@196 - it's easy to dismiss hard theory in any field as mindless jargon. But reading Butler changed forever how I see the naturalness of the categories we use in daily life to organize our world. If you didn't understand her, is it possible you weren't paying close enough attention?

On drag: "The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. But we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance....[T]he performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance... In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency ...in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary." (Gender Trouble, 137-8)

And then you realize she wrote that in 1990... Maybe you have to have drunk the Kool-Aid, but when I encountered that in 1993, it changed my life.

@114 (cigan), I just wanted to say I appreciate your comment. You've said many interesting and true things, on the basis of a really interesting amount of personal experience.

If you don't mind, I'm cutting and pasting that comment. I want to keep a copy of it in my hard drive, for future reference. Thanks.

@194 – how do you determine someone is behind the times in other fields? Rich taught at Rutgers 1976-78; Cornell 1982-85; SJSU 1985-1986; Stanford 1986-1992 – and since then she has been National Director for the National Writers' Voice Project, which as far as I can tell doesn’t even have a website. She's still publishing books of poetry, though.

@183 Seeker 6079 Thank you, that is indeed the message I was trying to get across. When you make other people unhappy to get what you want, you are a BAD PERSON and all the reasoning in the world doesn't change it. Tricking people into a relationship is always a bad plan.

@125 (I Hate Screen Names), also an interesting experience. I'm interested in people's actual experiences with Gender Studies in university, in whether or not (as part of a liberal education) it actually delivered some of this capacity to appreciate and evaluate other viewpoints and the world in general. If you don't mind, I'll cut and paste your post too, to have a copy of it on my hard drive. Thanks!

@203: Their theories are disproven, and you'll find sources saying "we used to think X or so-and-so thought X, and that was wrong." This is obviously easier to do in subjects that are more empirically verifiable, but even (say) psychology is rife with papers criticizing Freud/Skinner/Chomsky/etc., along with experiments or longitudinal studies supporting that criticism.

It just occurred to me that there may be something more fundamental at play here. Let me ask this: is gender studies a science or is it a humanity? In other words, in examining humans, does gender studies hold itself to the standards of the scientific method (as do anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.) or does it use less rigorous means (like the various arts, religious studies, linguistics, etc.)?

It seems to me the disconnect is that gender studies is a humanity, but that its adherents seek to promulgate its theories as though they had the force of science. In other words, gender studies is using subjective methods to derive its conclusions, then trumpeting those conclusions as though they had the force of objective truth. Not "my take-away from Macbeth was X, and yours was Y, and they're both OK" but "we live in a rape culture and if you don't see that, you're wrong."

Obviously, scientists and other empirically-minded people will have a problem with that.

On a different note, I find this letter interesting because it shows that there are enough people, who identify as asexual, that they have formed a group identity. I wonder sometimes whether there are genetic structures in our animal bodies that respond to trends such as overpopulation by creating (hormonal or other physical?) changes that would reduce population pressures. One study of overpopulation in mice indicated a rise in homosexual behavior despite plentiful females and that female mice began to re-absorb their unborn young. As the human race approaches (or have we already exceeded?) 8 Billion, perhaps some sort of genetic failsafe is coming into play.

@207 - idiots abound, right? So sure, there are plenty of people who will assert that they speak for all feminists everywhere, and tell you to accept on their say-so that we live in a rape culture and if you disagree with them, you're a misogynist asshole.

That's not gender studies, that's just people being stupid. The Journal of Gender Studies would not publish a piece that says "we live in a rape culture and if you don't see that, you're wrong."

Now, personally, as a historian, I question the hard division that you postulate between sciences and humanities. Sciences pretend to be "harder" than they really are, in my view. And gender studies has provided some of the tools I use to think about why science isn't as "real" and "factual" as it pretends to be. That said, to accept your terms for the moment, yes, I see gender studies (and history, the way I do it) as humanities, not as science. Though my phd program was in the division of "social sciences."

Heartfelt: WHAT? Those mice are reabsorbing the living baby mice inside them?!??!! PREPOSTEROUS! Those mice are going to hell.

But seriously, why do other animals get all the good weird genetics? How useful would that be. Crap, I'm 16 and pregnant!! Better reabsorb the fetus!!

Kangaroos can put their fetal development on hold when there's not enough food. How sweet is that?

@23, et al. throughout the thread: I'm surprised so much of this thread degenerated into people making hacky jokes about "enjoy serving fries, humanities majors!" Somebody said the humanities aren't doing well -- well, they are doing well, if you go by the standard of whether the fields of study prepare people to think critically in a complex world. A recent study (http://www.philnel.com/2011/01/18/nodrif…) showed that humanities majors are showing “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Most jobs require those skills. And complex reasoning is something most Americans desperately need to do more of. There's a reason most English majors don't go on to become Sarah Palin fans.

Humanities majors aren't particularly good at preparing undergrads for any particular job, but neither are most majors. A BA in biology doesn't qualify you to be a biologist -- you need a Ph.D. for that. And it's a little ludicrous to say that women's & gender studies is an ivory-tower discipline with no benefit in the real world. Gender relations and sexuality inform almost every aspect of our lives. Having some tools to think about them intelligently isn't a bad idea (not that all Women's Studies majors actually DO think about them intelligently). And a feminist perspective on current events is another thing American could use more of. Again, not a lot of Women's Studies grad running around claiming Sarah Palin is a great role model.

As for the earnest, preachy, p.c. undergrads who give the field a bad name -- I hate 'em, too. I never too a Women's Studies class in college, because I that heard people cry in Women's Studies classes. Yuck. The discipline attracts a certain type of person who's looking for a reason to impose her preferences on everyone else ("don't use that language, it's Offensive to Women!"), and overly prone to thinking she's found the One True Faith. Hopefully they mellow out later in life. Citing this as a reason to dismiss an entire discipline is absurd. It's like saying engineering is useless, because some engineering students you met were socially awkward aspies.

