One student’s prattling on academic objectification, transpeople, and the fall of women’s studies
Mar 5th, 2008 by Rebecca
I’m entering my last year of an undergraduate gender studies major at the moment, and as much as I love it, I’m getting increasingly frustrated with the way that it’s taught.
Women’s studies as a discipline is essentially dead in Australia - I don’t know of any university that still maintains an undergraduate department in it. It’s been replaced by gender studies - and those have been besieged, with many being shut down in the last decade, and mine (which is at real threat) having already been merged with cultural studies.
The consequence of this, as I’ve found, is that lecturers are extremely reluctant to run with explicitly feminist coursework, or really, anything that seriously addresses the issues that we face as women in society. Rather, I’ve wound up taking a lot of courses - many inspired by the loathesome Judith Butler - which essentially wind up in pointless theoretical “there is no table if I say there’s no table” arguments about gender. The further problem for me specifically is that I find a lot of lecturers, given this, tend to see transpeople as the perfect case study - we are the perfect Other that can be put up as focusing attention on neither male or female. And so - rather bizarrely, over the last three years, I’ve actually done far more stuff relevant on me as a transperson than me as a woman. The problem with this is that in every single case the lecturer concerned appears to have either a) never read anything much about transsexualism, or b) if they have, read extremely selectively - so what we wind up with has been almost always objectifying and generally flat-out wrong.
I’ve always had this issue, but it seems to have reached a peak this semester, where I have trans issues routinely coming up in three of my four classes - and three lecturers who couldn’t tell their arse from their elbow when it comes to trans stuff. It gets tiresome to have to be the one minority student to try to inject some reality into things, and to try and get my lecturers to treat us as something other than an academic curiosity. Today, I had to take a lecturer to task who started focusing on Brandon Teena’s gender performance and identity as something to be interrogated, a fun case study. When I asked her why she wasn’t focusing that same attention on, say, his killer, she seemed genuinely shocked, and tried to take that into account - but I have this same problem in nearly every class. I had similar issues with a well-intentioned, but completely wrong lecturer the previous week, who came out with some things that just about made my jaw hit the floor. I’m guessing that this will be a regular occurrence this semester if the lecturers so far have been anything to go by.
Julia Serano wrote a really scathing chapter in Whipping Girl that basically said to academics - look, if you can’t treat us with respect, and at least consider your own cissexual privilege in dealing with these issues, quit writing about us. I’m fed up with dealing with utterly ignorant (even if, as is usually the case, not intentionally transphobic) academics who preach stuff they’ve never bothered to even research. I’m doing honours in gender studies, and I’ve decided that I’m going to go after this sort of thing in a big way. It’s going to be a lot of fun to write, and I fully expect to cause some waves in the humanities department. But beyond the direct issue of the treatment of transfolk, though, I think there’s a broader problem at play here.
The fact remains that most of the gendered issues in our society affect women specifically. The change from women’s studies to gender studies, here at least, has stopped academics from focusing on that, and trying to find something that they can relate to everyone - with anyone who can be considered a gendered Other thus becoming an ideal case study. Perhaps it’s time we returned to studying material that actually had some relevance to our actual lives, rather than getting caught up in epistemological crap about the theoretical concept of gender. Frankly, I’d rather be studying some work by the likes of, say, Gloria Anzaldua, Rebecca Walker, or Serano, as opposed to once more some vague, privileged, overly theoretical crap by Judith Butler or one of her ilk. I hate that I’ve reached fourth year and had to take such complete and utter piffle as trauma studies (perhaps the most intrinsically privileged, objectifying and otherwise creepy discipline I’ve come across), and the outright comedy fest that was Freudian film theory (short version: student: “lecturer, why are we studying this?” lecturer: “well, the cinema is kind of like the womb” class: *rolls on the floor laughing* lecturer: “I don’t get why you’re all laughing”), but am only getting the chance to touch postcolonial feminism for the first time now.
I really wish both the academics here, and at other universities would break away from their obsession with Butler and theory for theory’s sake - and stop objectifying my community in the process. Having the chance to do a degree where one focused on actual issues faced by women in society, or theory that actually pertained to such, would be far more valuable than what I’m getting here - a degree that mostly wallows in intellectual masturbation, and occasionally stumbles onto really useful material by accident.
