Not your men, or in the alternative, not you

First, I want to thank everyone who commented on my last journal post for their warm (well, mostly) and generous expressions and encouragements. I wish to respond to what was said there, and I will. Before I do, however, I owe renaissgrl the courtesy of a consideration of her arguments on my prior feminism-related journal post.

WARMING UP

Let's begin with imbtween's comment, and my contextualized response to it:

The choice by women during the baby boom to choose mothering as their career is backsliding? Why is that any less legitimate a career choice as lawyer or dr?

The assignment of any career to a specific gender category is backsliding, yes.

Now, my response here came from a distinction between "choice", as such, and the structures that determine the "choices" readily available to be made. From that position, the issue wasn't one of "choice": everyone makes choices, every day, every minute of their waking lives. To claim that people "have no choice" is to describe a world that doesn't exist. I thus dismissed this line of inquiry as a strawman, but failed to make my dismissal of it explicit, as I really didn't give it that much thought.

That I wasn't giving it that much thought doesn't mean that imbtween was as unconcerned with the question as I.

what was "assigned" about it? Most, as far as I know, chose it....

(emphasis mine)

There's that word again. He went on to develop his point. But I wasn't listening, because again I saw him as arguing against a strawman. We had no disagreement: people choose (not women, people, individual persons). That had nothing to do with my argument about the structure of choices readily available.

That word, "readily", is important here. I will link to a podcast that develops this idea, in terms of "default" choices, in the comments. It is not to say there aren't other choices available, but that what's available, as compared to what's readily available, are experienced very differently. That's the stuctural argument.

ROUND I

Groucho contributed a response here, but I believe I responded to him there (at least on that point--there's clearly been a lot of activity on that thread since then), so let me focus onrenaissgirl's words. She wasn't about to see me brush off imbtween that easily.

imbetween did not say "assign"; he said "choose and choice." it's so interesting how you interpreted his words. you project your ideas onto them.

So, let's recap. I did interpret his words. I didn't interpret his words to make "choose and choice" synonymous with "assign". I interpreted his words as making an argument against a strawman, a fictional dystopia in which there is no choice--and gave it no further thought.

As such, I sought to bring the discussion back to what I saw (remember, this was my perspective: your milage may differ) as reality. Not an argument about having choice or not, but an argument about the structure of the choices one obviously (because it is not possible to not have choice) has.

I wasn't projecting my ideas onto his words. I was trying to actually express my ideas, and his words seemed to be ignoring those ideas in favor of ideas I did not hold and could not possibly imagine anyone successfully defending if they did hold them. As far as I was concerned, he was projecting his ideas onto my words, which is why I was so adamant about what words I chose and that they were my words, not his.

No, ren, I said assign. Btween explicitly questioned my use of the term. I defended that use. You may not judge my defence [sic] inadequate [sic], but I did not project words onto his argument, I used them for my own.

Notice, however, that I still haven't actually engaged imbtween's argument, which renaissgirlwas taking on for her own, because I simply didn't see it as an argument that was being had with me, but with some imaginary person who believes in worlds without choice.

ROUND II

renaissgirl, clearly, was not satisfied with my choice (see what I did there) not to engage the argument.

you just repeated back to me the point i made to you....

you responded to his use of the word "choice" by using the word "assign" and, as i pointed out, that is quite telling about how well you were paying attention.

because women ARE choosing to stay home if they can. many woman can't stay home and be integral in their children's lives and are not happy about it.

I acknowledged the point made to me, yes, and made my point that the point being made to me had nothing to do with me (although not as clearly as I could have), as I was talking about something else entirely. I was paying attention, but what I was paying attention to was that there was this argument going on with a strawman, and that wasn't my argument, and I really, really, wanted to get back to my argument dammit! :/

Yes, many women are choosing to stay home. As for the many women "can't" stay home claim: well, there's that fancy of a world where choice doesn't exist again. They are choosing to work. They could stay home. They'd sacrifice many of the things they would choose for their children if they did, but they have that choice.