@137, @138 (I Hate Screen Names, EricaP): there are ways in which emotion and rationality can help each other. In fact, a lot of what passes for emotions (the so-called 'gut feelings') are often actually fossilized rationality -- 'gut feelings' can come from experience that was absorbed so well you don't have to think about it anymore (as in when you instinctively know your way back home). In some situations, using rationality (since rationality as we use it is not perfect -- we don't have full information, and our brains are not perfect computational devices but have a number of in-built biases) would actually lead us to make wrong decisions. There is such a concept as "emotional intelligence."

But I have the impression this is not what EricaP is talking about. When I see your posts, Erica, it seems to me you're talking about the kind of emotionality that doesn't actually depend on what the world is like, but only on how the speaker feels. Feelings can be wrong; gut feelings can be mistaken. I Hate Screen Names is right about the need for a good -- nor just any, but a good -- procedure for eliminating bad ideas. Because feelings can also be feelings of attachment to a bad idea -- because I had this idea, so it's my intellectual child.

It's great to open yourself to others, and allow emotional contact with them. But as a procedure for distinguishing good ideas from bad... it is not optimal. There are strong biases in our emotions, both innate and acquired. Forgetting about them can be... dangerous.

"Are instinct and emotion considered inferior approaches because they're traditionally associated with women, or are they actually inferior and that's why they've been traditionally assigned to women?"

A very good question and I tend to think it's the latter situation in your question.

Indeed a very interesting question, @125 and @150. I agree, for the following reason: there are various kinds of emotions. Some of them were always associated with men (say, ambition; desire to conquer; patriotism; the old ferocitas the Romans used to praise so highly); others with women. All in all, it seems to me societies thought women and men were both pretty emotional, but they wanted them to have different kinds of emotions. Men were supposed to have the emotions that lead to success in war, in battle, in conquest, in an unfriendly environment; women were supposed to have the emotions that would make the home a 'sweet place for the warrior to rest' and which would nurture the children.The question is then whether men had the emotions they were supposed to have because these emotions would lead to success, and men were the only ones supposed to want success, or because that is their true nature, and our society defined 'success' as being the kind of success that men attain with said emotions.

All in all a complicated topic. But an interesting one.

Reason says that two people of the same sex shouldn't be prevented from marrying if two people of the opposite sex are allowed to marry.
Ah, Roma, that's an interesting point. No, reason does not say that what is good for people of opposite sex should necessarily be good for people of the same sex. Note that this argument would have the same structure as the following wrong argument: "Reason says that two people who are children (e.g., younger than 10) shouldn't be prevented from marrying if two people who are adults (e.g., older than 20) are allowed to marry."

This is not simple "reason": there are other assumptions that are not made clear in your argument. Children shouldn't be allowed to marry because their cognitive levels are still not sufficient to deal with marriage and its consequences. To allow them to marry would be to invite harm. In the case of same-sex marriages, there is no harm involved: even the strongest opponents to same-sex marriage have not been able to prove that there is harm (other than trying to say that children need a father and a mother -- in which case they should be in favor of same-sex marriages that remain childless, but still they aren't...).

It is also not necessarily logical to assume that if something is not harmful then it should be allowed and legal: there's an assumption about legal systems and 'what's better for people' in here. But I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader. :-)

In logics, you always need premises. You can't get something from nothing.

@209: I'm not a fan of the "hard" distinction between science and humanities either-- I actually specifically thought of history and almost carved out a third category for it. But I didn't want to get bogged down in details in getting to the "subjective truth" vs. "objective truth" point. [And yes, I recognize that biases and perspective distort what one sees as "objective truth" and we can ultimately only consider our mental representations of objects rather than the objects themselves, but you get my meaning.]

If women's studies is humanities and not science, then I'm prepared to acknowledge its utility. I enjoyed studying Kant, even if I ultimately rejected his deontological framework (no surprise), because it gave me some insight into how other people process information. If women's studies is packaged as viewpoint informing rather than viewpoint commanding-- "here's how we see the world" vs. "here's how you should/must see the world"-- then that too has some value to an outside observer.

I suppose I'm approaching women's studies the same way I approach religious studies-- I don't necessarily agree with the tenets and think some of the conclusions are absurd, but there are bits and pieces that I can appropriate for my own use, and it's helpful to know how other people think anyway.

@212 - ankylosaur: "the kind of emotionality that doesn't actually depend on what the world is like, but only on how the speaker feels"

Is how someone feels not part of what the world is like?

Some of us like to study how people feel & think.

Do I seem like someone who, personally, relies on emotion and rejects rationality? Interesting...

@209, 215: Just a quick follow up: yes, the "packaging" of the discipline matters. I can appreciate religious studies as a humanity but not as science. In the same way that trying to "convert" me to a religion forces me to empirically analyze the religion itself and (in all likelihood) reject it as scientifically unsound, so too trying to "convert" me to whatever is in vogue in women's studies circles would force me to empirically analyze the opinion and (in all likelihood) reject it as unsound.

@169, the reason why I don't like the expression "rape culture" is that it trivializes this word "culture" which anthropologists have been trying to define and study for such a long time (the last time I counted, more than 100 different definitions had been proposed). We then also start hearing about "morning cereal culture" or "nail polishing culture" or "horror movie culture"... and complex cultural phenomena that interact in complex way with other complex cultural phenomena within the same culture end up reified, hypostasized and pointed at as "something independent".

I'd rather call talk about "the social locus of rape in our culture" or "cultural practices and beliefs that relate to rape". You may think it's terminological hair-splitting -- but I think talking about "rape culture" actually promotes, well, rape culture. It reifies it in a way that gives it more power despite the attempt to fight against it.

