Georgina Hanke & why Academic Feminism is useless

 Biology explains gender. We know why it exists- Evolution, d'uh!- and why it does not correspond to an essence. Rather, it is the fitness landscape which has salience in determining gendered traits.

Prof. Georgina Warnke takes a different view. In an article for Aeon, he writes

What sex or gendered property or properties do females or women hold in common, then, that might be cordoned off and considered independently of their differences?

Evolution explains why there will be phenotypal diversity such that no 'property' will necessarily pick out all members of a gender. Indeed, the existence of such a property makes extinction more likely. Diversity and multiple realizability helps baffle a predator or a parasite.

Political Philosophy, of course, is not a Scientific discipline. Still, it is foolish to wish to find a property which picks out only and all members of a class.

Why?

Either the property can be changed or it can't. If it can be changed, it is useless for 'cordoning off'. If it can't be changed then either it can be faked- in which case 'leakages' arise- or it can't.

 If it can't be faked  either using it is helpful or it isn't. If it is helpful then, so long as it remains so, though the property itself isn't changing, the condition of the underlying population is changing for the better. This means that it could be  instrumentalized for purely commercial or economic purposes. In other words, the existence of a useful 'cordoning off' trait would itself reduce the need for political philosophy to interest itself in that Identity Class. Indeed, it has no 'interessement' mechanism with regard to it and thus is wholly irrelevant to its trajectory.

How do we formulate an answer to the question of who women or females are that is definitive, inclusive and useful for moving forward on issues of women’s equality and freedom?

How demarcate an Identity Group if the demarcation can itself be instrumentalized to lift some members out of it? Consider India's affirmative action programs and legislations. A 'Dalit' picked out for affirmative action ceases to suffer oppression- indeed, he may oppress others- but this does not help those left behind.

On the other hand, by picking out a trait possessed by a particular Dalit group- e.g. a habitus of working with leather- can turn that group into a prosperous and successful element in society if the State encourages the leather industry and provides credit and infrastructure. Of course, some groups will have no useful habitus in the modern world. But some new niche activity can be found for them which builds on their skill set.

Political philosophy objects to this sort of useful work because it dissolves the wider Identity Class. Thus the savants lose their 'obligatory passage point' status which they use for moral, or virtue signalling, purposes and whereby they derive a rent.

Second-wave feminists were roundly criticised for claiming to speak for all women while focusing mostly on the issues and challenges confronting white, middle-class women, and neglecting those facing non-white, non-middle-class women.

Those who criticized them gained an advantage over the rest of their identity class and extracted a rent on the basis of 'representing' this surd and subaltern alterity. Unlike the Second Wave, these poseurs achieved nothing.

On the other hand, it is true that here were 'first wave' feminists who were racists or elitists. The classic example is Minnie C.T Love who was a Doctor and Suffragette who served in the Colorado legislature while playing a prominent role in the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, there were many first wave feminists with strong views on eugenics and the evils of miscegenation and so forth. Katherine Mayo, who is infamous in India, was a First Wave Feminist of this type.

By contrast, Second Wave feminists worked within the system and secured incremental benefits in a strategic manner. This greatly altered the lifechances of the Third, or now the Social Media based Fourth Wave of self-dramatists.

How then do contemporary feminist philosophers recognise differences between women while also providing the basis for collective feminist work?

They don't. They merely extract an exiguous rent in return for some child-minding duties or more or less puerile exercises in sham scholarship.

Still, they get to say silly stuff like-

If one is not subordinated – perhaps the Queen of England – then one is not a woman by this definition

Maggie Thatcher, maybe. The Queen has always subordinated herself to the Crown in Parliament. Hers is an extraordinary record of utterly selfless Public Service.