Many women make that choice. Society generally doesn't look to kindly upon them for doing so, but they do. There is always choice.

This is the nature of the structure of choice. It isn't enough to say that someone chooses something, just as it is fanciful to claim that they can't choose. Choices are far more complex than that.

I said as much in my reply, quoting from an earlier reply directed at imbtween.

I repeat, for ren's benefit: "The issue of choice is more complex than whether persons from one culturally defined category decided to do something or not."

Yes, that was snark.

ASIDE ON COMPLEXITY

Some will say that I am over-complicating the matter. A choice is a choice, simple as that.Complication is, to my ears, another strawman. Most things in this world are complex, simple as that. Things only get complicated when we refuse to acknowledge that complexity and insist that everyone operate as if things are really simple.

As I did when I bypassed imbtween's and renaissgrl's argument about choice as simply having nothing to do with my argument. Their argument, like everything in this world, has far more complexity to it than I (and perhaps they, I don't know) was willing to admit. I tried to dismiss it as too simple, and as a result, complicated the discussion.

I'll note that I did next to Groucho's argument what I had been doing to the argument being discussed here. I dismissed it as not being the argument I was having. I wasn't "avoiding and begging the question", as he then asserted--that would have been to give me far too much credit--so much as seeing the question as simple, distractingly so, and doing my best to get him to just agree with me that it was simple and move on.

Failing to see the complexity of things tends to complicate things unnecessarily.

ROUND III

But let's get back to responding to renaissgrl. Here was here follow-up.

"The issue of choice is more complex than whether persons from one culturally defined category decided to do something or not."

well, those are a bunch of words strung along together in a sentence format.

what do you know about what it is to be a women and not have a choice about whether to work and try to raise children or just spend time raising children? uh, nothing? amirite? i am right. you have no idea what it's like to be a woman that has born children. this is not about cultural definitions, not what i'm saying. again, projecting wrong meanings onto my words (my words now) based on your notions of what my words mean.

but rabid, extreme feminists...they don't women as people but as womyn. or some such nonsense.

To which I replied:

well, those are a bunch of words strung along together in a sentence format.

Try as I might to hew to Martha Nussbaum's standards of clarity, I still find my sentences received like those of Judith Butler.

...what it is to be a women...

Do I touch it. No, that would be ad hominem. I'll leave it alone. Really. ;)

I'd stopped reading at this point. So let me have a go at it now.

ASIDE ON CLARITY

First, quickly, for those who care, Nussbaum's critique of Butler can be found here. I'm not finding a response by Butler, but from my understanding of it, it can be summarized as: "If you don't understand my sentence, you aren't working hard enough."

I long to be able to adopt the attitude I ascribe to Butler, but keep finding myself wanting to side with Nussbaum, even if I don't see my way clear to writing the way she advocates.

Someone commented recently that they prefer to use vernacular. Another way one might say this is that one speaks clearly (or writes clearly). I've often found that using clear words is not the same idea as communicating an idea with clarity. Often, the vernacular obscures or even leaves unsaid the very things one most wants to say.

Or, to formulate it differently: I could say something the way you want me to, but then I wouldn't be saying what I sought to say, I'd be saying what you want me to say, which is something else entirely. Here, I find myself squarely in Butler's camp.

ON THE SINGULAR PLURAL

But let's consider renaissgrl's construction "a women", not because I want to make another veiled ad hominem attack, but because I think it points eloquently to the very point I was making against Groucho's line of argument, which renaissgrl begins to employ here. Terms that recruit indefinite or definite articles often tell us very important things, and this is certainly no exception.

Let's look at both permutations of this construction.

OF A CATEGORY

What do I know about what it is to be a woman? Absolutely nothing. I am not of that category. Nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of any individual person who has a body associated with the gender "woman", where those experiences are opened upon and constrained by the very features of their body that I don't share.

