Judith Butler: “Why Bodies Matter” - Gender Trouble | Full Conference

Judith Butler’s conference entitled
“Why Bodies Matter”
on June 2nd 2015
in the context of the celebrations of
“Gender Trouble”’s
25th anniversary in
Teatro Maria Matos in Lisbon
Conferência de Judith Butler
Why Bodies Matter
2 junho 2015
Teatro Maria Matos
Gender Trouble
Performance, Performatividade e Política de Género
5 maio a 24 junho 2015
Publicado em 1990, o livro Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity é uma marca não só na história dos Estudos do Género e do feminismo contemporâneo, mas também nos Estudos da Performance, pela ligação que estabelece entre o género e a performance, através do conceito da performatividade do género. Ao longo dos últimos 25 anos, Judith Butler nunca deixou de marcar presença no debate acerca do género e da sexualidade e continuou a inspirar académicos, feministas, artistas e ativistas pelos direitos das comunidades LGBTQI com publicações como Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Antigone's Claim (2000) e Undoing Gender (2004). Judith Butler é professora do Departamento de Literatura Comparada e do programa de Teoria Crítica da Universidade da Califórnia, em Berkeley.
Vinte e cinco anos depois da publicação de Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, de Judith Butler, o Teatro Maria Matos propôs-se como espaço para debater, observar e experienciar a performatividade de género, num ciclo com debates, espetáculos, intervenções artísticas e workshops, ao longo de um mês e meio. As conferências encerraram com a participação de Judith Butler perante uma sala cheia naquela que foi a sua primeira conferência em Lisboa.
Mais informação www.teatromariamatos.pt/pt/pro...
curadoria: Salomé Coelho e Mark Deputter
com Andreia Cunha, Laura Lopes e Sezen Tonguz
Gender Trouble é um projecto House on Fire com o apoio do Programa Cultura da União Europeia
Edições Passante agradecem esta edição na sua página ao Teatro Maria Matos e a Gender Trouble - Performance, Performatividade e Política de Género.

[@RealCutPlay]

6:30 Conference start in englisch, moderation 8:45 Judith Butler starts talking

[@Luis88571]

I have no hurry

[@GuessTheFondMachine]

Gracias

[@Hist_da_Musica]

Ótima palestra! ✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽

[@battags22]

Beelzeboob - Professional Circular Reasoner

[@the_grand_tourer]

Ha yes! and the cultists fall for it like the sheeple they are.

[@17thstellation]

excellent, this truly deepened my understanding of hollow knight lore, thank you [REDACTED]

[@clfm20]

By the 21st minute she seems to have dissolved in to gibberish.

[@caromikalef4602]

my kind of sermon - so greatfull to such a fresh air in the semantics of 'the bodies'

[@upasanaghosh1053]

How can people be so intelligent, and I am not!!!

[@sandrinecacheton3909]

WELL DONE HAHAHA

[@Charles3x7]

Following interests that excite you, and pushing through practice when you're not excited until you rekindle the excitement.

[@bobrolander4344]

Judith Butler: One of the greatest thinkers of our time.

[@ValleyoftheRogue]

Then this world is in a shitload of trouble. There is a place in hell for this whack job.

[@Luis88571]

I don't know

[@lechenaultia5863]

One of the most destructive

[@daxeckenberg]

Nothing against her personally but she'd not make the top 50. At Cal she's 12th in citations. That's good but that's no where near best.

[@GuessTheFondMachine]

​@@daxeckenberg who's number 1?

[@arizafra7349]

muchas gracias por compartir

[@clfm20]

If she believes that what defines which sex a person is has changed significantly through history, perhaps she should name an historical figure who would be assigned a different sex today than they were deemed to be during their lifetime. I can't think of any myself.

[@janusz_santana]

I recommend checking the pre-enlightenment understandings of sex, "one sex theory" with women and men being essentially of the same sex and with same organs but in different forms. I bet had we been born back then, our view would be different than it is now

[@clarkbowler157]

Your question is your answer. The process of assignment is changeable. Using the terminology today would make no sense in a historical period as many concepts such as non-binary did not exist. The concept is tied with the society within which it resides. Treating these concepts solely as biological realities rather than social phenomena reminds of biological essentialism. P.s. There are many non-binary, queer and trans folk all through history.

