/lit/ - Literature

Books or GTFO.

>>3166486

>>3166486
Shouldn't that be "/lit/s or GTFO?"

>>3166500
HA HAHAHAAHAHAHAAHHA

>>3166481
ur moms is.

>>3166481

obviously..

>>3166481
The question isn't whether gender is performative. It's whether gender is basically performative or not.

>>3166617

care to elaborate?

depends on whether you're talking physiology or self image, if i'm understanding your question.
ask a psychologist, then a biologist.

>>3166481
I'm like a bass player of gender, I am disgustingly filthy, loathesome, and only alluring to people who never get to date the lead.

So yeah, gender's performative and it makes little difference to my sexual desirability, now, watch me slappadabass.

You know who I don't like? Martha Nussbaum.

>>3166625
gender - identity (self image, psychology)
sex - biology

now lets wait for the trolls and the /pol/sters to roll in and get the two confused

Eve Sedgewick

>>3166662
Sex/gender distinction doesn't work with Butler. 2 main reasons: sex is still socially constructed on some physical level because hermaphrodites and "correction"; our usual experience of people's physical sexes have nothing to do with their genitalia (we hide our junk).

No.

It's manifestation is a result of biological processes.

>>3166695

What does biology have to do with "manning up." Why is genital alteration such a prevalent practice?

>>3166677
Good point.

>>3166702
>Why is genital alteration such a prevalent practice?

Special snowflake syndrome coupled with school bullying.

>>3166702
Because I hate my son's penis and wish to castrate his sexual experience and performativity to get it to match my concept of what a "mans" penis should look like.

>>3166481
No. Existentialism is for faggots.

>>3166677
>our usual experience of people's physical sexes have nothing to do with their genitalia (we hide our junk)

We don't hide it with the purpose of concealing our junk. In fact in a lot of cases it's the opposite. Are you trying to say you've never fantasized about an attractive person you saw in public?

http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

>>3166702
Because Puritans and fear of angry desert gods.

>>3166695
if this was true, what it means to be a man or woman would remain constant across cultures and through time. this obviously isn't the case, you even have opposing notions of what it means to be a man within a society at a given point in time. eg the aristocracy and peasants during feudalism.

>>3166786

Thank you for cementing my point.

>>3166791
You're welcome. I wasn't the guy you were replying to.

>>3166747
Of course, but the fantasy isn't junk oriented. Concealing the junk reduces a person to the appearance of the person—it castrates them. Even soft-core porn is insufficient to make people's gender whole because only fully sexual genital exhibition produces a full gendered subjectivity.

Now I'm all one for looking at ladies' pensises, and men's vulva; but normally it is the otherway around.

Junk is junk only when it is in your face and you can slickle it, or headbutt it, all people performing masculinity like that.

>>3166806
>yur dik

>>3166849
I've posted my dick on /soc/, find me, find me in the multitude of disembodied cocks.

>>3166745
>Existentialism

do you even butler

>>3166762
Has Nussbaum ever read anything other than 20th century American philosophy? There is nothing particularly dense or confusing about Butler's prose.

>>3166875
he has bigger tits than she does

>>3166931
Hurrr lets make fun of the aesthetic guys.

>>3166934
I'm just saying mang

>>3166789
I don't agree. I think gender roles across cultures and times are remarkably consistent.

The variation comes from factors external to the body. Resource scarcity in other words.

Culture is the result of biology and resource scarcity. Ultimately, however, resource scarcity causes a biological reaction so that it's biology all the way down along with the turtles.

>>3166928
maybe she's improved over time but last thing i read by butler she just kept saying the same thing over and over again but in different ways

i realize this is what philosophy does sometimes but it was pretty poorly organized compared to other stuff i've read

>>3166702
Men are relied upon to protect women so that they can nurture infants in security.

Genital mutilation serves a variety of needs. But primarily: In women, it serves as a way to indicate who is available for reproduction. A mark of adulthood. In men, the same, but also a symbol of menstruation - sympathetic magic in other words.

I think a healthy dose of both 2nd and 3rd wave feminism is good.

>>3166971

>>3166976
http://thenewsjunkie.com/man-flashes-feminist-pride-walk-all-hell-breaks-loose/

>>3166981

>>3166662
Daily reminder.

>>3166996
Please for the love of god tell me this is a troll image.

>>3167008
>I have been intellectually pummeled so I'll just call the other person a troll

>>3166996
I agree with you and I think I see what the graphic is communicating, but I also think that it's missing the issue.

The issue is that there is a wide range of personality variation among men and women. It's easy to find women who act masculine and men who act feminine. It's not uncommon at all. Even more common are men and women who have specific characteristics not commonly thought to be associated with their gender.

That variation, I would argue, comes from a biological place. But some would argue it's completely culturally derived. I think it's obvious that just as people differ physically, they differ in personality, but some can't accept this.

>>3167012
Sex is not gender. Sex is not a social construct (mostly, at least. Notions of sex are still socially constructed by biologists, who categorize certain physical properties as "male" and "female", but that really isn't particularly interesting to me).