Do you think maybe it’s the way Butler is taught, or the way theory is taught, rather than the theory itself that’s the problem? I went through a cultural studies degree in the late 90’s, and basically, Butler/Foucault/Derrida changed my life. I think it’s possible to teach undergraduate students to question gender norms, and to theorise gender as performativity, in a way that does engage with politics, and that does not necessarily refuse to think feminism rather than abstracted ‘gender benders’. I’m trans, and Butler was a central part of the way I learnt to experience my own gender as something I could work with and mutate, instead of suppressing/ignoring. But then, we also read Anzaldua, hooks, and the debate between ‘real feminists’ and ‘theoreticians’ was tabled as something we could think through and make our own sense of.
So now I tutor in Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies at La Trobe (yeah, the triple barrel doesn’t do it any favours) and am really trying to give the students theoretical tools like performativity, but always bring it back to politics and everyday interactions. We study femininities, and the devaluing of such, and we also interrogate masculinity as it relates to privilege. That feels much more balanced, to me, than claiming that all gender oppression is about women. (And it allows for the students, who are mostly female, to think about masculinity in relation to themselves, rather than assuming that they’re all women so they have a common experience of gender.)
But I’m with you (and Serano, and Viviane Namaste) on the level of weird approporiations of transpeople for th purposes of ‘gender studies’ examples. I’m lucky, I have a lecturer who makes an effort to educate herself very comprehensively, but I can imagine that many others are far, far worse. Good luck with making a space where you can feel more comfortable and less crazy frustrated.
It’s quite possible, I suppose, that it could be the way it’s taught rather than the content itself. I’ve been in far too many tutorials where we’ve had meandering discussions about not much in particular as people tried to work out what on earth X critical theorist was actually trying to say. I’ve rarely had a lecturer who will/can go beyond pondering about that to actually try to explain why it said ideas/work are relevant outside of mere philosophising and why one should actually care. This is about the point at which I start to we’d go study someone like Dworkin so at least we can have a discussion about something that means something, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
So now I tutor in Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies at La Trobe (yeah, the triple barrel doesn’t do it any favours) and am really trying to give the students theoretical tools like performativity, but always bring it back to politics and everyday interactions. We study femininities, and the devaluing of such, and we also interrogate masculinity as it relates to privilege. That feels much more balanced, to me, than claiming that all gender oppression is about women. (And it allows for the students, who are mostly female, to think about masculinity in relation to themselves, rather than assuming that they’re all women so they have a common experience of gender.)
We’ve got a similar triple-barrel major here at ANU (although it’s gender, sexuality and culture here). Your courses, however, sound awesome. A large part of my gripe with critical theory is that I’ve never seen (at least in a university context) anyone try and apply it usefully to reality. It also came at the expense of, rather than alongside, the likes of Anzaldua and bell hooks. Perhaps I’d be less irritated if I’d gone to La Trobe….
But I’m with you (and Serano, and Viviane Namaste) on the level of weird approporiations of transpeople for th purposes of ‘gender studies’ examples. I’m lucky, I have a lecturer who makes an effort to educate herself very comprehensively, but I can imagine that many others are far, far worse.
I honestly can’t say I’ve ever had a good experience with lecturers trying to teach trans stuff as examples. I had one lecturer (who was amazing otherwise) who sincerely apologised after I called her on it, but pretty much every other lecturer I’ve had has been roundly clueless. This semester, I have the great privilege of having three roundly clueless lecturers. For me, it’s like…if you’re a lecturer, and you’re having to ask me “so, do transwomen transition because they really want to do girl stuff, or for some other reason?” (a real quote from one of last week’s tutorial) …then perhaps you shouldn’t be trying to teach this stuff to other people just yet.
Thanks for dropping by, anyway! I’ve been reading your blog for a while, and it’s good stuff.
Isn’t the lovely Sheila Jeffreys also still teaching womens’ studies? in Australia? I thought? maybe that’s why she feels under siege: she’s nearly extinct career-wise?
why is trauma studies “creepy?” (first I’d heard of the name)
btw, Rebecca, can you drop me an email? (address should be in your reply box–oh hell, it’s bel4 AT earthlink DOT net). got something I want to ask you.