Sally Haslanger, professor of philosophy and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts forth an influential analytic-feminist approach in a series of articles, and in her book Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (2012), proposing what she calls an ‘ameliorative’ definition of women. Different projects might require different definitions. But if the feminist project is that of emancipating women and ensuring their equality or, as Haslanger puts it, overcoming sexist oppression, and correcting disparities in power and privilege, then she thinks that for these purposes we can look to hierarchical relations in which one group is subordinate to another, and in which the two groups are differentiated by presumed differences in sex. On this formulation, S is a woman if and only if:

To be a woman is to be subordinated in some way because of real or imagined biological features that are meant to indicate one’s female role in reproduction.

The definition is inclusive enough to include not only cis women but also both AIS women and trans women, at least those who have undergone sufficient bodily transformations so that their visible bodies would seem to be evidence for a female role in biological reproduction.

The definition includes Ezra Pound's Honest Sailor who believes he was impregnated by a 'rich merchant in Stambouli', or the prison bitches of muscular nutjobs who think men can get pregnant up the ass.

There was a French diplomat who claimed he didn't know his Chinese wife was a man and that their child was not born in the normal way as the biological product of their marriage.  Apparently, the Chinese man- an opera singer- was a spy.

The definition can also include both those subordinated and oppressed by being discouraged from working outside the home, and those subordinated and oppressed by needing or being required to do so.

Many bosses encourage their employees to work from home because this lowers overheads. Some may like the arrangement. However, if they have dicks, they aint women.

Of course, if one is not subordinated at all or at least not because of presumptions about one’s biological role – perhaps the Queen of England – then one is not a woman according to this definition.

This is why it is silly to have definitions. It is a different matter that a protocol bound juristic process may have its own evolving 'buck stopped' nomenclature.

Why speak of 'ameliorative goals' if what you are doing is writing stupid shite?

Given the ameliorative goal of providing a definition of women geared to the task of overcoming sexist oppression, Haslanger is not overly concerned with such omissions.

Coz of all the time she spends fighting the Taliban and killing human traffickers and releasing sex slaves from bondage.

Other analytic feminists are less sure. Mari Mikkola, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, claims that use of Haslanger’s terms would simply create confusion by excluding many people commonly defined as women (such as the Queen of England). Katharine Jenkins, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, notes that if the definition is capacious enough to include trans women whose visible bodies evoke presumptions about a female role in biological reproduction, it nevertheless excludes those trans women whose bodies do not (and thus leaves important issues unresolved).

Important issues? Do these stupid pedagogues really think what they are doing has any importance to anybody anywhere?

Finally, Jennifer Saul, professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, wonders whether individuals who want to become women necessarily understand themselves as wanting to become subordinated.

Do individuals who want to become professors of philosophy necessarily understand themselves as wanting to become utterly stupid?

Such objections suggest that the task of delineating an analytically precise and appropriately inclusive definition of women will be an arduous one, with some people messily slipping out of the confines of strict definitions even though they might well be among those on whose behalf feminism should be struggling.

So nobody is doing any actual struggling. They are just lecturing each other on how they should be struggling coz struggling is cool.

If we turn now to the continental tradition in feminist philosophy, at least some of its representatives suggest that attempts to clarify who or what women are simply come too late in the game. Rather than trying for an exhaustive definition, we should first ask how women come to be. This question goes back to the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who in her book The Second Sex (1949) asserts: ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.’ But who is the ‘one’ here? Who is doing the becoming?

De Beauvoir may seem silly to us now. However, she was writing at a time when France and much of the World believed that women had to be removed from the work place and sent home to have more and more babies for the armies of the future. The Nazis had only recently been vanquished. They would have been quite comfortable with enslaving women to bear sons for  SS 'supermen'.

Second Wave Feminism was not fighting against phantoms. Its enemy was real and utterly ruthless. Beauvoir, it is true, wrote in a stilted manner because of her particular academic specialization. This did not mean Philosophy was important for the Second Wave. Rather it was 'Law & Economics'- changing the rule set and creating a Social Minimum. This was advantageous to men- more particularly those lower down the pecking order. They could have stable relationships and accumulate joint assets.