Consider the quotation you mentioned, for instance. All the ways in which women back off... they are also ways in which men back off, depending on the circumstances (males interacting also often establish hierarchies in which one backs off with mechanisms similar or identical to the ones you mention). The consequences for the men who back off in the same way more often than not are often similar: they are taken advantage of in various ways (though, among straights, the result is very rarely rape, since most straight men don't pursue other men sexually in the same way they pursue women and wouldn't also be able to rape other men). Backing off establishes a pattern that others learn to expect, and even manipulate; because we're very good at extracting generalizations (correctly or incorrectly) from experience. Social stereotypes also play an important role (they suggest that certain people -- e.g., women -- will always back off, so many people start out expecting this to happen with a given woman even before they have any experience with her); but they are not the only mechanism involved.

Because the reason why women back off more often are complex, and can't be simply reduced to "rape culture"; or even to stereotypes about women. In fact it would probably harm our chances of understanding this phenomenon in the context of Western culture to assume that.

Culture is like a big river, with a lot of local whirlpools and rapids. Some (say, what we call 'religion') are so big that it's even sort of useful to think of them in isolation from others; but even in these cases something important is lost. That's what makes culture such an interesting thing to study; it ain't easy.

@218, I agree with everything you say except that I don't understand why you say that men "wouldn't also be able to rape other men." Men rape men quite frequently, so what did you mean?

I'll say again that I brought up the idea of rape culture because I am interested in the meme, not because I'm absolutely convinced that it is a good way of describing the culture in which I live.

or does it use less rigorous means (like the various arts, religious studies, linguistics, etc.)?

Erm, I'm a professional linguist. Maybe I'm nit-picking, but linguistics, among the human sciences, is the one that most clearly follows the traditional scientific method. (In fact, anthropologists often think we've formed a little ivory tower of our own with our 'scientificity' and 'laws' and whatnot.)

@220: I defer to your expertise; I just picked that example out of a hat. I confess I have almost no knowledge of linguistics beyond some familiarity with neurolinguistics, which is pretty science-based indeed.

@216 (EricaP): no, actually, reading your posts here (and others elsewhere), you don't look like somone who relies on emotion and rejects rationality. I sincerely think that most of your exchange with others here (especially I Hate Screen Names and Roma) are more based on misunderstandings than on real differences in worldview.

The study of how people feel and think can also be done in an empirical way. The feelings of others are then the explicandum, the data. But in some kinds of studies, the feelings of others are things to accept by virtue of existing as feelings of others, no further criterion needed. That I think is not correct.

And I'm not saying you do that.yourself. But the post I was reacting to did give this impression. The emotions and feelings of others shouldn't be belittled or despised, but they are of course not necessarily right just by virtue of existing. Other criteria are necessary.

Interesting that you see gender studies as part of the humanities. I had always thought that the one vantage point of the humanities was the re-introduction of the individual perspective as valid (by offering, for instance, qualitative studies as interesting and deserving of discussion, just as much as quantitative studies). Such a perspective is also favored in some currents within anthropology for anthropology itself in general. But I would still agree with those who say that the problem is many WS/GS programs want to tell you "what is" -- i.e. they want their output to be seen as objectively real, even though they didn't go through the necessary steps associated with objectivism and empiricism.

EricaP, I *knew* you'd say that I didn't understand Butler. That's what everyone says when someone points out that her writing is laced with jargon and densely written. She even chastises people down in conferences when the complaint is raised. In point of fact, I even removed my original ending: "I wonder how long it will take for you to respond that I didn't like it because I cannot understand it."

I never said I didn't find Butler's ideas powerful, nor did I say that I couldn't discern her arguments. I merely said that folks who come from disciplines that emphasis clarity of communication and "hard data" can find the theoretical forest of cultural studies a bit tedious. Ever heard of the Sokal incident? I consider myself a member of cultural studies, a feminist and an anti-racist activist, but that shit had me rolling on the floor. It seems to me intellectually dishonest to not reckon with the reasonable critiques of your own field without resorting to ad hominem attacks and categorical dismissals of any and all critiques. And, c'mon, you know there is some bullshit masquerading as scholarship in cultural studies. As just one example, one very "in vogue" cultural studeis scholar of the '90s argued that rich white kids mutilate their jeans to express solidarity with poor people--that was some serious bullshit.

Back to the other side: I Hate Screen Names, you can go on and on with your claim that all of gender studies reject empirical data based on one class with a feminist poet, but I would put to you that gender studies is interdisciplinary because it draws from different kinds of methodologies--including focus work, interviews, field experiments, oral histories, statistics and the more experiental and philosophical approaches that make you so uneasy. Your unease betrays your championing of your own fairness. If you were, for example, to take an oral history class about WWII, would you bristle that the primary evidence in such a class would be peoples' experiences?

I also think such critiques ignore that all historians and sociologists rely on on all kinds of "hard" data in order to be successful in their fields. It made me crazy when as a biology major I would hear scientists make this bullshit argument that there are no standards of evaluation or real evidence in the humanities. Again, your targeting of just gender studies mobilizes very similar prejudices.

On of the wrinkles I would add here is that I think too many humanities teachers over-value personal experience in the classroom--I think that that contributes to claims that we offer opinions and ideologies in place of "real" learning. But I think that might be another conversation.

@218, indeed you said that you are interested in the meme "rape culture" rather than defending its appropriateness as a descriptor of the real world in which we live. I had understood that when I read your first post, but somehow all the back and forth in this thread made me forget that and react inappropriately. Please accept my apologies.

When I said men wouldn't be able to rape other men, I meant simply "most straight guys". Of course there are some who can, or else no men would ever be raped (and I should speak from personal experience: by some definitions, I myself, a man, was a rape victim, though I prefer to see it otherwise). Most straight guys wouldn't be able to rape even a woman, but obviously sufficiently many can or else rape wouldn't exist. (Especially in cases of forcible rape, I really fail to understand how a rapist can keep his erection while the woman he is attacking so clearly shows signs of panic and fear and so obviously rejects the situation; I often think this must be some kind of sexual kink, to be aroused by the very fear and disgust of the woman; anger at the woman can't be enough -- it usually kills erections rather than producing or maintaining them). But when raping a man, there is the added feature that most straight guys wouldn't be able to have an erection for another man under any circumstances, much the less when the victim shows signs of disgust, fear, and rejection. Are men who rape other men always at least a little bi-curious, even if they don't admit that to themselves? I don't know.

