Judith Butler vs. Michel Foucault

hey everyone back again today I want to talk about the differences between Judith Butler and Michelle Foucault on the topic of sexuality specifically the different ideas and conclusions drawn from Judith Butler's gender trouble compared with those of Michelle Foucault's the history of sexuality volume one before jumping into it hi I'm David I explain philosophical Concepts and ideas and ways to make them accessible to you so if you're new here like share subscribe you can see 300 episodes I already have up that will add to your already vast knowledge we can all learn together if you want to follow me anywhere other than here you can find me on Instagram at Theory underscore and underscore philosophy or on Twitter David Gino or on Tick Tock at Theory philosophy you can also help me out monetarily be a patreon or PayPal but no pressure to do that if you found this on YouTube you're going to be able to find just the audio alone on pretty much any podcast platform if you found this as a podcast you're going to be able to find the audio accompanied by video on YouTube if you're into that so yeah let's jump into the differences between Judith Butler and Michelle Foucault now I'm going to do this by focusing on gender trouble and comparing it with the history of sexuality so I just want to give a little brief summary of each and then highlight their main points of Distinction like of course they're different books so there are tons of differences but I mean as far as the broad conclusions go and as far as identifying exactly how sexual repression is exercised and how to remedy it now Judith Butler's gender trouble is focused on the problem of assuming that there is a neat distinction between sex on the one hand and gender on the other which is what I would say most people learn throughout any kind of their time in life is that there's this real physiological thing called sexuality and then there is the artificial thing called gender that exists on top of that sexuality so people are born with certain bodies and these bodies happen to comply with many other people and so from that is inferred the idea that there are men there are women and there are people who might be ambiguous whose chromosomal configuration might deviate from either an X Y or XX chromosomal configuration now the point of this to say look okay this is real however we acknowledge that gender is always fluid because gender is always communicated through dress through speech through everything like that and these things change today from culture to culture people wear different things across history people wear different things they talk in different ways various tasks and Duties are ascribed to different people historically for example cooking with something that was reserved for like monks in some European settings for male monks who could other female monks anyways for male monks who would take on these roles and then that task became more of a woman's obligation as industrialization took a foot so this is to say that in this traditional framework you have this real thing called sexuality and then you have something called gender that is apt to change now the problem here for Butler is that it's almost impossible I say almost because Butler is clear that it might be possible it's almost impossible to actually discuss sexuality this real thing pointing to bodies and people's physiological makeups without going through the medium of gender to discuss and to understand that sexuality so Butler's point is to say that there isn't so much of a neat divide between the two almost like a nature versus nurture argument instead Butler points to many of the historical developments in which scientific knowledge about people's bodies and their sexuality and their chromosomal makeup was influenced by and mediated through their understanding of gender which is that cultural thing that is susceptible to change so you might say how I mean how can science be affected by gender well Judith Butler draws upon the work of David page who is a scientist in the 80s and 70s I guess who was fascinated and who studied chromosomes and so at one point David page was fascinated with the example of somebody who didn't have a standard XXX or XY chromosomal configuration not to mention there are so many other possible configurations we tend to ignore that and instead just reduce all people into being under either men or women without actually following the science you know and suggesting there could be five or six genders but that's another conversation for another day David page was fascinated with situations in which people with X Y chromosomes could be women and people with X X chromosomes could be men so traditionally X Y chromosomes would mean that you would exemplify certain traits that we associate culturally with being a man whereas having X X chromosomes we would traditionally associate with you presenting yourself as a woman but David page started to notice that there are many people with X X chromosomes presenting themselves as men and living their lives as men and there are many people with X Y chromosomes doing the opposite presenting themselves as women even though biologically physiologically they should comply with the gender that they were assigned at Birth determined by their sex determined by their bodies so if you're listening to this and you're thinking wait that's weird why was he looking at people like women with XY chromosomes and trying to find like the truth of their gender David page was obsessed with knowing what the truth of these people's genders were but it's interesting because the very fact of deviating from a norm a believed to be Norm influenced him desperately to find a reason for that deviation as though the deviation itself could not be normal and natural in itself and what is bizarre instead is that desire to impose an identity unto people to make sense of them when they deviate from that identity and here we see a very strong connection with Michelle Foucault's work who has often written about this act of Prosecuting of institutionalizing trying to understand people who deviate from the norm in order to bring them back to the norm so with all these cases instead of David page saying okay I guess there can be XX chromosome people who whose chromosomes don't actually matter at all they're just presenting themselves the way that makes sense to them and that's a good thing instead of that being his conclusion he sought to understand biologically how that could be the case he sought to look at people's bodies to look at their cells to understand why they were presenting themselves in one way that was different from the expectation imposed upon people with that chromosomal framework so we see here that one's gender presentation motivates scientific observation and scientific discovery because David page was trying to twist the science in order to make sense of what in the world the thing that was open to change gender how that was not making sense to him so he had to go in and alter the signs twisted around to make sense of it but this opens up a number of questions how come some signs are implicitly associated with one's sexuality one's body why does dressing a certain way imply that you must have certain chromosomal makeup what does it mean to present oneself as a woman to present oneself as a man to present oneself as non-binary or anything else how does that make any sense at all that we can ascribe such Transcendent value to these identity markers