[@nothersheep]

The example Butler offers is that of Caster Semenya, who would historically have been recognized as female (as she identifies and is identified by her own family, based upon anatomy) but has been refused that sex designation by the Olympic committee (due to naturally occurring testosterone levels). This example of hormone defined sex vs anatomically defined sex is an example of a change within our own time. Butler also points to the historical and ongoing complexity of “intersex” folks being assigned a binary sex.

[@clfm20]

But this is a current example, rather than historical. Also, the definition of intersex (as I, perhaps wrongly, understand it) captures a lot of people who would never dream of questioning their gender identity - boys with malformed penises or women born without a uterus, for example.@@nothersheep

[@SmokenJs]

starts at 8:40

[@Luis88571]

I have no hurry

[@rebal1681]

I have never heard of anyone claiming that the ability to reproduce is what define sex. Never. Reoroduction is one component of sex among about 6000 biological markers that define sex.

[@user-rl3io8nj6t]

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “female” as the sex capable of bearing offspring.

[@ricardocosta351]

What an admirable thinker. Butler's philosophy does a great service to society as she is a strong voice in favour of those which society decided to exclude, not only LGBT people but anyone who lives precarious lives.

[@wozzup08]

She's insane and ignorant.

[@lagarton91]

Ricardo Córdova, You are fucking nuts.

[@serpentines6356]

What is so admirable? We now have perverted adults pushing sick garbage like DQSH on children, more, and more kids being scr*wed over by lame adults that think it's no big deal to chop up children's bodies, etc. My God, what are you thinking?

[@the_grand_tourer]

You really think JB is a philosopher, no she isn't, she's got you all fooled. Impenetrable, opaque and invented language isn't philosophy it's cultism.

[@ricardocosta351]

@@the_grand_tourer an outstanding number of papers, thesis and dissertations worldwide say otherwise. "Performativity" and "precarity" are in the centre of the current political, philosofical and literary debates, to name a few. If you don't understand her, that's your limitation not hers.

[@pippiniyt]

Lbtavares Tavares, do you know if there is an English transcript available of this lecture anywhere? For accessibility reasons, I'd prefer to be able to read it if possible... Thanks.

[@pippiniyt]

I mean, for download... whoops.

[@Luis88571]

@@pippiniyt, I don't know...

[@magnojuniormagno2921]

Libertadora!

[@chriswalker7632]