@221 (I Hate Screen Names): think historical-comparative linguistics, the attempt to demonstrate that certain languages are related (e.g., that all Indo-European languages form one family with one hypothetical ancestor language that split into several branches that led to the currently existing languages of Europe). It is even possible to successfully reconstruct a large part of the vocabulary of this ancestral language, and many of its grammatical features, without having any direct access to any speakers of this hypothetical ancestor languages (all having died many millennia ago), by careful use of the scientific method in the methodology known as the historical-comparative method. (My own research involves the comparison of a specific group of South American Indian languages, and the reconstruction of their hypothetical proto-language, with precisely this methodology.)

Peer reviews, and criteria to identify bad ideas and exclude them from the idea pool are very important in linguistics; in fact, I don't think there are linguists who can get by or go far in this discipline without a good knowledge of how to defend ideas against scrutiny.

@223: I make a distinction between "gender studies" and "the study of gender," and I recognize that my distinction has not been consistently conveyed. When I criticize "gender studies," I'm criticizing the way those departments are run in my experience. I have no problem with "the study of gender" as conducted psychologically and sociologically; indeed, I find both fascinating. And I've always liked history. :)

You're the second person to criticize my admittedly narrow experience in gender studies. I find that criticism misguided. I had an open mind about the field, I took two classes in it, I read all the papers assigned and a whole bunch more that weren't, and ultimately decided that the area was not for me. Is it your contention that only people who specialize within a field are qualified to judge it? There's a rather severe selection and confirmation bias there, don't you think? That said, I am certainly open to more data, and casting gender studies as a humanity rather than a science makes me want to do more reading.

@223 (maddy811), your point against I Hate Screen Names is well taken: it is, well, unscientific to base a claim on the lack of scientificity of a whole discipline on one experience with a class given by a feminist poet. Obviously more data is necessary. But let me turn it against you (in the good sense of the word: I see debate as a dance, not as war ;-): what example could you give of gender studies classes, works, papers etc. that do not reject empiricism and criticism in an off-hand manner and do engage in theory-testing and actual attempts to come closer to the truth (as opposed to 'expressing opinions')? Which researchers do you know are open to different ideas and don't assume you're criticizing them because you're privileged and want to maintain your privileges, etc., but actually engage intellectually with the criticism and try to extract useful things in it? (My experience with many of them -- and it has admittedly happened here on the internet, not in academia itself -- has thus far been mildly negative.)

@225: Agree; sounds pretty scientific to me. :)

My back-of-a-cocktail-napkin test for "scientific" is falsifiability: can it be disproved? If so, practitioners generally search for that disproving evidence as a matter of course. I can conceive of evidence that would disprove solutions to the problems you described; I assume linguists (who like, do this for a living) search for and produce that evidence, and thus it is not at all difficult for me to see linguistics in scientific terms.

Thanks for the explanation.

@223, @226: To clarify slightly: I take a scientific approach to my analysis of gender studies: I gathered data and drew a conclusion that best fit the data. Like any theory, I may be wrong, and I'm open to data showing that to be the case. The revelation that my selection of materials was influenced by a poet makes me think that my random sampling was biased.

That said, a rebuttal that consists of "you don't have enough experience" without providing any specific data points that I missed does nothing to convince me. Empiricists can be a real pain in the ass, no? :)

@ 228, and indeed you are correct: there are ways of disproving claims (not so long ago, a certain claim -- i.e. that Eastern Algonquian languages form a clear sub-branch within the Algonquian family -- has come under attack with arguments that seem pretty convincing and falsify earlier claims, basically by showing new evidence that cannot be accounted for with the hypothesis of an Eastern Algonquian subbranch).

Of course, "falsifiability" is a good criterion, but not itself infallible. You probably know that there are good philosophical reasons why Vienna-school logical positivism is no longer considered a defendable position in the philosophy of science? Falsifiability is no longer considered a perfect criterion for scientificity (in a nutshell, because the falsification of a hypothesis is itself a hypothesis that can be falsified by further evidence, thus reinstating the original "falsified" hypothesis, which means that one can never be sure that a given hypothesis has really been falsified).

Having said that... I will hasten to add that, alas, personality worship and non-empirical argumenta ab auctoritate are not unknown among linguists. A certain element of subjectivity persists (many historical linguists are very strongly opposed to the use of statistics, which they see as 'unnecessary', for instance). We strive for scientificity, and have achieved higher standards than most human sciences (I'd claim even economics is often less empirically oriented than linguistics); but perfect we are not.

That said, a rebuttal that consists of "you don't have enough experience" without providing any specific data points that I missed does nothing to convince me. Empiricists can be a real pain in the ass, no? :)

That is in principle correct, but it misses the point. The degree to which a certain hypothesis invokes respect in others depends among other things on the amount of work put into it, which often correlates with the amount of data that was looked at. If your experience with gender studies is limited to one course, it is not illogical to assume that your sample is too small to warrant compelling conclusions -- just as a statistical study that only has, say, 10 human subjects does look too small to command much respect. (I'm told less than 32 subjects is never a good idea.).

Or, using another scientific metaphor: when your data points are too few, the number of possible curves that fit your graph is so large that one may very well feel that the one you chose for it may not be the true one. Even if later studies do demonstrate that your chosen curve was indeed the best fit, you couldn't have claimed it on the basis of so few data points.

