
The Sexual Is Political - sridca
http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-sexual-is-political/
======
gaur
> The vision of social relations that sustains transgenderism is the so-called
> postgenderism: a social, political and cultural movement whose adherents
> advocate a voluntary abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent
> scientific progress in biotechnology and reproductive technologies.

What a bizarre claim.

~~~
Bartweiss
Not just bizarre, but actively backwards.

There's a decent amount of conflict between people advocating "no one is
gendered" postgenderism and transgender people going "I'm suffering for my
gender identity, get out of here with that nonsense". I'm a bit baffled by the
claim that "I am gender A, not gender B" is somehow a call for "abolition of
gender".

~~~
slavik81
Unless I misunderstood, I thought that was part of the conflict they're
discussing.

~~~
justinpombrio
Unfortunately, the writing style makes it almost impossible to tell.

~~~
chongli
Žižek is a challenging read if you're not accustomed to it. Typical for a
philosopher (or indeed any expert), he uses technical terms with the
assumption that the reader knows them or at least will take the time to look
them up.

------
amelius
> Which man has not caught himself in momentary doubt: “Do I really have the
> right to enter GENTLEMEN? Am I really a man?”

Honestly, I never had this thought. Am I strange?

~~~
jelly
When I was younger and saw the full word "Gentlemen" on a toilet door I would
wonder whether I was polite enough to qualify.

------
duaneb
I wish I could select the text to quote on iOS but I can't.

However, there's a core premise of the article that I disagree with: it is not
more acceptable to emphasize your identity as a minority. People emphasize
identity as a white, as male, as part of their class every day. People are
OBLIGATED to make an effort to embrace or at least accept and work with
minority cultures, but are not restricted from emphasizing or being proud of
their own. I certainly know a few Germans and Scandinavian Americans who have
no issues celebrating their heritage non-offensively.

I think the same applies to sexuality. Cis people have no issues expressing
their identity as cis daily. To draw a parallel to the black lives matter
movement, the reason #AllLivesMatter is offensive is not because all lives
DONT matter, but because it negates the efforts of other people to raise
awareness of minority issues. Similarly, nobody is going to give you shit for
being cis unless you do some thing like try to start a heterosexual pride day
--that's just the norm, EVERY day is heterosexual pride day. You can be joyful
of your sexuality daily and express how much you enjoy it to the world. It's
called pop music!

Secondly, there was a lot of talk about a class binary. This isn't really a
thing outside of dialectical materialism, to my knowledge, and the rhetoric
about the 1% vs the 99%. Neither of those describe a social class structure
but certain interesting economic behaviors characteristic of the times in
question. A revolution is inherently binary; a class queer economic revolution
isn't an idea that makes sense.

Third, the mention of the end of sexual reproduction was... Weird. I'm not
sure what that has to do with anything but the end of the male sex thought
experiment. Certainly not related to anything happening today.

At this point, I stopped reading. Some sources or building on other material
would be helpful to see the conclusions in an incremental manner; this reads
as a manic rant by a young student who reads philosophy but neglected anything
about the topic in question.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
> the reason #AllLivesMatter is offensive is not because all lives DONT matter

I'm not sure I agree with that wording. To be clear:

    
    
      * No lives matter outside the narrow scope of humanity.
        The universe is an uncaring void. In the context of the
        universe, no lives matter.
      
      * Within the context of human society, all lives should
        matter. Fairness requires a certain amount of equality
        and equity.

~~~
duaneb
Yes, the wording is a little weird in my post.

But nobody has argued that all lives don't matter. Nobody has argued that
black lives matter more than any other lives. It is not the statement itself
that is offensive, it is the hashtag used to deny systemic racism by shouting
over people attempting to raise visibility to a minority cause--often unarmed
black men being brutalized or shot and killed by police.

It's like someone gets hurt, and then you start talking about how everyone
gets hurt, too, instead of giving the person help. Perhaps there are better
ways to communicate the initial half but I haven't been able to figure out a
better brand off the top of my head.

Edit: also I think the reason the #AllLivesMatter movement has been so
successful is because who wouldn't agree with that statement? You must think
not all lives matter! Which is a little silly and, I think, is intended as
self-reassurance that these #AllLivesMatter proponents can self-love as the
#BlackLivesMatter movement self-loves.

------
aiiane
I really wish philosophers would stop using a half baked understanding of
trans folk as an intellectual plaything.

~~~
joe5150
I really feel like Zizek must be aware of the fact that practically all of the
social, ontological, etc. issues he brings up about transgenderism have been
discussed and debated within and outside of academia for many years, and he
just doesn't care and doesn't believe his opinions need to be informed by any
of it.

~~~
duaneb
I recommend all people interested in philosophy engage in it, but go to
classes for critical theory. This is where most of the interesting philosophy
of the last 50 years has taken place, including the entirety of queer theory.
His view is so backwards from where the jargon he uses comes from I wonder if
european philosophers are even aware of the field of queer theory.

------
jessaustin
LGBTQQIAAP FTW!

The speechifying conventioneers of the last several weeks had enough trouble
pronouncing "LGBT". A more mellifluous acronym (or, dare one suggest, actual
_word_ ) would make this an easier topic to discuss, but perhaps that wouldn't
do justice to it: is every new letter a new inclusiveness?