I think I really only understood Butler's position on trans people - that it not being a contradiction of her approach to gender - after I had understood Martin Heidegger/Existentialism. And I only understood Heidegger because I had come to similar conclusions already after looking into neuroscience that affirmed to me that being trans was innate. I started looking into neuroscience because of prejudice against trans people by some out spoken feminists - so why do I still think Butler's position is okay? By the way I am not an expert. There is a hypothesis that the brain can be split into "Ventral" and "Dorsal". Ventral contains our amygdala (fight flight) and hippocampus (emotional memory) and colour perception: all that make up "explicit memories". While dorsal contains our motor cortex and working memory and positional orientation perception: all that make up "implicit memories". It seemed a neat fit for me to equate Hiedegger's "present at hand" with "Ventral" activity, and Heidegger's "Ready to Hand" with "Dorsal" activity - which Heidegger classifies "present" as "ontical" (which relates it to "essentialism"), and "ready" as "ontological" (which relates it to the "existential"): in effect I am saying that "essence" is "explicit" while "Existence" is "implicit". Heidegger gives the example of hammering a nail for "ready to hand" while stopping and just looking at the hammer is "present to hand". I am not totally sure. But it seems as though increased ventral activity and reduced dorsal activity is associated with symtoms of depression (it also seems associated with increased sensations of pain). But on the other hand reduced ventral activity and increased dorsal activity seems required to go into an hypnotic state - which if you think about it is similar to driving somewhere and then not remembering anything about the journey. To me "Performance" is similar to the hypnotic state of dorsal activity (as it involves working memory and the motor cortex) - only it is not "passive" (like being hypnotised) but instead "active" (in effect "self-hypnosis"). Like Heidegger's "ready to hand" is an active and not a passive state. However, if something were to wrong - such has hammering your thumb - you would switch from dorsal to ventral activity as you felt the pain. I think Albert Camus "Myth of Sisyphus" is a good analogy here: of Sisyphus slaving away with a lot of pain while slowly pushing a heavy boulder up hill (engaging a lot of ventral activity)... and then able to engage more dorsal acitivity as he watches the boulder roll back down from the top of the hill again as he gently walks down hill after it (i.e. he is happy). Evidence I've seen relates "gender identiy" to the "bed nucleus of the stria terminalis" (i.e. it is "sexually dimorphic" - though this is correlation and not causation I must stress, but it does appear to be that transgender people have a bed nucleus of the stria terminalis that is similar to the gender they identify with) - which is a structure in the "extended amygdala" of the brain. While the "amygdala" deals with "fight or flight" responses - so called "fear" or "contextual" "phasic" responses. The "extended amygdala" instead deals with "freeze" responses - so called "anxiety" or "non-contextual" "sustained" responses. This would make "gender identity" different in character to "sexual orientation"/"homo or hetero sexuality" (which evidence suggests is related to "amygdala" activity. Also, amygdala activity relates to "patterns" while "extended amygdala" activity relates to "unpredictability". In existential philosophy "anxiety" relates to possibilities in the future or "the unknown" - the "abscence" as I think Derrida would call it (which he would use in terms of how things classed as "abscent" are "ignored"). While "fear" is there in the moment - it is "present". In effect "anxiety" frees us from the "present" - anxiety's "non-contextual" nature allows us to think of alternatives to what is right in front of us in the moment. In effect, thinking in terms of "gender" (if it relates to anxiety about the future) frees us from the constraints of "sex" (if it relates to fear of the moment). So maybe it is best to think of gender identity in terms of shades of gray-ness and the unpredictable. Rather than constrain gender with the predictable patterns of sex? I.e. Gender requires a whole different approach than sex can give us. I am not sure itself with "anxeity" relates more to ventral or dorsal activity? "fear" does seem clearly to relate to amygdala activity in the ventral part of the brain. But I am seeing evidence of "anxiety" being more related to dorsal activity in the brain - which, in the way I have discussed would link it more to existential attitudes and the post modern philosophical approach of Butler. I must stress I am not an expert (I am not saying that ironically) An example everyone can try is there is apparently a ridiculous test that supposedly women can do but men can't - which is to be able to lift up a chair from a particular bent over postore - starting position of your legs straight and feet together, with your back straight and your upper body bent over at the hips and facing parallel to the floor, with the chair beneath you. The explanation given as to why women find this easy and men find it difficult is suppose to be due to women having a lower centre of gravity. Which is true. Despite apparently many guys finding this task difficult. Guys should actually be easily be able to do it - it just means they are out of shape if they can't. Which is even more bizarre that apparently many women do find this task easy - probably because women are often cleaning ect in this bent over posture and so have stronger backs as a result. While some lazy arse guy with a weak back struggles. xD

[@user-btmbangalore]

We can never be anti Earth and still be healthy or long lived, male and female is an constuct happening outside of an individual mind/brain. We want to redefine what is with what a minority mind finds comfortable, even if it were a MAJORITY mind we become anti earth. A mind alone, no body to confirm with the mind. As such, we are trying best to address a suffering mind, a mind that must find hapiness and relevance outside of an regular role, not ever mock the regular earth confirmity.

[@daxeckenberg]

I stumbled across this recently. This seems to be a whole lot of effort to explain away mammalian evolution. Evolutionary success is dependant on the sex binary. One group of individuals possess large gametes while the other group possesses small gametes. We define those with large gametes (eggs) as women or females and those with small gametes (sperm) as males or men. There are of course individuals who have genetic or developmental issues which prevent them from either as a woman to become pregnant and bear children or as a man to impregnate a woman. But with all of those individuals something has gone awry. I find it puzzling that we spend so much effort trying to justify their existence by trying to dismantle the binary that is present in all primate biology. What is it about sex or gender that's driving this desire to adjust what is evolutionarily the norm. We don't do this , at least not with this fervor , with any of the other issues that impact human development. Please do not interpret my words as disavowing the existence of people who don't fall neatly into the sex binary. They of course exist, but they are by definition the exception. Also, this is not to say that all women must be feminine and all men must be masculine that's ones behavior not their sex. Are they highly correlated, yes, but culture plays a significant role in the behaviors of men and women. And this is not say that all men must be sexually attracted to women and all women must be sexually attracted to men. So your behavior and your preferred sexual preferences while highly correlated to your biological sex are not as neatly packaged into the binary. But your desires and actions do not change the existence of an underlying biological sex binary.

[@slaapkaamers3377]

How about the Australian bush tomato?