On a completely different track, I'm sad that we're over 230 comments without any data on what asexuals think about when they masturbate. :)

Good question, ankylosaur. I would start by saying that these are often, precisely because of the everpresent suspicion that surrounds them that they're not legitimate scholarship, very defensive spaces. Personally, I found graduate school emotionally exhausting for precisely this reason--I felt personally policed. I too love debate, and I cannot count the number of times I got shouted down or mocked or called names simply for asking critical questions. Even when I would preface questions with "I am playing devil's advocate here," I would get accused of being secretly opposed to the politics in question or (as I was here) assumed to be too intellectually challenged to get it. I've been told that i cannot be a feminist if i like having sex with men, that I can only see class but not race, that my upbringing on welfare to parents who didn't finish high school does not cancel my "white privilege," that all whites are hopelessly racist, and on and on and on. And I remain steadfast that these scholarly forays are rich, necessary, and legitimate.

I'm not a gender studies person. My work is in journalism and African-American history. However, I tend to prize works that are ambivalent and evidence-driven rather than advocacy-prone. As for specific examples, I'm a big fan of Susan Douglas's work on women in the media, as she operates on the assumption that the media plays inherently contradictory roles in women's lives, offering possibilities for joy and rebellion as often as repression.

I also just finished a book by a historian Liz Cohen about how women's consumer activism proved vital to progressive politics in the 1930s and WWII. I found her argument interesting and persuasive, but, again, it wasn't offering a theory; it emerged from archival work and sociological data.

In terms of race, I really prize social scientists' experimental work documenting how readily news viewers can be "primed" through coded language to racially hostile attitudes, and I regularly use that research to "back up" more philosophical arguments about the persistence of white racism in American life. I trust that many women's studies folks do the same, drawing on research across discplines, prizing ambivalence and contradiction, and trying to integrate theory with empirical work. I know from experience that there are other folks who maintain open hostility to all empiricism, denounce people who dare criticize them, and reject work that doesn't conform to their political agenda. I think they're weak scholars, lousy teachers and petty human beings, and I think they out themselves as such over time. But, to call for the dismissal of their fields strikes me as a misfire. If there's a biologist who denies evolution, few argue for the dismisal of biology as a field. Yet folks regularly will point to folks in our fields and extrapolate to the fields as a whole. To me, that's why some of us are so defensive in the first place.

@231: I'm using a statistical analysis here. I read maybe 40 women's studies books and essays; none of them employed science. If even 10% of women's studies essays were scientific, the odds of my hitting none of them in 40 samples is around 1.5%. That's a small enough number that I feel comfortable forming my conclusion.

Of course, that assumes the 40 samples are random samples, which I now question.

@233: Your point about loud-mouthed idiots is well taken. Particularly since the loud-mouthed idiots in gender studies caused me to analyze the field as commanding rather than informing. We need better publicists. :)

I think there's a key distinction between your biology example and women's studies, though: a biologist who denied evolution and trumpeted something completely lacking in evidence (say, creation "science") would be denounced by other biologists. In a real sense, he or she would no longer be a biologist. A women's studies scholar who denied empiricism would face no such sanctions (or at least that's my impression). So outsiders are a bit more justified in drawing conclusions about the field from the welcomed anti-empiricist than the ostracized anti-evolutionist.

maddy811 @223...You suggested @196 that you saw Butler's "dense theory as a load of self-inflating bullshit." It was hard to predict from that, that you would next say: "I never said I didn't find Butler's ideas powerful."

I wrote: "If you didn't understand her, is it possible you weren't paying close enough attention?" I think raising that question hardly qualifies as "ad hominem attacks and categorical dismissals of any and all critiques." If I went to a talk on physics, and complained that I found it so theoretically obtuse that I didn't even understand what the topic was... would people be justified in thinking I should study more physics before I decide whether the jargon was obfuscatory or necessary? Why is that more reasonable for physics than for gender studies?

I agree with you that many people use theory to hide their lack of ideas. I don't think Butler is one of them, and I don't think you've produced any evidence that she is.

@224 – self-declared straight men can rape other men with broomstick handles. Or their hands. Erections and arousal are not required for rape.

@226 -- "only people who specialize within a field are qualified to judge it?"
In all academic fields the evaluators are taken from the same field. People outside the field get to think whatever they want. (Freedom of speech :) Gender theorists say all sorts of crap about hard scientists, and vice versa. Each field defers intellectually only to people within its own field, and only listens to outsiders when they find a way to communicate their ideas in terms that also make sense within the field.

Those of you criticizing gender studies bear the burden of proof. Name a gender theorist who spouts the kind of self-justifying self-congratulatory bullshit you're talking about, and who is also well respected in the field, as evidenced by many publications in peer reviewed journals and a permanent appointment in a prestigious gender studies department. Sokal doesn't count for this, sorry.

EricaP, return to my post: i said that if you're used to hard data you "could" dismiss Butler along those lines. I didn't say that I did so. I did, however, say that I think she's a lousy writer. Powerful ideas, undeniably influential, doggedly painful (at least for me) to read.

The example I was thinking of, in truth, is Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic. I used to play a game with friends that you could open that book at random, pick any sentence, and then try to figure out whether or not said sentence had a real subect and verb in it.

As for the comparison between physics and gender studies (or cultural theory), yes, all fields develop their own terminology, but, as I remember, the concepts of physics are challenging, not the language used to describe those concepts. There are lots of very useful terms in cultural studies, but there are also ones that are needlessly obfuscating and self-promoting.

Case in point: a book that made a big splash when I was in graduate school: "Disidentification." Open that book and notice how many paragraphs begin with "Disidentification is..." (Another grad school game). Turns out that plenty of scholars before him had words describing "disidentification" just fine, so it was hard to not conclude that this guy was trying to coin a big word to establish himself as a scholar. (And don't think I didn't get criticized for saying that shit in class, but, c'mon, if you have to define the same word over and over and over, are you really producing scholarship?')

Boy, I'm tired...