But then again, nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of a person of any other category. A diabetic, a gymnast, a octogenarian, a five year old, all are equally closed to me, because while the body I inhabit may have had or one day may have features in common with any of those categories, right now, inhabiting this body, I am not inhabiting the body of the five year old standing in front of me.

What do I know about what it is to be a man? Again, absolutely nothing, unless that man is me. Nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of any individual person who has a body associated with the gender "man", because those experiences are opened upon and constrained by the very features of the body of that individual man that I don't share.

I and "a man", not me, have features in common, sure, but then I have features in common with "a woman", also. Features in common are not shared features. Features in common does not make my features their features, my body their body, my experience their experience.

I cannot know what it is to experience life as any individual person that the one I am. All I can know is what any given individual, woman, man, five year old, etc. tells me about their experience. Even then, I may not know as much as I think I do or would like to be able to.

A CATEGORY OF

What of the alternate permutation?

What do I know about what it is to be women? Again, absolutely nothing. I am not a category. Nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of the body imagined for the category "women", where said imagined body is constructed and subverted by the features of bodies, within said category, outside of it, and in opposition to placement within or without, all of which but one, I do not inhabit.

But here again, nothing about the body I inhabit allows me to know the experiences of any other category. Categories don't have experiences, despite all the experiences imagined for them. What do I know about what it is to be men? Absolutely nothing, I don't inhabit that imagined body. Nobody does, although many find themselves contained within it, assigned to it.

ASIDE ON MY OWN GENDER IDENTITY

Indeed, despite such an assignment, I do not think of myself as a man. I acknowledge that I have a body of the category male, but the body of the category men is so very alien to me that I do not relate to it in countless ways. Likewise, I often find the experiences of those who identify as men, as they describe those experiences to me as the experiences of men, unfathomable.

Now, I do have a choice here. I could stake a claim to the category man. I could inform the person speaking to me about their experiences--which they describe as their experiences as a man--that they are entitled to their experiences, but they don't speak for men, because I am a man, and those are certainly not my experiences as a man.

I could point to some category that they use to identify themselves other than that of "men" (perhaps, "masculinist"?), and argue that they do men a disservice by claiming to speak for men, because they certainly don't speak for me. If I really wanted to make my point, I could add some adjectives to the front of that category, let's call them "rabid, extreme masculinists", and then I really could be on firm ground saying well, you can go be rabid and extreme all you like, but you don't speak for men, so stop claiming you do.

FURTHER ASIDE ON WHO MAY BE SPOKEN FOR

I could do that. I don't however, because a category is not a person. One can speak for a man, or a woman, or a five year old. These are each persons. One may speak for a person. One cannot speak for a category (no matter how much they may claim to), because a category is not a person for whom one may speak.

Thus, rather than lay claim to the category to which I would otherwise be assigned, I choose not to identify with it. It's easier than trying to speak for something that is not a someone that can be spoken for.

This is a major division between feminists of the so-called second wave and those of the just as dubiously termed third wave. An individual "second wave" feminists will likely stand right up and pronounce that they are speaking for women. An individual third wave feminist will (assuming they are not cowed by their elder's much longer tenure as a champion of women's rights) often challenge this claim, making an argument very similar to the one I make above.

YET ANOTHER ASIDE ON RELATING TO CATEGORIES

The importance of the distinction between a category and a person, meanwhile, is central to my own work. I have been building a case for nearly three decades now that, while many entities we encounter in our world are not persons, we relate to them as if they are. My argument here is that our ability to relate to any given set of phenomena as if it were a flesh-and-blood person makes possible all the multiplicity of institutions, artifacts, systems, and yes, categories, that populate our worlds.

