I’m actually reading Second Skins atm for the first time, the first chapter where he critiques Butler is good, I like it a lot. I can’t speak about the rest, I have only skimmed it.

Namaste calls herself a post-structuralist, and actually critiques Butler as being an insufficiently rigorous post-structuralist and not actually giving the contexts of the things she talks about (eg a drag performance in a gay club) any weight. She does use interviews and sociological techniques you might prefer, and cites policies and laws a lot. So it’s all pretty practical–and really refreshing that a book about trans stuff actually bloody talks about prostitution, access to medicine, and violence.

Incidentally, *I* consider myself a post-structuralist feminist, but see I’m in Lit, so imo deconstruction is far less problematic there than in talking about people’s lives, institutions, violence etc.

Do we have any recommendations for good trans writers, then, besides Julia Serano? Susan Stryker has just brought a new book out about trans histories… on Seal.

Er, you don’t remember her attacking feminism in general? That’s precisely what her “convoluted verbiage” about delineating the subject was; and it was a half-assed, incoherent critique at that. Where she touched on actual issues within the feminist movement, it was stuff that had been covered far better by previous (mostly non-white, too) theorists - and Butler ignored all of that and wrote as if she was covering new ground. That really pissed me off.

Her comments about lesbian identity weren’t in any of her books, from what I can remember; they were on a sheet of her quotes that the lecturer handed out, which I assume were intended to make us think she was funny. I don’t have the exact quote anymore, but I found it glaringly privileged and offensive; it was to the extent of “going off to [some left-wing university in the states) to be a lesbian” and was really dismissive of lesbian identity; it was as if she’d spent so much time in the ivory tower that she couldn’t conceive of why lesbian identity might be important other than a naff expression of sexual roles.

Julia Serano was spot on about insisting on cis academics studying cispeople for a change, but what Butler argues would, in practice, mean for transpeople “okay, you get to disappear now! congratulations!”, so the fact that she chooses to ignore that is problematic to say the least.

Emma G: Oh, I understand why she’d be an academic favourite, but I think it says more about the problems with modern Western academia (especially in the gender studies area) than it does about Butler’s merits. I’m not saying that she’s anti-feminist; I’m just saying that she’s not a feminist. She’s a queer theorist; from reading her work, I don’t think she particularly gives a crap about practical problems facing queers or women; it’s all about breaking down the categories. Joy. I think you put it nicely in the end: a difficult read that’s worth it is fine; not so much coming to the conclusion that there’s not much there. I didn’t much like Butler going in, but I came out even more angry with the prevalence of her work in gender studies orthodoxy.

Emily: I’m inclined to think both poststructuralist feminism (well, for the most part; at least in the sense that Butler used it) and psychoanalysis are nonsense in general, which is where I’m coming from here. I’m not a huge fan of Irigaray either, although I find her considerably less irritating than I do Butler. I can’t speak for Butler’s later work in any detail, but I haven’t seen anything so far that would change my low opinion of her.

Yeah, Namaste has been on my to-get list for a while. Prosser, though, hasn’t. I had to study part of Second Skins in a course I did a couple of years ago; I ferociously critiqued the other presented readings on trans stuff, but I wound up ignoring Second Skins altogether because I felt it came out with a lot of bizarre generalisations and generally didn’t make much sense; I believe my comments at the time were that he should go easy on the drugs. I see some sense in where he was going generally, and maybe the rest of the book was better, but I wasn’t impressed with what I read.

As for Janet Halley, yeah, we have an interesting gender studies faculty. According to said lecturer, Halley is “the next big thing in feminism from the states”. This comes as news to me, and I think says rather more about the lecturer than it does about Halley.

Her later work is, as Robbie said, much better. Undoing Gender is alright, and Precarious Life has some interesting meditations on mourning and 9/11 and is written really clearly for her. I also liked the bit in The Psychic Life of Power where she analysed heterosexual cisgenders as a form of melancholia.

I recommended Viviane Namaste to you, I’d also recommend Jay Prosser’s Second Skins, which has a whole chapter critiquing queer theory’s use of transness, particularly Butler (though he is surprisingly eager to brush aside Elisabeth Grosz’s transphobia, which is a bit odd considering).

I haven’t read Janet Halley, I cannot for the life of me imagine why she’d be considered significant enough to study.

It’s been a couple of years since I read Gender Trouble, I admit, but I don’t recall her attacking feminism in general. I do remember her devoting a big wad of painfully convoluted verbiage to highlighting some theoretical problems with the project of delineating the subject of feminism - that is to say, where those feminists Galla listed thought they were in a position to say who is or is not a woman, Butler emphatically did not. She thought they were barking up the wrong tree.

I liked her take on queer identity. What did she say about lesbian identity that you didn’t like?

Julia Serano said that cis people would make ideal subjects for gender studies, and seemed to think that it’s insulting for cis academics to use trans experience to illustrate academic points. In any case, Butler does explicitly talk about trans stuff a little bit in some of her other work. My copy of Undoing Gender is in storage, but otherwise I would photocopy you a very clearly trans-friendly (and surprisingly readable) essay about GID diagnosis, the DSM, sexuality and trans autonomy.

While Butler didn’t say it quite as GallingGalla put it, it’s still a grossly cissexist work. You can’t say what Butler does about sex and gender, ignore transpeople, not mention transpeople, and avoid the conclusion that we’re being defined out of existence by implication. It’s not just that though: I simply cannot stand Butler in any context. Her comments about lesbian identity, for one, practically screamed “I AM A PRIVILEGED TOOL”.

Firefly: Unfortunately, ANU’s end-of-course reviews are only ever seen by the teacher concerned, and so I’m not sure that would be of much help. Thanks for the suggestion of appealing the mark, though; I’m tempted to go ahead and do that.

Also, if you seriously think you’ve been marked down for disagreeing with the course co-ordinator, go to academic appeals to have it re-marked, hopefully by someone saner. I hope your academic board is a lot less crap than ours.

And I’m fairly sure that Butler didn’t say that anyone is really X pretending to be Y. For one thing, that would make no sense after she argued against the idea of sex being unsubjective and unconsructed.

Robbie - Oh, sure, Butler is just great. Yeah, gender is all “performativity”, it’s not possible that there’s a neurological component (oh, the brain has neurons with estrogen receptors? I’ll have to ignore that, as it interferes with my grand unifying theory of gender), and anybody who feels that their gender is innate is simply deluded. Cuz, you know, she’s the big academic expert and that certainly trumps the lived experiences of real, live, trans folk.

And, she’s a feminist? That sure makes her qualified to speak for trans people, just like it makes Raymond, Greer, Daly, Jeffreys, etc qualified to do so.

Butler’s arguments are nothing more than “you’re X pretending to by Y” wrapped in a thick blanket of academic language, ready for quoting by the “But I *respect* trans people! Really, I do!” crowd.