@238: I'm not referring to evaluating ideas within the field; I'm referring to evaluating the field as a whole.

Let's take an easier example: Scientology, whose practitioners insist is a scientific discipline. Suppose I spend several months reading the works of L. Ron Hubbard, attending audits, and doing whatever else it is Scientologists do. At the end of those several months, I conclude that Scientology is a load of shit and a giant scam, and I publicize this conclusion/viewpoint. Would it be a valid rebuttal to say that I don't have enough experience with Scientology, and that only people who have penetrated the mysteries of ten years of dona... err, "study" are qualified to judge it?

Of course, I'm not comparing women's studies to the heaping mound of horseshit that is Scientology. I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the rebuttal.

To return to another post, I just did provide a specific example: Munoz's Disidentification. Utter crap. Scholars of marginalized groups have been describing cultural appropriation and reappropriation for decades--he spends most of the book arguing for his definition of his new word. I wanted to stab out my own eyes, and I LOVE gender play and subversion!

I gave another example above: John Fiske's essay on Jeans as a site of popular resistance. That dude shovels some serious shit in that piece too, as I mentioned above.

Another example: I had a "colleague" who set out to "prove" that women who write slash fanfic were the most radical challengers of patriarchy and heteronormativity and to "disprove" psychologists who argued that said women were pathological. She had her thesis before collecting any data, and steadfastly dismissed anyone who pointed this out by responding with piles of anthropology theory about the self-deluding folly of empirical work and the scientific method. Guess what? She writes and consumes slash fanfic. I don't mean to pick specifically on her, as she was one of many in my program who would dismiss their own biases as political radicalism, and, in doing so, dismiss counterarguments and conflcting arguments categorically. You don't need to do scholarship if you already have an answer to an intellectual question--that's political advocacy and polemicism.

maddy811@243 – if those are responding to my request @239, they're not directly on point. John Fiske is in media studies rather than gender studies; Gilroy is in race/diaspora studies. I've never heard of Muñoz, but apparently he's in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. But I'm sure they've all been cited by gender studies courses at prestigious universities, so I'll give them to you.

I'[ll give them to you, just as long as we give equal disparagement to the fields of media studies, race/diaspora studies, performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory.

When a woman writes in to Dan, and her letter is mocked in part for her field of gender studies, I'm just glad to hear it's not the gender part of gender studies which is at issue, but simply the cultural/theoretical/humanities part. As long as gender studies is not being criticized more than those fields, I'm happy for you all to hold it in high or low regard, as you see fit.

@242 As I said before "People outside the field get to think whatever they want." That's just as true for the Scientologists as for the gender theorists. You want to call Scientology a "heaping mound of horseshit," I'll agree with you. But we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back and think that we've converted any Scientologists. We're just speaking to the converted. Similarly, you can think whatever you like about gender studies, but you won't convince me that it's crap unless you try to engage with its utility on its own terms.

@245: I'm not trying to convince you of anything. Even were I the most eloquent writer in the history of the world, there is pretty much no chance of convincing anyone that something in which they've invested a significant amount of time is worthless.

I don't have a dog in this hunt, so to speak, so was hoping you could convince me. I am now convinced of women's studies' value in describing the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of a subset of the population-- i.e., women's studies scholars and some (but not all) of the women they claim to represent. I am not convinced that I should lend any objective weight to any of those thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, but it was my impression that you agreed that no objective weight should be taken.

@246, If you lent objective weight to my feelings & beliefs, what would that mean? I believe that gender is a spectrum, not a binary. I believe the same of sexual preference. I give those beliefs great weight in my life; they help me understand how people around me work, and influence how I decide with whom to have sex and how I should carry myself in the world. Also, those beliefs encourage me to post a lot on Slog, which if I were a different person, who had never experience Judith Butler, I might not do. (Or I would do very differently.) My categories of understanding the world are vastly different than they were before I read Butler.

So - I think all that is super super important. But, what would it mean if I gave them "objective weight"? Or if I thought you should give them "objective weight"? That I would tell people what categories they belong in, and try to get the state to punish them if they step outside their categories? Surely not. Then what does "objective weight" mean, in cultural analysis?

@247: By "objective weight," I mean considering something as universally true rather than true-for-you. For example, the fact that you consider gender a spectrum does not mean that gender actually is a spectrum, although I happen to agree there. Same with sexual preference.

Something that I do give objective weight to: women as a class being undervalued in society. Not because some women think that they are, but because the statistical and demographic data reveal that they are. As a comparison, some men think men are undervalued in society. There is no data (to my knowledge) that supports that subjective belief, so I do not give those guys' opinions any objective weight.

Ok, I Hate Screen Names, you flipped me back to the other side. I echo EricaP's question about what could possibly lend "objective weight?" And, again, you say that you don't suffer from confirmation bias, but gender studies must provide "objective" evidence? Can history? Literature? Sociology? Anthropology? Psychology? Again, your rigidity in your dismissal of gender studies is suspicious. While I reject categorical dismissals of empiricism, I also think it's equally ridiculous to pose some sort of standard of "objectivity" in academic studies of the human condition. What exactly would that look like? How can anyone meet that? Or is it only women's studies that must do so?

EricaP, sorry, but you needed Butler to realize that gender and sexuality exist beyond binaries?

@249, I'll cop to being an underinformed idiot with no proper theory training until I got to grad school in 1993. But tell me who was writing about gender & sexuality not being binaries before 1990? Maybe I could have learned it from them; in practice, as it happens, I learned it from Butler.

EricaP:
Even if one accepts that GS/WS is a discipline just like any other and whose academic standards are as rigorous as any others -- and I don't see why it wouldn't be -- it does rather leave the puzzling question of why it produces so many graduates who seem to badly need to open floodgates of wordiness to seemingly correct everybody else, and, well, proselytize. They remind one of folks who have come to Jesus and all they want to talk about is the Bible. ("Did you see the game last night?" "I don't feel that you understand that ALL games are the creations of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who ....[etc]". ) And, like Jesus freaks, they just assume that if you aren't instantly in agreement with their particular interpretation of the culture then it's because you you're either bad, or you just don't know enough and they can convert you by talking more and more about the promised land.

