"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."
Without a unified theory of gender, we cannot theorize an appropriate or strategic response to patriarchal oppression
Hmm, this doesn’t sit right with me. Gonna try and explain why.
-If you try to have One Theory Of Gender, you’re gonna alienate people. The exact definition of gender is really difficult to pin down, and many trans people (myself included) are okay with that. Allowing everyone to define their own personal relationship with gender is good, actually.
-Many times in history, trans people have, in fact, managed to fight against patriarchal oppression and make important strides in advancing trans rights. Yes, even without a unified theory of gender.
Took a look at another of this person’s articles.
The struggle for the abolition of gender cannot be separated from the struggle for communism.
Oh, this person’s a gender abolitionist. In response to this, I’m just going to drop in a passage (lightly edited to remove triggering content) from Leslie Feinberg’s Trans Liberation.
Many in the movement who yearned not only for women’s liberation, but also for human liberation, embarked on a bold social experiment. They hoped that freeing individuals from femininity and masculinity would help people be viewed on a more equal basis that highlighted each person’s qualities and strengths. They hoped that androgyny would replace masculinity and femininity and help do away with gendered expression altogether.
Twenty years after that social experiment, we have the luxury of hindsight. The way in which individuals express themselves is a very important part of who they are. It is not possible to force all people to live outside of femininity and masculinity. Only androgynous people live comfortably in that gender space. There’s no social compulsion powerful enough to force anyone else to dwell there. Trans people are an example of the futility of this strategy. Mockery and beatings and unemployment and hunger and threats of [...] institutionalization have not forced us as trans people to conform to narrow norms.
Why would we want to ask anyone to give up their own hard-fought-for place on the gender spectrum? There are no rights or wrongs in the ways people express their own gender style. No one’s lipstick or flattop is hurting us. No one’s gender expression is any more “liberated” than anyone else’s.
Gender freedom — isn’t that what we’re all fighting for with every breath we take? Well, how are we going to win it if we don’t support each other’s right to be different from us? Each person has the right to express their gender in any way that feels most comfortable — masculine or feminine, androgynous, bi- and tri-gender expression, gender fluidity, gender complexity, and gender contradiction. There are many shades of gender that are not even represented in language yet. One could argue that leather people and nuns are their own genders.
People don’t have to give up their individuality or their particular manner of gender expression in order to fight sex and gender oppression. It’s just the opposite. People won’t put their time, energy, and commitment into organizing unless they know that the movement they are building is defending their lives.
Your counter completely misses the point. That's the danger of quoting just the spicy sentence.
A properly materialist assessment of the conditions which produce gender reveals the extent to which gender is not merely a linguistic or discursive phenomena. Gender is a material relationship that can only be combatted materially.
Alyson wants to abolish gender the same why we want to abolish the class distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Like your quotes from "Trans Liberation" don't contradict Alyson's arguments.
First check out this other comment I made:
https://hexbear.net/post/82659/comment/894002The main thing I’m trying to get at is this: I don’t agree with Alyson’s assertion that gender abolition/nihilism is the only way forward. In fact, I think it will make it much more difficult to form a movement, since such assertions will dissuade many potential allies in the trans community who have fought hard for their identities.
She does not propose androgyny as gender abolition however. Many other form of gender abolition do, but her work rejects this as still within the gender and unhelpful. She would like to abolish the gender as the power structure, not abolish the self-expression. This is the purpose of the article in rejecting the previous work.
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.
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.
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.
Did you just go in for the dunk without reading any of my other comments
Twenty years after
It is not possible
lol ok millennial
Sorry for reading an old book, I guess.
Are you suggesting that it is possible to force all people to live outside of femininity and masculinity?
The gender abolitionists I've known have been less "genders get the wall" and more "let 10,000 genders bloom"
I have worked elsewhere to provide an account of gender which seeks to contextualize it within the Marxist method of historical materialism. I have previously argued that gender has to be understood in material and economic terms, as an ideological justification for a specific class relationship within capitalist society. I do not wish to rehash the entirety of that work here, but I do want to point readers towards important feminist contributions that allow us to theorize gender in a materialist manner.
sorry i didn't read the post i just threw the first thing that came on my mind after reading the title
Interesting article. I feel like I don't understand enough about Marxist feminism's take on gender before capitalism. Surely issues of social reproduction and domestic roles existed in, say, Ancient Athens? I need to read more...
Somebody on chapo (was it you?) linked her anti-manifesto on gender nihilism too, I think that's also a good read
It did! I think she relies too much on Federici though. I've read some critiques of Caliban and the Witch as hugely overestimating the extent of the witch trials (though tbf I haven't studied either side of the arguments in depth).
Alyson has a Patreon if people are interested in reading more and supporting her directly.
I got confused near the end. Like I get the parts about the problems with not having a unified theory and deploying contradicting versions of gender when it's convenient, but I was just kind of waiting for it to address the elephant in the room near the end regarding settler colonialism, class, and race which is well, outside the bougie areas of wealthy western countries most people reject the entire field of study. Like how do you fix this without just blowing the entire thing up and maybe using something like the mass line to make new theory with a material base that has motivations more in line with broader society?