Gender, however, refers not just to one's biological chromosomes, but the social role associated with those chromosomes. When I say "Alex is a woman", I don't just invoke a purely objective, biological understanding of who Alex is in your mind. To say she is a woman rather than a man means *far more* than just her genitalia are different, it brings about all sorts of assumptions as to the characteristics that Alex has, as well as how Alex ought to be, and these characteristics are established not by biology, but rather by society, and that is what people mean when they say that gender is "socially constructed".

>>3167012
Posting a man often called female isn't the best move to make when supporting that image

>>3167031
I would go further, and point out that "masculine" and "feminine" are not even objective categories, independent from social institutions. When you say that "he is a woman, but acting masculine", you are not referring to objective categories of male and female-ness that are universal, rather you are referring to the way that her behavior is perceived within certain social circumstances.

It is perfectly conceivable that things that are considered "masculine" even from a supposedly "biological" perspective, may be considered "feminine" in certain, different social contexts.

>>3167037
>Gender, however, refers not just to one's biological chromosomes, but the social role associated with those chromosomes.

Social behaviors associated with masculine/feminine are derived from biology.

>these characteristics are established not by biology

[citation needed]

>rather by society

Based upon biological differences between men and women.

>>3167012
not the guy you're replying to, but that image is a strawman insofar as it claims that people claim sex is a social construct

people claim gender is a social construct, not both gender AND sex

>>3167055
>people claim gender is a social construct, not both gender AND sex

There's no difference. You can't separate gender from sex.

>>3167052
also not the guy you're in a debate with, but the fact that i have a penis and testosterone pumping through my body doesn't tell me whether i will buy chanel no. 5 or drakkar noir

cologne/perfume is actually an excellent example of the social construction of gender now that i think about it. you need to view masculinity as culturally dependent.

>>3167052
>Social behaviors associated with masculine/feminine are derived from biology.
>Based upon biological differences between men and women.

The fact that social norms are based upon biological differences does not change the fact that the expectations and meanings cultures assign to gender are socially constructed, and more importantly, could be constructed differently.

It is self-evident that physical distinctions are what gave rise to different gender roles, male and female bodies are objectively different. Literally no feminist or gender theorist will disagree with you here. The point is, how societies react to and treat these physical differences, and how they construct and define roles like "man" and "woman" are flexible, and not absolute nor objective.

>>3167059
sure you can

>sex
my son has a penis

>gender
i paint my newborn son's room blue and not pink

i can tell that you are severely under-read on this subject and don't have a full grasp on what is meant by "gender"

>>3167059
The terms are definitionally different, unless you want to start your own world where these words mean different things, your statement is necessarily untrue.

>>3167068
>It is self-evident that physical distinctions are what gave rise to different gender roles, male and female bodies are objectively different. Literally no feminist or gender theorist will disagree with you here.

I think the problem some people have, myself included, is that it seems some gender theorists DO disagree. But I'm no expert. Maybe I'm wrong about this.

It may be a modern thing too. I think Professor John Money definitely believed gender was 100% culturally derived.

>>3167098
Reading Money's Wikipedia page, it looks like I was wrong, that he is giving culture like maybe 90% gender construction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Money

Thing is though, this may be the problem some people have with the whole gender role line of thinking. Where is the line drawn? What is cultural? What is biological? Extremists, like Money, will give culture 90% influence, while a more moderate thinker, I imagine puts it at almost the opposite.

Personally, I ultimately think everything is biologically derived in some way because otherwise, where does it come from? God? The cosmic ether? Culture is not simply a roll of the dice. Or is it? Maybe it is.

>>3166481
check an anthropological study on gender, on ebsco. this is a question that has been solved and filed many times over.

>>3167124
not everything observed in society can be reduced to biology, just as there are explanations in biology that cannot be given from chemistry

>>3167136
I don't currently agree with that. Maybe WE can't currently understand the underlying biology, but it still exists.

Maybe I'll someday be convinced otherwise.

>>3167145
Regardless, at the moment, we don't have conceptual models even remotely complex enough to model social behaviors in terms of biology, so when people say something like "the hormonal difference between men and women explains why men are dominant in social institutions", these sorts of claims go far beyond what biological evidence necessarily supports and can prove.

>>3167066
I don't know how true this is, but it's something believed in a lot of the perfume industry: scents like musk found only in men's perfume can be smelled by women and not by men, or more acutely by women. So there's even a belief that, even though the man is choosing the scent, he is doing it on the belief that it can attract women, not through first hand experience and choosing the scent his genetics attract him to. It's a kind of weird, ideologically charged, hetero-normative inversion, where there's this ingrained belief that men and women are fundamentally different, yet still only respond to social pressures/cues.

>mfw the latest trend in stifling the dissonance from being a faggot

Soon enough we'll have people sitting in front of their computers all day every day and justify it by saying that movement is "performative". Oh wait, that's already happened.

I think the term "construct" only leads to semantic confusion. To people just learning about this stuff, it makes it sound deliberate and not a product of a contingent sociohistorical process.