[@daxeckenberg]

@@slaapkaamers3377 it's a plant. it can't move. and so therefore evolutionarily speaking it would be beneficial for it to be able to switch between the male and female. and these types of sex change are minimal at best because it's simply what kind of flower do I grow. so there's already an evolutionary process built-in about growing flowers during that time of year now you just have to decide what type of flower are you going to grow is going to grow the male version of the female. as mammals we don't have this flexibility because there are physical reproductive components that are created in utero as well as mature during puberty. these structures are not changeable nor replaceable.

[@abetheape38]

Loved this lecture by JB. One of the greatest thinkers of our time, and has radically altered our heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality. This entire video was great, minus the moderator who comes off as an authoritarian control freak and asshat.

[@Luis88571]

Thanks!

[@serpentines6356]

"Heteronormative" is great!

[@the_grand_tourer]

It’s a giant word salad, scrambled for a gullible bubble of an audience, too keen to fain understanding of her confused, contradictory, insular and unworldly neural spasms.

[@the_grand_tourer]

You really think JB is a philosopher, no she isn't, she's got you all fooled. Impenetrable, opaque and invented language isn't philosophy it's cultism.

[@abetheape38]

@@the_grand_tourer fair enough, it’s all liberal bullshit anyways

[@sophiepecorari5784]

Has this been written or only on video?

[@cagruluger5167]

She has a book called "Gender Trouble"

[@sunshinedenney8695]

❤️

[@sledgehammer5033]

Lot of people in these comments who have no fucking idea what they’re talking about and haven’t watched the video

[@the_grand_tourer]

JB has no idea what she is talking about, and there are many who pretend they do, it’s smoke and mirrors, made up language shared in a converted bubble.

[@Neo2266.]

Day 376 of tracking down mossbag's adress

[@cherrypixmovies3322]

Hi, Lbtavares Tavares. Thanks for posting this, really helpful. I am an independent film maker and currently working on a short film on understanding queer theory from my geographical and cultural position of a South Asian artist. I am collaborating with a friend of mine, a talented performance artist from India Kaur Chimuk. I would love to use some audio excerpts of this video. Please let me know if I can do that. Please note that ours is an independent film made with the sole intention of understanding queer theory and does not have any profit motive.

[@Luis88571]

Yes, of course, thanks!

[@cherrypixmovies3322]

Thank you so much. Solidarity.

[@the_grand_tourer]

@@Luis88571 Why did you remove my comment?

[@northking2317]

I ma here because of mossbag

[@rebal1681]

Too conforming? That's a judgement

[@John-lf3xf]

21:40 what if it’s these things because without these terms (perhaps purely analytical) my theory couldn’t function.

[@audreyburton5367]

I love you Judith Butler. Thank you.

[@yankeeluver100]

Anyone else want to see Judith Butler debate Jordan Peterson?

[@yankeeluver100]

@Karl Scher Why?

[@yankeeluver100]

Lol, I personally think it would be interesting, especially when they discuss gender.

[@userin2963]

Well, it depends on what you mean by Jordan Peterson

[@k.m.4971]

Jep , I actually don’t need to watch this video to know that Jordan would „destroy“ her , it’s Jordan come on ...

[@luisasouza5472]

@@k.m.4971 Jordan is a fraud who talks a lot about postmodernism despite not even having a basic understanding of it and who uses contradictory concepts such as "post modern neo-marxists". Judith is multiple levels above him. I would rather see Judith debate someone her level who disagrees with her gender theory of performativity (not to be mistaken for performance).

[@MeineKleineWeltOO]

The most misunderstood thinker of all time? ^^

[@henkverhoeven1256]

Thinker?

[@John-lf3xf]

Kleingeistfresser And one of the most profoundly wrong.

[@joaogabriel1820]

John Landon Miller how come?

[@John-lf3xf]

João Gabriel Because ignorance of evolutionary biology and psychology of course in the system.

[@joaogabriel1820]

John Landon Miller well i see people saying this all the time but i never saw no one actually making arguments. how evolutionary biology proves that butler is wrong? the only relevant criticism of butler was written by martha nussbaum, and even her critique misses a lot of points in butler’s work ( prolly ‘cause of her writing style, i must recognize that butler kinda sucks at it)

[@darrenquiett6167]

I am at 23:27 and the only thing I am getting from this is, though someones Sex is based on biological differences, it still is a social conception that was created by heterosexual power and though it is based on things like hormonal differences, reproductive organs and natural biological shit, we define, classify and attach false perceptions to each gender resulting in one being more dominate over the other. Am I way off ??? And if not why couldnt they just fucking say that. I keep getting lost when she throws in abstract terms like materialization and discourse. I wish people would just make their theories understandable and stop trying to sound smart