Those, I think, are more accurate explanations as to why a lot of folks have aimed jokes/potshots at WS/GS majors. HC, our letter writer, is a good example. My god her letter is a tome and it speaks to one of the most experienced and open-minded sex columnists in N.America as if he's a baffled noob who needs all the help he can get in understanding How These Things Work. So when somebody rolls their eyes and says "oh dear, another woman's studies grad" it's often simply because that assumption -- that such a steamroller of information-spewing, jargon-laden lecturing and often condescending earnestness is a product of a WS/GS program -- is so often right. I can't recall seeing any other discipline that produces the type in such staggering -- and often wearying -- numbers.

Unpost, unpost! Kinsey, of course, for sexuality. Damn. Not that I knew that work back then, but still.

And what I got from Butler was also about the performativity of gender even for people who think of themselves as being completely 100% girls.

Which leads me to: IHSN @248, I do actually think that's universally true, that no one is actually naturally a girl, separate from how her culture constructs girlness. It's true for me, but I have become convinced by Butler that it's true for everyone. Girls, like chairs, don't exist separate from culture. I understand that to most people in our culture, I sound as crazy as a Scientologist. And I don't run around forcing girls to agree with me. But I believe it has objective weight for everyone, even those who don't believe it. Still don't understand what consequences follow from that.

214/ankylosaur: No, reason does not say that what is good for people of opposite sex should necessarily be good for people of the same sex. Note that this argument would have the same structure as the following wrong argument: "Reason says that two people who are children (e.g., younger than 10) shouldn't be prevented from marrying if two people who are adults (e.g., older than 20) are allowed to marry." This is not simple "reason": there are other assumptions that are not made clear in your argument. Children shouldn't be allowed to marry because their cognitive levels are still not sufficient to deal with marriage and its consequences. To allow them to marry would be to invite harm. In the case of same-sex marriages, there is no harm involved:

Au contraire. Reason would not say that two people who are children shouldn't be prevented from marrying if two people who are adults are allowed to marry. There are good reasons why we don't allow children to do things -- get married, have sex with adults, vote, go to war, drive cars -- that adults are allowed to do. This distinction between adults and children is not based in emotion.

In contrast, the opposition to same-sex marriage by religious (and other) conservatives is based in emotion (just as opposition to interracial marriage was.) As you noted, in the case of same-sex marriages, there is no harm involved. Therefore, there is no rational basis for preventing it.

@251, that is a puzzlement. One could propose theories... but I don't think gender studies would have any special expertise for answering that puzzle.

250: Kinsey? The Romans? Folks within the New Left/Counterculture, and Feminism of the 1960s? That's off the top of my head. I also tend to think that scholarship caught up with lived experience, and was able to do so as, in the case of the US, social life got more open. I suspect that folks' sex lives were always more varied and rich than publically revealed, but that may be optimism on my part.

To take race, we have centuries of white men railing against the mongrelization that would result from race mixing as they raped their female slaves. Thus, I also think people are quite adept at rationalizing away and repressing what they actually do while publically professing some higher moral standard for others to observe, but that may be cynicism on my part.

I also tend to wary of anyone with a vested interest in telling people who and how they should fuck. I tend to conclude that folks who are preoccupied with controlling others sex lives are sufferin' under some mighty demons of their own...

@252: I didn't say that gender wasn't socially constructed; I said that the fact that you consider gender socially constructed does not mean that it is. I did state that I agree with you, mostly because I've looked at enough cross-cultural and historical data to know that the definition of "girlness" varies across societies. It is that reviewed data to which I give objective weight, not any person's opinion. (Though as the joke goes, if you gather enough opinions together, you end up with data.)

The difference between objective truth and subjective truth is one of policy. It is objectively true that women are undervalued, and so we as a society should implement various programs and stratagems to rectify that. It is not objectively true that men are undervalued-- though it may be subjectively true for those "men's rights" douchebags-- so we as a society can ignore their doucheiness.

Dear H.C.,

Humans have these little things that we like to call "ethics." They help society--and relationships within society--run smoothly. Asexy people have an ETHICAL OBLIGATION to disclose their sexuality, just as a gay man is ethically obligated to tell his straight friend that he's interested in him, rather than duping him into going on 'dates' and whatnot. Yes, it's hard out there for the asexy. There are few asexy people out there. But surely this lack is due, in part, to the continued secrecy and shame they feel? And, even if this isn't the case, it doesn't follow that the lack of available partners makes lying to non-asexy people okay. It doesn't.

There are plenty of people who are willing to compromise for a partner they think is worth it. But they can't have the chance to compromise, or even be with a worthy partner (in my mind anyone who lies to their partner isn't worth being in a relationship with) if the asexy partner isn't *honest*.

And again--this honesty, this ethical conduct that the asexy should adhere to would be greatly enhanced by a small handful that "came out." It would give permission to others (some surveys claim as much as 10% of the population is low-sexual or asexual). But, more importantly, it would convince the majority that asexuality wasn't something to be looked askance at because asexual people would be acting with integrity.

Sincerely,

Cyrano
Master's Candidate, Rhetoric and Composition, Washington State (LOL!)

Dan, thanks for such a sweet and thoughtful response to the letter. That's above and beyond, and I appreciate it.

Oh noes, cyrano..., does this mean we now have to debate the pitfalls and virtues of rhetoric and composition programs?!?

@83, @112, @139, @232:
What do asexuals think about while masturbating?

I have a spanking fetish. I masturbate to fantasies of being spanked for being a naughty, naughty boy.