TFA takes the bathroom brouhaha as its starting point. ISTM the only tenable
long-term solution is to have any number of single-toilet rooms, each of which
may be used by whoever wants to use it. In locations that serve many people at
once, these could be supplemented by a single many-toilet room, reserved for
those who are comfortable eliminating in the presence of other humans. Future
generations will laugh at us silly Victorians.

------
ericjang
Author:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek)

 _What justifies the limitation to the binary form of marriage? Why not even a
marriage with animals? After all we already know about the finesse of animal
emotions. Is to exclude marriage with an animal not a clear case of
“speciesism,” an unjust privileging of the human species?_

This is a question I like to entertain, and was wondering if the HN community
had thoughts on the matter.

Most argue that romantic/sexual relationships with animals is wrong because:
1\. an animal is incapable of consent. 2\. even if the relationship was
"consensual", there is a power dynamic that the human enjoys over the pet
animal that the animal has little control over, so the relationship is still
predicated on some kind of exploitation.

This suggests that we can only seek ethical relationships with intellectual
and equally independent entities.

Now replace "animal" with "mentally disabled" or "children". Are they capable
of consent? Who are they allowed to have a relationship with?

I am not suggesting that children or the mentally disabled are equivalent to
animals - I just find the arguments very similar.

Edit: it's my life objective to maximize HN karma, so my feelings get hurt
when I get downvoted. I'd like to hear why you disagree!

~~~
sevenless
> an animal is incapable of consent.

They don't exactly consent to being killed and eaten, either.

Looking for consistency in human ethics, particularly sexual ethics, always
seemed a bit foolish to me. We didn't develop them with ethical consistency in
mind, nor do our basic biological drives care.

~~~
ericjang
Without ethical consistency, of what use are the ethics?

~~~
sevenless
I'd say that ethics define a local and situational landscape of guidance,
rather than global policies.

There are cases where our ethical intuition breaks down altogether or gives
contradictory answers depending on how you argue, such as the trolley problem,
utilitarianism/deontology - and really, many of the great social
liberal/conservative arguments are based on different ethical approaches to
the same situation. Like the mathematical value of 0/0, it all depends on how
you get there.

This is to be expected, since after all, we're social animals. Our ethics,
such as the sense that murder is generally wrong, evolved and developed over
many thousands of years as value systems (via government, law and religion)
that preserved cooperative and successful societies. I expect meta-
ethics/attempts to codify our ethics, in general, not to succeed, since they
never developed as cohesive, all-encompassing systems in the first place. Our
society's code of law is as close as we get, and that's a long way off being
ethically coherent.

------
sevenless
This is gibberish.

~~~
hx87
I expect nothing more of Slavoj Zizek.

------
joe5150
Zizek is so far out of his depth here that it's comical, and it shows in his
juvenile "trans leads to bestiality" concern troll. Idiotic. Does LARB have an
editor, or are they just supremely aware of the fact that even the worst
garbage by name-brand thinkers will get eyeballs on the page?

I don't even know how to approach the weird discourse on Jews....

------
c0nducktr
Was this killed by flags? What happened?

~~~
jessaustin
It appeared so, but then I clicked "vouch" and it came back. Of course, this
may just be a sort of hell-vouch, visible only to me? [EDIT:] No, not a hell-
vouch; it still appears in incognito.

[EDIT 2:] ...and now it's flagged again. Philosophy on HN casts pearls before
swine. If I were illiterate I would call it "ironic". A simple essay that
addresses matters of broad public discussion (certainly on HN) in slightly
idiosyncratic fashion ( _not_ rude, _not_ disrespectful, only a bit out of the
rut of banal everyday discourse), is immediately round-filed by the right-
thinking brigade? Could there be a more convincing proof of TFA's title?

~~~
justinpombrio
I suspect it was flagged by left-thinking people. I'd flag it if I could: in
the _second_ paragraph the author conflates transgender people with
postgenderists calling for the abolition of gender. None of the trans people I
know believe anything like that. It's possible there's some subtle argument
that's going over my head, but either way this article seems like poorly
grounded flamewar fodder.

~~~
jessaustin
Haha, every line is a point, when viewed sideways.

The reactionary "whew I've made it in now close the bathroom door" position
you ascribe to certain "T" people wouldn't be shared by all that many "Q"
folk, although it is of a piece with some "G" voices elsewhere in this thread.
There is a natural tension in any political coalition, between those who join
for ethical reasons and those who are primarily self-interested (and, one
supposes, those for whom the whole movement is only a political tool). Do we
see some fraying around the edges?

Perhaps TFA _is_ flamewar fodder, but that says more about this forum than
about TFA itself, which when taken on its own terms is interesting and
imaginative.

~~~
justinpombrio
> The reactionary "whew I've made it in now close the bathroom door" position
> you ascribe to certain "T" people

To be clear, I only ascribed a _lack_ of uniform belief in "a voluntary
abolition of gender, rendered possible by recent scientific progress in
biotechnology and reproductive technologies", and thought it strange that the
author assumed that trans people shared this vision.

------
eximius
1\. That was painful to read.

2\. Be excellent to each other.

~~~
hinkley
Station!