However, because female productivity created wealth for plutocrats, a sham type of Feminism based on maximizing these surpluses gained currency. This was bad for both men and women of modest backgrounds. Oddly, 'Second Wave' Feminists in some Socialist countries- like East Germany- were able to get women a better deal than their sisters in more prosperous countries. They worked within the system in a pragmatic manner.

By contrast, the rise of academic Feminism in the West worsened things because  it rejected 'Law & Econ' in favor of Metaphysics of an absurd type.

De Beauvoir’s claim seems to envisage a biologically female-sexed child who learns through socialisation to assume the attitudes, behaviours and desires of a femininely gendered woman.

'Socialisation' meant a type of indoctrination at School and in every Public Space which was in a direct line of descent from Nazi or Stalinist type of thought control. The Third Wave had no direct experience of any such thing. It could have done 'Law & Econ' but this would mean getting useful jobs as Lawyers or Econometricians rather than tenure in shite University Departments.

The issues of what makes for the female sex and what makes for the feminine gender are knotty enough – de Beauvoir has been accused of assuming all women are mid-century, middle-class Parisians.

She was writing for them, nobody else. She could scarcely have anticipated that women in Calcutta or California would discover her work and utilize it in their fearless struggle to gain tenure in a shite University Department.

What is the point of writing nonsense of this sort?-

Yet some continental feminists think that if there is a distinction to be made between sex and gender at all, it is misleading to think that we begin with a sex and acquire a gender. Bodies do not come presorted by chromosomes or genitalia alone; we could sort them by belly-button type, after all. Their sorting by sex, then, reflects human purposes and interests – those having to do with human procreation.

If we trace human procreation back far enough it involves non humans, indeed non primates. Go far enough back and it involves non mammals.

Was anything very wonderful achieved when 'Women in Development' was replaced by 'Gender and Deveolopment'?

Although these might be crucial human purposes and interests, they are still human ones. To this extent, the primary division of populations into males and females, like the socialisation that creates men and women, is a human ‘construction’.

But humans are not a human construction. Non humans had sex till by some sequence of random mutations and changes in the fitness landscape, humans became viable.

Currently some people- very few and very silly people- get paid a little money to talk shite about the social construction of reality. Purely economic forces can eliminate this academic availability cascade. If no one will pay for this type of idiocy, it will disappear of its own accord.

In her classic text Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, goes further.

Classic text? Classic to whom? Only tenure craving gobshites in worthless University Departments.

While de Beauvoir suggests that gender is a result of socialisation, Butler sees it as the imposition of a set of behavioural and attitudinal norms. She suggests that, as such, it is an effect of power.

It follows that Butler is 'an effect of power'. That's why she gets paid. Over the last 30 years, American women have worked harder and gotten a lower share of National Wealth than in the previous 'Second Wave'. Intentionally or not, Butler has served a type of 'Power' which may not have a locus but which has, in a manner of speaking, undercut the position of the vast majority of women. Distrust of elites & 'experts' has never been greater. Academic Feminism has never seemed more out of touch with reality.

Likewise, because what sorts human populations by sex is the necessity of human procreation,

Sexual reproduction greatly predates the origin of our species. Only now are we entering an age where asexual reproduction seems feasible.

at the root here is what she calls, following the late American feminist Adrienne Rich, compulsory heterosexuality – or again, power.

Right! Coz homosexuals can't have kids. There is no such thing as artificial insemination! Which world are these cretins living in?

As it turns out, then, both sex and gender are effects of power.

Very true. Power invented a time machine which enabled it to intervene throughout the history of the Universe such that Sexual Reproduction would lead to the emergence of stupid academics who would say idiotic things like-

Rather than beginning with a sexed person who acquires a gender and develops appropriate desires for the other sex/gender, the analysis must begin with the requirements of heterosexual desire that demand an opposition between masculine and feminine genders, and see these as modes of behaviour of male and female sexes.