Note that it doesn't matter whether I'm being spanked by a man or woman. See how that works? This works with any fetish/fantasy that doesn't rely on male or female anatomy. So it's pretty easy to imagine after all.

I'm what they call demisexual. For me that means that I am not turned on by the physical appearance of men or women, but I am turned on by other "secondary" characteristics like a British accent and low-talking. It's confusing, since for the purposes of this discussion we're talking about the asexual people who have no or low sex drives. And many do. But the defining characteristic of asexuality (at least as I understand it) is that you are turned on by the physical appearance of neither men nor women. Give me a demure Londoner who knows how to use a wooden paddle, and my sexual response springs to attention. But I have never once in my life sexually responded to the physical appearance -- boobs, butt, arms, legs, torso, etc. -- in person, in magazine, on tv, in movies, etc. -- of a man or woman. That's what makes me asexual.

Does that help? Or just confuse the issue even more?

A confession: my fetish isn't spanking. I'm too much of a wimp to disclose my real fetish, but the spanking example is close enough to illustrate my point.

maddy811 at 262: Is that a rhetorical question?

No one is going to read a comment this far in but I'm writing this anyways for my own catharsis. First, I'm sick of every sexual minority pretending their struggle is like gay, bi and lesbian struggles. It's not. Just like gay rights is not analogous to the civil rights struggle in the 60s though lots like to pretend it is. There are big differences. Which brings me to my second gripe. Fuck this letter writer alluding to this analogy of gay and lesbian people. Who is persecuting them? The christians would fucking love it. No one is intruding on their goddam rights to be open and freely marry. The only persecution they will face is the simple and sad fact that they have a sex drive out of step with almost everyone. I guess they might never understand how hurtful it is to be sexually neglected, but I can tell you it's at least as hurtful as being alone. If you don't want to have sex, then just have friends. I am as close to some of my friends as I am to my loved one. But the fact is that girlfriend boyfriend relationships form largely out of the special contingencies of being sexually active (not just straight sex, i mean like increased trust and risk etc). The asexual might not feel loved, but it's not because they are persecuted or misunderstood, it's because they apparently want an extra special best friend that is not going to look any different than most people's close friends. I don't buy the strife matches LGBT strife, and i don't buy the asexuality is the root cause of their strife. I'm not sure i've made my point as well as it could be but no one is going to read to comment 265 anyways.

265: Cherry Pirate, I read your comment. And I think it's spot on, well put, and on target: the cherry on the message board parfait.

@264 lol
@266 cute

@263: Thank you for sharing. I had assumed that asexuality was synonymous with a lack of sex drive, which I think was the main stumbling block. If I may make a no doubt imperfect analogy: I consider myself heterosexual because I am sexually attracted to some (not all) women, and am uninterested in the remaining women and all men. If I had that same "uninterested" attitude toward all women, I would be asexual.

Or another angle: I've had a couple female friends that were interested in me romantically and presumably sexually, for whom I cared dearly, but to whom I was just not physically attracted. If I had that same response toward everyone, I would be asexual.

The thing I have trouble getting is the separation of the romantic and sexual. If I have romantic feelings for someone, I want to have sex with her, without exception. (I liked or even loved the friends I referenced above, but I didn't looooove them.) I think that mental equivalence is why "sexuals" are so devastated when they end up with an asexual: because we can't separate the two, and thus being told "I don't want to have sex with you, ever" is equivalent to being told "I don't love you."

@260, 262, 264: Rhetoric and composition programs suck donkey balls.

I keed, I keed. :)

@251 seeker6079 it does rather leave the puzzling question of why it produces so many graduates who seem to badly need to open floodgates of wordiness to seemingly correct everybody else, and, well, proselytize."

AMEN. You know, for a bunch of people who are against the patriarchy, WS/GS graduates tend to be awful PATRONIZING.

here's an idea: try not to alienate people who are on your goddamn side!
example of GS/WS douchery: a friend who is an ESL speaker is speaking, and trying to be inclusive says 'he or she', only to be interrupted by a GS nutbar yelling at him to use the gender inclusive pronoun 'ze'. His language doesn't even have gender specific pronouns, he was trying to use 'he or she' to be inclusive! Also HE ISN'T EVEN FLUENT IN REAL ENGLISH, don't start throwing bullshit made up terms at him!! WTF? Why do GS/WS people always do douchey stuff like this? Cut that shit out already if you want people to take you seriously!

Cherry Pirate:

What if you're a homoromantic asexual? What if you are two same-sex asexuals wishing to marry? There are homoromantic asexual couples, you know. They can't marry each other any more than homosexual couples can. I don't think too many asexuals are going to quibble with the fact that homosexuals and trans-folk have had more systematic abuse and discrimination. However, some asexual people are trans, and some are in same-sex relationships. There is cross-over all around, and an asexual person can be discriminated against, though not necessarily for the asexuality by itself.

Which makes me wonder what would happen if homoromantic asexuals were more vocal (or noticed, rather) in the media. Would those still against same-sex marriage still rail against same-sex asexual couples?

I know this is an old letter, but a word on disclosures in general: Back in my single days, I disclosed a lot on the first date. In fact, since people normally talk to someone before going on a date, I tried to disclose everything I could BEFORE the first date. I disclosed being bi (even though I’m monogamous), I disclosed being pagan, I disclosed having acted in some pretty racy films (even though there was no nudity), I disclosed having been through a lot of therapy. I disclosed all of this (and more) not just for my date’s sake- but for mine as well. I considered it weeding out incompatible people before I got emotionally involved and got my heart broken when it turned out that one of these things made me un-dateable to them.
And you know what? I still got TONS of dates. I still tended to have my pick of people. I just got to tell whether they were a good pick for me from the start, instead of being rejected later because something about me made us incompatible. And I know there were a lot of people I broke things off with, not because of what they disclosed, but that they didn’t disclose it earlier and I felt duped.
So seriously, asexual who do not disclose, I have no pity for you.