionist. Just point out how gender is perceived and who it works in Western society.

I think the only recommendations she gives is more exploratory. About how we can look individuals that don’t act in the binary and try understand their gender role

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>Her logic is like walking in a tight rope, it has to be perfectly balanced otherwise you fall off and miss the point

I think you're right about that, and I think that's a general point about following philosophical arguments. But what's wild to me is that we literally have an interview linked and people are still here saying that Butler claims X when that position is either not at all present, or is clarified in the interview -- the one linked!!

I tend to hold to this general rule: r/badphilosophy brings us the gems, but the worst philosophy takes are overwhelmingly in the comments section of this sub.

Not surprising, her work is kinda hard to read, so most people will get the work explained to them. And that explaining often will miss small crucial details that tie her theory together.

Her logic is like walking in a tight rope, it has to be perfectly balanced otherwise you fall off and miss the point

>This is clearly the realm of science which is the best means for figuring out reality

It's not, it's in the realm of ontology, which is a category of philosophy.

>Good news: I'm pretty sure her vague theories are also 100% unfalsifiable, so there will NEVER be a study which contradicts it.

They are definitely falsifiable, but you can't just do experiments do falsify them. They are able to be falsified on exactly the basis that philosopher critics of Butler's work take: that the phenomena Butler describes aren't played out in exactly the way they claim, or that Butler's reasoning ignores certain crucial aspects or phenomena that contradict their conclusions, etc.

>So rejects all known facts, replacing them with vague unfalsifiable theories, and does zero experimentation.

Notably, Butler doesn't "reject all known facts", what Butler rejects is a certain notion of gender as inhering in the identity of a person, and supports their claim with a consideration of cultural practices in which the understanding and meaning of gender is produced.

>She 100% implies it, or implies that biology is so small a role it can be ignored. Which is goofy nonsense. We know biology plays a MAJOR role in men and women. She separates sex and gender as wholy separate entirely to make "sex" as small a role as possible.

No, what Butler implies (in fact argues for, as do most other feminist philosophers of gender) is that biology does not determine one's gender (and also that the sex/gender distinction is itself unintelligible, as our scientific conception of sex is based off bodies we already categorize as "man" and "woman").

>If they want to be taken seriously, actually create testable hypotheses and test them!

Again, Butler isn't doing science and never claimed to. This work on gender is ontological and political.

>I agree entirely, but there's a difference between denying science and writing a book that isn't even claiming to do science.

You can't have it both ways. She's making VERY grand pronouncements about human nature, human biology, and such. This is clearly the realm of science which is the best means for figuring out reality. her approach is more akin to Greek philosophy - very armchair but no experiments.

Good news: I'm pretty sure her vague theories are also 100% unfalsifiable, so there will NEVER be a study which contradicts it.

So rejects all known facts, replacing them with vague unfalsifiable theories, and does zero experimentation. This is what we mean by saying her theories are anti-science, it's literally doing the opposite of what scientists do.

>Butler does not claim this.

She 100% implies it, or implies that biology is so small a role it can be ignored. Which is goofy nonsense. We know biology plays a MAJOR role in men and women. She separates sex and gender as wholy separate entirely to make "sex" as small a role as possible.

Since she and her adherants haven't even bothered to do the basics, I can thus pretty much reject their theories wholecloth. If they want to be taken seriously, actually create testable hypotheses and test them!

>Think: Butler never did a study and never thought about even testing her ideas. That's literally the bedrock of science!

I agree entirely, but there's a difference between denying science and writing a book that isn't even claiming to do science.

>But that would almost certainly mean that people like Butler would have to NOT make extremely big pronouncements about how the universe operates, and instead make smaller testable claims, then build up from there. And people like Butler don't want to do that. They want big theories of everything.

It should be noted that Butler's arguments on gender doesn't claim "this is necessarily what gender is". Butler rather approaches gender as a specific cultural and historical phenomenon, and talks about the conceptions of gender that we already have, however contingent they might be, and what it is about their production that causes them to arise with the particular ontological structure they have. That's why,

>The thesis is so goofy - saying that humans are blank slates

Butler does not claim this. A significant premise of Butler's thesis is that performativity only works by citing past cultural conventions, and that these conventions are not fully able to take account of all of the possible variations that, A)it can actually admit of, and B)can be produced outside of the possibilities it can admit of.

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>It doesn't deny science, what it denies is a particular philosophical commitment within a particular scientific discourse, but not science at large.

Creationists literally say the same thing. ie they're not anti-science, they're against the fake evolution science.

Think: Butler never did a study and never thought about even testing her ideas. That's literally the bedrock of science! Even thinking "how would you even test any of this?" is kind of confusing, since these theories are somewhat vague. You'd have to create a testable hypothesis. Then test it. Which would ultimately make this much stronger, since it would then become a self-correcting science and more tied to reality.