She’s not still teaching women’s studies, thankfully, but I believe she is still teaching - last I heard it was history at the University of Melbourne. She’s still around there, though, and it’s one of the reasons I wound up avoiding that university - I didn’t want to go anywhere near a women’s studies department that she was associated with.
Trauma studies is basically entire discipline whereby upper-class white academics who’ve rather lost their touch on reality have created a whole bunch of grossly disrespectful theory about suffering they will never experience. The couple of weeks we spent in class discussing in class whether survivors of the Holocaust could ever really be objective about their experiences was really special. The whole course was just one long-running “oh no you didn’t!”
Sheila Jeffreys did once teach in Women’s Studies at Melbourne Uni, and decided to leave when it changed to Gender Studies. Gender Studies subsequently got axed. But Melbourne Uni is a big place: more queer-friendly feminist scholarship tends to be done by individuals in specific disciplines, like History, or Cultural Studies, or English.
“The couple of weeks we spent in class discussing in class whether survivors of the Holocaust could ever really be objective about their experiences was really special.”
…good god. and here I was thinking it might have something to do with y’know actually studying trauma and the traumatized. oh wait, a lot of psychology already does that…
I have a similar experience to Az. Theory was great for me, it helped me understand a lot, and later, I could learn how to twist and pervert it for my own ends. So I see a definite value in critical theory, but, yeah, teaching it alongside other feminisms. I think race is even more massively absent from Australian gender studies than in Canada or the US.
I *have* seen more than enough rubbish lectures and presentations using Butler and trans people as these magical semiotic creatures who illuminate the falseness of all gender (but which, somehow, never gets applied to cis people in quite the same way). It’s AWESOME being a metaphor.
I also think there is a real gatekeeper function that’s perpetuating the Othering you talk about, wherein the theory of marginalised groups doesn’t appear as “theory” unless it quotes the theoretical canon (eg Spivak, oh she’s counts cos she’s quoting Derrida. Phew). Hence do I foresee Julia Serano being be added to a gender studies canon? Not bloody likely.
>>>maybe that’s why she feels under siege: she’s nearly extinct career-wise?
Oh, she’s a bloody dinosaur, out-dated by early 90s queer theory, let alone trans theory. Besides her coterie of adoring fan-girls on campus and on-line, she’s an irrelevancy in contemporary gender studies (if well-known). I have honestly never ever seen anyone quote her as an authority on anything.
I guess it’s an experience I’ve never really had, actually teaching critical theory alongside and in conjunction with other feminism - critical theory as I’ve done it has always been pretty much on its own, and I’ve mostly been left thinking “okay, I understand what this person is saying, but how in hades is it relevant to reality?”
You’re spot on about race in Australian gender studies, too - in my degree, it’s been a case of “race? what race?” I had two classes where it was seriously raised. Both were taught by WoC (and one of those was on Freudian film theory, which wasn’t the most insightful course in history). I think I learned as much in the other one of them as I did in the whole rest of my degree. We’re also doing a bit on Spivak at the moment, basically as a token postcolonialist feminist, but yeah - not much.
I hadn’t thought of there being a gatekeeper function in those terms before, but I think that might be right on. I can think of about ten WoC theorists off the top of my head with more current and more insightful work than Spivak, but it’s her that we’re studying on race. The only trans theorists I’ve ever studied directly were Susan Stryker and some transguy whose name I can’t remember but whose work resembled the product of a particularly wacky acid trip - both of which fit right into that theoretical trend. Really, I think you’ve actually hit on one of my main beefs with critical theory - that I don’t get the chance to study perspectives of marginalised groups - especially those that I’m a part of - that are more grounded in reality than the current theoretical fad.
I’ll have to see if I can get Whipping Girl onto reading lists at ANU, though. I’m fairly well known around the department, and I’m doing my honours thesis on the appropriation of trans lives and experiences by cissexual academics, so I’m hoping to cause a few waves - for I’m so sick of having to do trans 101 with lecturers who seem to feel qualified to teach about trans issues, but not, y’know, to know the most basic information about our experiences.
and Jefferies? Like Emily said, she’s a dinosaur. I’ve never seen her cited for anything outside of radfemwingnutland. More problematic these days is that other transphobic Australian women’s studies professor whose name escapes me. I’ve had bits of her work cited in various courses, and her work is pretty widely available in Borders, but the detail of it is pretty…special…it’s the bastard ideological child of Judith Butler and Fred Nile. Can you think of the woman I’m thinking of, Emily?