[@ProdigySim]

I think she is saying that even if we accept that the body is a material thing that can be studied dissected and proven to be made up of various genes, hormones, cells, brain structures... It is also a living person, who exists at a certain point in time, in relation to a world full of other people, an environment--and those factors are real and can be taken into account when discussing the "sex" of a person. "No matter how adamant we are in our claims to know [...] the material body, we are bound up in a discourse that cannot claim to be the only way to know what a [...] sexed body is and how it means." Very generally, it reads to me like "Yes, we can talk about what a body materially IS all we want, but that is not the only way to discuss what someone's Sex is". Armchair philosopher here, but often language shapes the way we think about things, and definitely shapes the way we talk about them... so philosophy quite often has to come up with new words, and use words in weird ways, to discuss new concepts. I would imagine a lot of her sentences here are constructed in a way to be dissectable in strict philosophical examination.

[@the_grand_tourer]

Well done for trying, JB’s practice is to bore people with invention and hyperbole until they concede the she is a higher being, it’s a load of smoke and mirrors, meaningless twaddle for the converted.

[@Bolsonaro-em8tb]

#ForaButler

[@wozzup08]

This dude is insane.

[@henkverhoeven1256]

Geving a speech is not reading out your notes...

[@JordanWindhamBenford]

Fellow conservatives. Lemme save you an hour and a half of your life by explaining exactly what she's talking about. Judith Butler is proposing that because exceptions exist in our world it proves any idea of a standard in society utilizing any physical perception (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and experience) is bullshit.

[@LMYS5697]

Not exactly, more to the point that the nature of discourse around sex and gender precludes one from discussing the nature of that nature. A system of language based upon binary hierarchies, applied to the body, invariably leads to some bodies falling into the margins, becoming "derealized", becoming "marginalized". Woman is itself a concept existing within discourse. Il ny'a pas de hors-texte, there is no ontology of woman outside of discourse, there is no Platonic form of Woman one can point to as the origin point of what a woman is or should be or should do.

[@JordanWindhamBenford]

@@LMYS5697 That's wonderful but people still have the ability to make shit up. Therefore you have no standard.

[@joaogabriel1820]

300bpm dude society literally invented “stable” ontology for men and women and are trying to make the subjects fit in these discursive practices

[@serpentines6356]

@@JordanWindhamBenford Thanks Detroit man!

[@paraponera5157]

Butler proudly ignore science. Ideology is her game.

[@MeineKleineWeltOO]

Look the video before you comment it.

[@wozzup08]

@@MeineKleineWeltOO I've watched video and read her articles. And confirm buttler's ignorance.

[@AriaFray]

Science is subjected to theory and Butler is a theorist, a scientist who has their own theory. Theories can be proven wrong, but they are based on knowledge. And to be honest, to discredit someone's work with a claim backed up in the unexplained concept of what "science" might be to you, shows little profesionalism in your opinion, and therefore, your comments are just throwned words that honestly seem cries of fear of the broaderness of theory among other things.

[@PrincessGigi-69420]

If your science cannot stomach critical examination than it isn't science at all, it's just privileged insistence dressed up in a lab coat.

[@the_grand_tourer]

@@AriaFray And another one misunderstands the use of ‘theory’ in science, and then goes on to lecture … and every day occurrence in the bable tower of the idiocracy of the interweb.

[@BurntF3aceMan]

this is just word incomprehensible word salad

[@milascave2]

saaa: It isn't word salad just becase YOU can't understand it. I found it quite easy to understand.

[@milascave2]

@300bpm So do I, and I say that it is not. It is just written in highly academic jargon. Literature and philosophy are different. Being able to read one does not mean you can easily read the other.

[@joaogabriel1820]

300bpm jargon doesn’t mean bullshit men....

[@serpentines6356]

@@joaogabriel1820 Yes, it's bull.

[@the_grand_tourer]

Yep, she’ll one hell of a snake oil salesman, they lap it up, all pretending to know what she is saying.

[@adilalam2947]

A successful attempt to create confusion in the favor of personal interests...what a pity.

[@serpentines6356]

That about as clear stated as it gets.

[@the_grand_tourer]

I think she’s a fraud, a smoke screen of invented jargon and half baked confused ideas to tap a freely paying audience who pretend they know what she’s wittering on about.