How Contrapoints Misunderstands Gender
medium.com
The theory of gender that emerges from Contrapoints’ videos offers us an eclectic mix of contradictory theories, and fails to give us a…

"I hope to explore the underlying conception of gender that Natalie deploys and develops in her Contrapoints videos, in order to provide a materialist critique of this theory of gender. First, I will look to several of Natalie’s videos in order to try to explicitly outline her conception of gender. Second, I will offer a materialist criticism of this conception that highlights Natalie’s silence on the economic and political function of gender in a patriarchal and capitalist society. In doing so, I will try to explain why this misconception of gender results in the problems and conceptual errors that plague The Aesthetic."

  • PapaEmeritusIII [any]
    ·
    4 years ago

    The demand “recognize my identity as being as valid as other identities” presumes identity exists as some unassailable and natural phenomena. For example, in the demand that non-binary identity be seen as equally valid to man or woman as identities, there is presumption that we ought not to be critical of the notions of man and woman in the first place. The impulse to simply create more and more identity categories can only be understood as a liberating political project if we understand the project of placing people into identity categories on the basis of gender and sexuality to be a politically liberatory act in the first place.

    This comes across to me as saying self-expression is fine, as long as you don’t try to label yourself or create a category for what you are. But creating/adopting categories which describe our identities is part of self expression.

    Personally, I don’t have a gender. I totally understand the desire to do away with gender altogether and just let everyone be “people” with unlimited expression. But labels such as “woman,” “man,” and “non-binary” are extremely important to many trans people who have struggled and fought to claim these labels for themselves. If you try and base your movement on the idea that these labels should be left in the past, you’re going to have a hard time. And I’m not convinced that any benefits of doing away with the labels would be worth it.

    • skeletorsass [she/her]
      ·
      4 years ago

      She is herself a trans woman who identifies as a woman. I do not think she opposes the use or the meaning for the labels themself. What she says is that getting the society to accept people is a single victory and does not fix the root problem of the coercive structure, but not that this is unworthy. She says:

      So, what comes after Gender Nihilism? It is certainly not a politics of radical negation, it is not a refusal to engage in positive political struggle, it is not a refusal to define our demands.

      Comrade Feinberg is actually saying a similar point here in different words: the desirable end is that all identity are freely respected without coercion. Comrade Escalante is using the word gender to refer to the power structure. She says that she can not know or prescribe how people would act without the structure.

      This is my understanding at least.

      I am going to be a master of English soon with all of this reading! I am honestly very exited to bring Western perspectives on this topic to my own activism.

        • PapaEmeritusIII [any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I wish I could just disagree with an author without my disagreement being mischaracterized as a dunk attempt. Do you think I’m doing this for epic debate points? I have an actual stake in these conversations as a nonbinary person; when I see a piece of writing that says that the proliferation of new gender and sexual identities “can perhaps be understood as a demand for recognition taken to an absurd extent,” I don’t think it’s bad faith of me to be perturbed.