Hmm do you mean Elisabeth Grosz? Her transphobic rant at the end of Volatile Bodies was pretty special.
That’s the one! It wasn’t just transpeople, either…I remember gay men taking some flak, and most people outside traditional ideas of sexuality.
And yes, there’s more than a few cis lecturers who feel they can talk about the philosophical implications of trans bodies–sorry, cultural signification–but who don’t know *anything* about the medical and psych hoops, the effects of hormones, the legal implications, or uh much at all really.
Yeah, she doesn’t like gay men much either, she’s anti “queer.” It’s all quite bizarre considering she’s vaguely a Deleuzian. Lesbian feminism in French clothing innit.
The one thing that I really liked a lot about Butler was that she described sex as a discontiguous set of gendered attributes. But rather than simply using that to dismiss sex, as in the standard trans canon, she pointed out that it is not exactly distinct from the discontiguous sets of gendered attributes that we know as gender and she questioned whether it really does us any good to support a sex/gender dichotomy that is necessary for the privileging of “scientific” biological sex over “unscientific” gender.
In short, the sex/gender divide is altogether a bit wishy-washy when you look at it closely and far too essentialist for my tastes.
That is basically the foundation of the way that I understand it now: people don’t have a single monolithic sex, but rather they have various characteristics which may individually be interpreted as masculine or feminine, and that interpretation interacts subjectively with gender presentation and identity. There’s a kind of freedom there, to change and re-interpret without any such re-interpretation being “delusional”. An understanding like that makes it easy to say that your body is not a male body now, and I for one would go nutty without HRT if I couldn’t do a little creative body image re-interpretation of my own.
That was one of the things I found disappointing about Whipping Girl, actually, that she mostly took the sex/gender dichotomy for granted. It was a good book overall but I couldn’t agree with it 100%.
I agree with you in a sense, Robbie - there was some useful discussions there, especially her critique of simplistic understandings of sex.
However, I found her constant and deliberate mangling of gender identity and gender expression to be grossly cissexist. It may be fun to deconstruct as a philosophical question, but gender simply doesn’t work that way in this culture - and Butler’s work in that regard has driven a whole load of ignorant transphobia from segments of the supposedly progressive left. It runs into another of my major problems with Butler: the way she merges the why and the what: she’s all about whether something is constructed or not, but ignores the reality that something that is constructed is no less real in actuality.
I might make a couple of more detailed critiques of Butler later in the week, once I’ve gotten over the flu, stopped procrastinating, and finished my critique of Gender Trouble. I have to say though - reading the damned turgid thing has more than reaffirmed my opinion of Butler as “batshit-ignorant-denizen-of-the-ivory-tower”, even if she does bring some useful ideas to the table.
i’m so tired of that kind of gender theory that has nothing to do with real peoples’ lives. it’s absolutely parasitical. how grotesque that people muse on brandon teena’s “performance of gender” as if that were the important issue in his life and death! or in any trans person’s. TRANS PEOPLE ARE NOT JUST ILLUSTRATIONS OF GENDER DE/CONSTRUCTION!! Wake up you academics!
i’ve read serano’s work although i think namaste’s is better in some ways. (serano bases a lot of her observations on namaste’s.) serano seems to hedge on the subject of sex work and sex positive trans identities… i don’t think her work comes to terms with that, but that’s just my feeling.
get hold of the piece called ‘tragic misreadings’ by namaste. i’m sure you’ll relate!!
oh, amen! i wish it were possible to convey to those in academia just how offensive that is.
I’ve unfortunately never been able to read Namaste - one of the problems with being in Australia - or at least in Canberra - is that swathes of important feminist literature is simply unavailable, unless one purchases it from overseas - which I mostly lack the money to do.
I’ve been meaning to get hold of her stuff for ages, though, especially after reading what Serano had to say about her. I’ll be writing my honours thesis on precisely this topic in 2009, and the department head has promised to try and actually get some of the books I’ll be basing my thesis on into the ANU library, so hopefully Invisible Lives will be one of them.
thanks for dropping by, anyway!