This is in direct contestation of the claims held dear in modern humanities departments. Within the halls of academe, any time it appears that we are relating "as if" something is an individual biological human, when it in fact is not a biological human, we have fallen into the trap of anthropomorphism. I reject this claim, arguing that anthropomorphism may occur when we tell ourselves a story in which we portray a set of phenomena as a person, but this is conditioned first by our capacity to relate to it as if it were a person about which a story might be told.

Features our bodies have in common, in particular features of the brains that are compnents of those bodies, grant us this capacity.  That's anathema to anything anyone in the humanities is willing to hear.  That would be some regressive brand of evolutionary psychology, which clearly has been soundly debunked, or horrors, of horrors, a revivication of sociobiology!  One step removed from social Darwinism!  Batten down the hatches!  We're being boarded!  Send that fellow to the plank!  He clearly isn't one of us!

Yeah, well, anyway.

RETURNING TO THE MATTER AT HAND

Having explored that, let's take the question a bit further. To refresh:

what do you know about what it is to be a women and not have a choice about...

Oh, well there I do know something. I know that I do not believe in the reality or even the potentiality of a world in which any person does not have a choice, regardless of the category or categories they may find themselves in. I believe any such world to be a fanciful construction.

This all started with imbtween pointing out, quite rightly, that people make choices. Actually, his initial formulation was "the choice by women", which I reject, as a category cannot make choices, only people can make choices. If I must be pedantically ironic about it, people have no choice but to make choices. Categories aren't in that position, because a category isn't a person.

Be that as it may, I read imbtween as asserting that individual persons in the category women made choices. I had no argument here, and had no interest in nailing myself to a post to play the strawman so that there could be an argument there, so I didn't give the question any further thought.

Now that I have, however, I am struck by the defense of that very position I found to be uninterestingly simple (a mistake I will hopefully learn from), by a question concerning a category of persons that do "not have a choice". Uh, sorry, as a certain cable television personality would say "I reject your reality, and substitute my own." There is no such world in which any person does "not have choice." There is always choice. The question, again, goes to the structures in which that choice is embedded. At least, that's the question I want to talk about. I'll leave a discussion of the imaginary world where choice does not exist to someone else.

FINISHING UP

Once more, here's the rest of renaissgrl's final volley before I dropped out of the discussion:

what do you know about.... uh, nothing? amirite? i am right. you have no idea what it's like to be a woman that has born children. this is not about cultural definitions, not what i'm saying. again, projecting wrong meanings onto my words (my words now) based on your notions of what my words mean.

but rabid, extreme feminists...they don't women as people but as womyn. or some such nonsense

Yes, you are right. I know nothing about what it is to be a woman. I know nothing about what it is to be women.

This is, however, most certainly about cultural definitions. All categories are culturally defined. I don't care what features your body have in common with mine, and what features your body does not have in common with mine. You are who you are. I am who I am. And "women" is a cultural category that is used to organize the bodies that you and I inhabit. (I shall resist the temptation to start down the path of discussing biopolitics, here.)

No, it's not what you're saying. That's entirely my point. You're saying that because I don't know what it is to be a person assigned to the category you find yourself assigned to, I lack the authority to speak as I do. I won't go into a discussion of just what I mean by authority, here, although I suspect I'll be accused of projection again, for those were not your words. That was, however, the substance of your interrogatory, so far as I could make out. Another, more clear language way to translate it might be: "You're not a woman, so shut the fuck up." That's a bit stronger than perhaps you intended, but that's the impression you comment, as I read it, leaves me with.

REALLY FINISHED, HONEST

What I am saying is that I don't know what it is to be a person assigned to the category you find yourself assigned to. I don't know what it is to be a person assigned to the category I find myself assigned to. I can only know what it is to be me, and what you tell me of what it is to be you.

Projecting meanings onto categories that neither of us can speak for only diverts us from that very truth. I won't go so far as to say projecting "wrong meanings", because how can you project wrong meanings onto something that is culturally defined? It means whatever it means.

All I want to talk about is how those meanings structure the choices readily available to individual persons. Dammit! :/

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