Critical Response #6

Reflecting on this past week’s readings, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was definitely an intense one. Butler’s discussion of kinship being defined through women made me think of the ways in which spaces for homo bonds are created, but regulated through women and heterosexuality. In intro feminism discourses, the exchange of women through marriage has been glazed over and looked at nothing more than an oppressive system where women were defined as property. While that’s not completely untrue, Butler discusses how it’s naive to dismiss it as only such that. The constructions of gender and masculinity are hardly critiqued in this process. Butler introduces the idea that women reflect masculinity through this process by existing as the site of its absence. Women are simultaneously imported and exported, disvalued and place huge amounts of power in concerns of the construction of patriarchy and masculinity all at the same time. This system of binding men together, creating homosocial bonds while also value and reinforcing heteronormativity; revealing as Butler reiterates, that the master is dependent on the slave.

Speaking of intro feminism discourse, something that I have heard way too often during my time in OSU’s WGSS program is for instructors asking students to imagine a time where patriarchy didn’t exist and what that society might look like. I have to admit that I’ve fallen into this trap several times here as a student, but reading Butler gave me insight on how this practice is harmful. First off, when people say patriarchy, they use it as a blanket term and rarely is it intersectional, so that’s the first flaw in this hypothetical reflection. Second, as Butler argues, this line of thought sets up the notion that this violent system was inevitable. It imagines as nature, always constructed as feminine evidenced by the names such as Mother Nature/Earth, needing at some point culture, created as masculine and white, to order it. Nature needs culture in order to be civilized, to not fall into savage ways, thus creating the ideology that civilization was needed and natural in order to exist in the society that we live in today. This analysis that Butler introduced made me probe into this issue further. Since this basic process has had its problematic flaws pointed out, how do we imagine a time before this specific type of violence in order to underline that patriarchy is not a natural system? For me, what makes sense is that these ranking and valuing of certain bodies did exist (reasons that I can’t really explain, but for hypothesis reasons, they just do). But the catalyst that brought the system that we know today was colonialism and how that system of domination and violence led to today’s current state. But who knows, another theorist could introduce ways that I didn’t see before how this imaging also is problematic.