More Judith and Martha and More Not My Book

[kelly_chambliss]

Further thoughts (and further avoidance behavior) related to Martha vs. Judith:

I think the Nussbaum essay, while erudite and in many ways convincing, nonetheless has some important problems.  For one thing, she sets up a dichotomy between her preferred sort of feminist theory, that which is directly connected to legal and social activism, and the Butlerian form of feminism, which Nussbaum defines as language-based and morally passive.  But to me, feminist theory and feminism in general are not so either/or.  Also, Nusssbaum accuses Butler of offering only assertions, not arguments, but in her essay, Nussbaum often does the same.  Also also, at times Nussbaum misrepresents Butler, and she's such a careful, thorough reader that I can't believe she did so unwittingly.

Very briefly, Nussbaum characterizes Butler's position as follows:  We cannot change any of the fundamental structures of society, including gender oppression and other forms of cultural domination and submission.  Since large-scale social improvement is impossible, we should focus our strategies of resistance on linguistic parody and subversion, small verbal challenges to prevailing gender codes that, at least for those in the know, will provide a little space for transgression.  It's not much, but it's sexy, and it's the best we can hope for.

This reading is not completely inaccurate, but it's a reductio-ad-absurdem, a tactic that I think is unworthy of Nussbaum.  There are many things in Judith Butler's work that one can object to (her mind-battering style being the most obvious).  But if one wants to object to her ideas, I'd prefer to read an objection to the actual ideas, not to a skewed version of them.

I haven't read all of Butler, so I can't comment on Nussbaum's readings of the books after Gender Trouble.  But as I read Butler in that book (and I find her as difficult as anyone, so I could be completely wrong), she is not saying, "you can never really change anything, so don't bother to try; just indulge in a little bit of nose-thumbing gender parody and call it radical resistance."  Instead, she is saying that unless and until we challenge notions of gender at the most basic linguistic level, until we cause some "gender trouble," we can never achieve meaningful, large-scale social change.  (Or if we do change some things, we're still likely to be serving the current power structures, just in less obvious or different ways.) In my memory of the book, she doesn't actually talk much about possible large-scale change, or set that up as the ultimate goal, but I never thought she was ruling out the possibility; she was just concentrating on the first order of business, issues of gender definition and performance.

Nussbaum accuses Butler, at the very least, of dangerous naivete, but I think Butler would see Nussbaum's sort of feminism, which accepts a stable, already-codified definition of "woman," as the naive one.  Sure, Butler might say, with that view, you can work on activist things like rape legislation, but you'll be treating only symptoms, not underlying causes.  The fundamental oppressive structures will remain intact because you're focusing on details, not on the system as a whole.  Thus, Butler doesn't seem to be saying simply, "you'll never change things," but "you'll never change things UNLESS you address our concepts of gender at the most basic level and ultimately challenge the entire human social structure."

Now, this idea isn't necessarily or automatically valid, but it IS a somewhat different one from the one Nussbaum ascribes to Butler.

The issue reminds me of Jane Tompkins' book Sensational Designs, in which she notes that modern critics have often denigrated Harriet Beecher Stowe's view, especially as expressed in Uncle Tom's Cabin, that personal religious conversion was necessary to social change.  "Come on," the modern writers say.  "What good will personal conversion do in the face of a vastly immoral, corrupt system like slavery?  How naive."

Tompkins suggests that to Stowe, it would be the modern thinkers who are naive.  To an evangelical like Stowe, it wouldn't make sense to think you could affect meaningful, large-scale social change without large-scale personal changes in the very way people looked at themselves and God.

Butler, of course, isn't talking about the power of religion, certainly not evangelical Christianity, but at their core, the issues between Stowe/Moderns and Butler/Nussbaum seem the same:  a difference in focus, a difference in one's sense of where the core troubles lie (and even of what the core troubles are) and what must first be done to address them. 

I find these topics fascinating but frustrating in how often it seems that even brilliant, well-meaning people can't make themselves understood to one another; how much potentially-useful time has to be spent just on clarification.  We're all a huge bunch of J. Alfred Prufrocks, constantly saying, "That is not what I meant.  That is not what I meant at all."

Of course, fanfic writer that I am, I can't offer all these direct opinions without disclaimers of some sort *g*  So here they are:

I'm not a big-star academic, no Nussbaum or Butler or Tompkins.  No big-time university has ever gotten into a salary bidding war over ME!  If I ever do publish my book, it will be lucky to get a review of any kind, let alone an 8500-word screed in a national magazine.  When I read people like Butler, I feel like an idiot, struggling to locate the subject of a sentence when other readers are apparently skimming right along, not only getting it all but formulating responses and objections.  So clearly I am an intellectual lightweight, and probably I have misunderstood and misrepresented all of these writers in my own way.

Plus, it's been literally years since I read theTompkins book, so probably I've misremembered and/or oversimplified it.

So there -- if I'm right, good; if I'm wrong, well, it was just a misunderstanding.