But that would almost certainly mean that people like Butler would have to NOT make extremely big pronouncements about how the universe operates, and instead make smaller testable claims, then build up from there. And people like Butler don't want to do that. They want big theories of everything.

The thesis is so goofy - saying that humans are blank slates - it's like, do I need to really explain this? Like explain how hormones and biology affect our brains? Really? It's such blatant science rejection it's like arguing for creationism.

>because of some simple differences in men and women biologically, the greatest of which is chlidbirth, there has been a natural division of labour that's been present in nature since before we were even humans, and, over millenia that difference in division of labour has even caused us to evolve to have some biological differences

To be fair, Butler doesn't deny anything about the distribution of physical traits on bodies, but rather approaches the issue in terms of how an understanding and establishment of the concept of gender and sex are constituted within a culture.

>Yes, people do perform to societal expectations, but people also make choices that are practical, and while that's less dramatic and interesting, I think it's at least part of the truth of the matter.

The performative is not contrasted with the practical, and is also not equivalent to a performance. The operative word, "performative", comes from linguistics and denotes a speech act which, instead of describing something, instead causes an effect or makes some change in the world. An example Butler uses is that of a judge: a judge passes a sentence in a court of law by combining the authority given to them as having power over certain legal procedures with their linguistic capacity to communicate such a sentence, and thereby produces a performative utterance. But just as we wouldn't say that the judge thereby created their own authority or even the law, but are citing cultural conventions, so in the various acts constitutive of cultural conceptions of gender, one "cites" those conventions of gender. That's why, oddly enough, Butler's theory of performativity actually seems to agree with you when you say that we shouldn't go for the position that "it's all just performativity". The kind of freedom that Butler talks about in this regard is to realize that while we may be determined to some extent by our culture and its conventions, we aren't thereby fully determined.

>Overall I'm still quite amenable to the position that a significant amount of gendered behaviour is performative; I just think that saying that all of is is getting overly ambitious

I think the ambitiousness in Butler's work on gender has to do with its approach as, not just a sort of incremental/social theory of gender (which we can find similarly in de Beauvoir, for example), but its particular position on how various acts concerning an understanding and establishment of gender are necessarily tied to the past in a way in which gender, a social classification, comes to be seen as merely natural and original. Though I admit that some of the more mainstream misunderstandings of Butler's work are the overly ambitious kind that you mention.

Nope! It doesn't deny science, what it denies is a particular philosophical commitment within a particular scientific discourse, but not science at large. Moreover, it is in no way a form of gender creationism, since Butler's main point is that in gender performativity the structure of repetition of acts is based on prior conventions and understandings of gender.

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>The idea that there are naturally occurring genders/sexes (and so masculine/feminine hormones) is exactly what's being questioned in Butler's work.

Yes, which is why it's ultimately science denying and the equivalent of gender creationism.

>The claims only work if the ideas separating the actual biology and social constructs are defined.

Funny you're getting downvoted for some rather common sense critiques. She's lumping like 20 different things into one word - gender - entirely so that she can dismiss it. The background seems to be that she doesn't trust ANY attempt to quantify or define anything relating to sex and sexuality because it's been used as a tool of oppression in the past. Thus it should be all vague as hell, and ultimately left to the individual based on their feelings.

Yes, there's some very silly cultural fluffy elements of gender. But there's fluffy elements of anything that we consider culturally important. But there's also hard biology that she is doing her damndest to sweep away.

It's hilariously anti-science - effectively saying humans are born as blank slates, that biology plays zero role in our personalities, and that nature does not follow any rules. She also does not engage in any kind of scientific testing of her grand pronouncements since she doesn't come from a science background, so writing giant opinion pieces is all she's good at.

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I mean people may prefer quality over quantity in our developed world, but it is not a case for some developing countries. There is some shift or realization point where the curve changes. Anyway it is funny that you mention AI cause for a discussion like this we can just feed the chatgpt with request for an answer and the n pretend its us who wrote it. The discussion on internet will never be the same, I enjoyed this.

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>arguing that every single matter of gender is performative puts an incredible burden on her case.

The simplest explanation is that she believes humans are born as blank slates, nature plays zero role in "gender", and that it's all performative. It's all goofy nonsense. It literally rejects all that we know about biology.

It's also operating on a naive mind/body dualism funny enough. It seems to assume that biology would play no role in our personalities which is just wrong. Butler should have done more reading on biology and less on sociology.

But she and her adherents do literally zero testing of their theories ("feminists release groundbreaking new study" is a headline you'll never hear), and tend to make very bold very ambitious claims that are also hopelessly vague. Rather than proving their theories, they go about attacking and shaming people for not believing them. It allows them to never have to interact with reality.