in the form of their biological truth because we know that gender is always fluid it's always going to be changing so why then is that they are this obsession with locating it within the body really hammering it down and making sense of it it's always going to be changing so that means then the science must always be changing to adapt to it or the alternative and this is exemplified in David Page's approach instead of alternating the signs instead of changing the science to match a changing world the science is kept grounded and everything else is seen as being fake or artificial in order to uphold the Primacy of these scientific Endeavors and their capacity to reveal the truth whereas everything else is artificial now that's just gender trouble in a nutshell there's so much more to it go check out my episodes on gender trouble if you want but just kind of the key points now Michelle Foucault is the history of sexuality goes as follows in it he pretty much says we have bought the illusion that sexuality has been repressed in the 17th 18th centuries in Europe in England he focuses on a lot in France but He suggests that this is a big illusion instead what happened was many different institutional configurations specifically medical ones plus prison ones as well instead of oppressing sexuality what we saw instead was a growing body of research about it a growing understanding about it not so that I have people's knowledge of sexuality can be expanded per se but so that sexuality can be more neatly controlled so before Michelle Foucault there's a guy by the name of Sigmund Freud who I'm I'm sure you've heard of who provides us the hypothesis that sexuality is something that has been repressed in order to keep Society afloat sexuality essentially gets in the way of a properly functioning Society Michelle Foucault on the other hand says that no actually there is this very strong obsession with sexuality people are so concerned with understanding it and once we accept that once we acknowledge historically there is this obsession with it then fouca asks us to look at which sexualities are being really studied and really understood and which ones are being prosecuted and which ones are being welcomed and treated as normal so he finds that instead of there being this blanket repression of sexuality instead there was a welcoming of certain sexual attributes and there was the application of names to different sexual orientations and these all serve the end of making sure that these sexualities would be easily grounded and coded to allow for a little Mobility so that they wouldn't become too transgressive now some sexualities in themselves like being homosexual for example was something that was seen as being and continues to be seen to this day seen as something that needs to be managed contained needs to be exercised away so that it doesn't actually pose a threat to the established normal form of sexual conduct in heterosexuality So within this Foucault identifies that there is this effort to make people really live their sexuality so that not only is it something that is done privately but something that they must make a part of their identity in order for that identity to be easily controlled because if it comes out if it becomes part of public life then it could be more easily managed and it can be more easily policed from deviating from a norm because all of this discourse around sexuality happened to be emerging at a time in which the social body and Society itself was implementing more stringent forms of control over the population in order to limit the possibility of revolts of mobs of any kind of transgressions in society and at the time then was the opportunity that sexuality could be welcomed in certain forms so that it could be controlled and managed now these forms of surveillance would be used to make sure that sexuality was conducted in the proper ways and that there wouldn't be deviations from the norm because like we saw like Butler analyzed and David page when there is a deviation from the norm then system freaks out it has to understand why there's this deviation it has to twist science in order to make it seem as though there's a reason for this deviation now that was just brief if you want more on that go see the episodes I've done on the history of sexuality but the point between them the points of contact between Michelle Foucault and Judith Butler are many Butler is indebted to Foucault and his inspiration on their work is just it's very clear now with that being said they have a very different approach to dealing with these systems of power that try to control sexuality where Judith Butler says that the primary goal of gender trouble is to expand legitimacy to those forms of sexuality that have been repressed and oppressed in order to allow for a flourishing of sexual possibility of the possibility of different sexual gender identities and sexual identities to flourish and to really exist happily now Foucault is not quite so quick to prescribe that solution to this issue because Foucault is concerned that if there is an expansion and Foucault wasn't responding directly to Butler of course and that this was many years before but Foucault says that if there is this expansion of discourse around sexuality even if it is in the name of expanding sexual categories and understanding then it will just fall prey to these legitimating apparatuses that try to establish a norm so then these new gender identities will become the norm and there will be the continued repression of certain other ones in order to uphold that Norm and that will continue to be the case until the very structures of power that underwrite these systems has been challenged now instead Foucault suggests that instead of us focusing on sexuality our focus should be on what he calls bodies and pleasure which He suggests is that thing or are those things that exist beneath sexuality it's kind of like returning to the body in a sense and this is a conclusion to be quite honest I don't totally agree with in this debate if we can call it a debate I'm definitely on the butler side of this equation because foucaultan's suggesting that there is this underneath this sort of underbelly to sexuality in the form of bodies what he's effectively saying is there's this like Transcendent Zone that is somehow free from the influences of power and it is about fostering that zone in order to liberate people so this is to me this is is like falling prey to the same trap that he is trying to draw attention to suggesting making us believe that there is a Zone somehow free from power when this very idea of transcendence through imminence by turning to oneself what makes oneself real like in this case the body and true this is just a big trap to provide the sense of ones being liberated now I wasn't planning on giving too much of my own opinion here I'm more curious to what hear what everyone else thinks so let me know what do you think are you on Butler's side even fuku side tell me why I'd love to hear about it I hope that this was Illuminating for you I know there's so much more to this go check out the episodes I've done on both Butler and Foucault there's so many of them hopefully that'll give you a better picture but for now let me know what you think if you like what I did like share subscribe and yeah catch you later take care

Channel: Theory & Philosophy

Views: 10,275

Keywords: Judith Butler, Michel Foucault

Id: TUmyfOHhkpE

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023