People express their personalities differently and it leads to a wide variance in behavior that biology has very little to say (currently) about other than conjecture. Some of these behaviors become associated with a given society's expectations for people who appear to be one of the biological sexes. These expectations change over time, and vary in every culture on earth. If you accept this, wouldn't it actually be a more cautious position to simply take how people act at face value, and accept it as a valid expression of who they are? How does it affect you?

>>3167066
>the fact that i have a penis and testosterone pumping through my body doesn't tell me whether i will buy chanel no. 5 or drakkar noir

Are you denying the effects of testosterone on human behavior? Feminists retards say the gender is relative, which is true, but where they go wrong is when they start claiming that therefore it is purely a cultural and social construct. It's not. Behaviors considered either masculine and feminine are largely based upon biology, for example estrogen and testosterone.

>>3167071
But your son's gender is dependent on his sex, so it makes no sense to separate the two. Educate yourself, kiddo.

>>3167498
>Behaviors considered either masculine and feminine are largely based upon biology, for example estrogen and testosterone.

Well if you're that confident about your position, I'm sure you're able to provide evidence for this claim across every culture in history, including all contemporaneous ones.

>>3167502
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Brain

>>3167502
Every man across all of history didn't act exactly the same, as culture influences some behaviors. But the basic identity associated with masculinity has been static because of testosterone and other biologic influences.

>>3167507
Answer the question. I'll get you started:

Was pederasty in ancient greece masculine or feminine behavior? How was it governed by biology? Cite any relevant studies done on the biology of contemporary pederasts to substantiate any claims you make about the biological basis of the practice.

>>3167512
You're simply restating your original point. I'm asking for evidence.

>>3167513
>all this backpedaling

I guess I've got you cornered. Since I've already proven to you that extensive influence that testosterone plays in human behavior, what left is there to discuss? Unless you are going to deny that hormones influence human behavior now.

>>3167518
>Since I've already proven to you that extensive influence that testosterone plays in human behavior, what left is there to discuss?

I'm just a concerned citizen asking questions. You've only cited one brief part of a wiki article about testosterone's effects on the brain. I'm asking you to fill the gap between brain function and culture.

>>3167525
You brought up pederasty in ancient Greece, so I'll go with that. Pederasty actually proves me right, because the ancient Greeks considered the man on top(the one dominating, a male trait) to be the masculine one, whereas getting penetrated was considered shameful and effeminate(because the man was taking on the role of the woman). Masculinity just manifests itself in different behaviors, for example whats considered an act of dominance is relative across different cultures.

>>3167411
>I don't know how true this is, but it's something believed in a lot of the perfume industry
Propaganda used to sell gendered products at a higher premium.

>>3167532
>Pederasty actually proves me right, because the ancient Greeks considered the man on top(the one dominating, a male trait) to be the masculine one, whereas getting penetrated was considered shameful and effeminate(because the man was taking on the role of the woman).

Except pederasty was a practice of the wealthy class and viewed as part of a passage into manhood. Why would the greeks consider it shameful to participate? The entire ruling class did it.

>>3167532
You've not only confused pederasty with homosexuality in general, you've also managed to throw in an outdated view of homosexuality in Greece.

>>3166633
I can't say I'm a huge fan either, although I have only had to read a few chapters of Cultivating Humanity for a class I'm in.

>>3167539
>Except pederasty was a practice of the wealthy class and viewed as part of a passage into manhood. Why would the greeks consider it shameful to participate? The entire ruling class did it.

The men did not penetrate the younger boys, sonny. Look it up.

>>3167532
Another thing: pederasty was not only part of a passage into manhood, but viewed as a sort of mentorship and the purest form of love two human beings could enjoy. What about that has to do only with dominance? The institution itself was already practiced by the dominant class as a passage into leadership of society.

>>3167545
Good catch. He tried to sneak that one by.

>>3167546
>What about that has to do only with dominance?

In Greece they did not view homosexuality the same way we do. A man putting his dick in another man's ass was considered an act of dominance. Now, as far as pederasty goes, the older man did not penetrate the young boy because that was considered shameful and effeminate.

everything is performative, including people saying that things are performative

>>3166806
>implying I have to use eyesight to comprehend someone else's junk

>forgetting sonar

>>3167500
Not necessarily. Let's do some simple tests and questions to look more closely at the relationship between gender and sex (NSFW). What gender is the person in this photo? And their sex?

Let's say this person walks past you fully clothed on the street, and you were none the wiser; you would think this person is a man.

>>3167498
Strawman, moving goal posts, etc. My claim is simply that testosterone in my body does not determine whether I like the male cologne or the female perfume. This is what is meant by "social construct." Again, I think you are the same person as above, and it appears you do not really understand what gender means.

To identify and be identified by others as "male" today in the United States is via particular appearances and choices that make no reference to genitalia. I do not need to show my cock to strangers to have them know I am a man, it is indicated by other signs, like short hair in this culture.

>>3167059
Guise, you should read up on Butler later works. The basic premisse is Derridean: The metaphysics of Presence attributed to sex are undermined by Butler - sex IS the social construct, not only gender.
Also, the discussion has moved on (at least since Harraway's mature essays) to a discussion of the boundaries of the body.