If we begin by saying 'heterosexual desire is required' then we have to ask 'required by what?' The Evolution of the Universe? In that case, we'd have to begin by studying the physics of the Big Bang. But only very very smart people who know a lot of maths can do that. So we must begin by saying 'we are too stupid to say anything about anything coz every discussion has to begin with explaining the Big Bang.'

If we accept this conclusion, we need to reconsider the assumption behind the feminist commitment to the freedom and equality of women.

Who believes heterosexuality is required? Not the biologists who explain why the evolutionary stable strategy will feature a proportion of homosexuals. The thing isn't 'unnatural' at all.

What is the result of rejecting the findings of science? The author says it involves reconsidering the feminist commitment to the freedom and equality of women. Why do anything so foolish? Women know they are equal to men and entitled to freedom. Moreover, both men and women benefit where women are free and equal members of Society. A particular woman may gain some benefit by denying that this is the case. But why pay any attention to her?

This assumption supposes that the challenge of emancipation is that of overcoming oppression from external relations of power and subordination.

Not necessarily. It could also be about overcoming one's own fears and prejudices and of building trust between women of diverse social or racial origin.

But if we follow Butler and some other continental feminists, the challenge turns out to be that women are themselves effects of power, so that emancipation from relations of power and subordination requires emancipation from being women.

That's not a big problem. A person who is good at their job and works well with others is welcome to believe they are actually the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat.

The question then becomes less how to further the freedom and equality of women, and more: what do feminist struggles look like if the subject for whose freedom and equality they struggle is already a product of subjugation?

It doesn't matter what 'struggles' look like. What matters is if they succeed. Consider the Indian Freedom Struggle which looked like Sir Ben Kingsley. Compare it to my own Iyer Liberation Struggle which looks like Beyonce. The former gets a lot of attention while the latter is ignored at Parties and ends up in the kitchen talking to Engineers.

Butler answers this sort of question by replacing emancipation with what she calls ‘resignification’, a process of taking up the effects of power and redeploying them.

That's what I do by describing myself as looking like Beyonce.

Although women are effects of power, this power is never accomplished once and for all but must be perpetually reinforced and, moreover, we reinforce it in the ways we act as gendered beings.

If women are effects of power, their resignifications too are effects of power- ludicrous effects designed to make the entire sex look stoooopid.

In behaving as men and women are meant to behave – moving and speaking in gendered ways, desiring those we are meant to desire, performing gendered roles in gendered ways, and in modelling these ways of behaving for our children – we continually recreate gender and do so as if it were a natural expression of sex.

In behaving as we wish we are not behaving as some idiot thinks we are meant to behave. So what? A smart person who wants to change our behavior would say 'guess what? If you stopped doing x and did y instead, you could make more money or avoid getting your head kicked in'.

Only incentives- i.e. the fitness landscape- matters. Armchair theorists have no access to it. We should and do ignore them.

Drag performances offer new possibilities in gender, but what about their more restrictive resignifications?

Drag performances which are boring and stupid, like mine of Beyonce, don't offer new possibilities. They lead to widespread shunning.

But we can also behave in ways that undermine this supposed naturalness. We can poke fun at our gendered ways of acting and we can act differently. Drag performances, for example, can camp up stereotypical feminine modes of behaviours and by doing so demonstrate their performance elements. Intentionally playful and ironic butch-femme relations can undermine and redirect conventional conceptions of how genders should relate. Both serve to parody a strict male/female binary, and muddle standard equations of sex, gender and desire.

Only if they have entertainment value.  It's funny when Butler or Spivak pretends to be smart coz boring and stupid male pedagogues have to genuflect to them.

Yet, just as many analytic feminists wonder about Haslanger’s analysis, many continental feminists wonder about Butler’s.

Why wonder about something which is obviously shit?

Seyla Benhabib, professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University, questions the recourse to resignification by asking how far we need to imbed power into identity. Infants might be born into a world of existing gendered relations, hierarchies and distributions of power, and they might be socialised into this world by parents, teachers and others. Nevertheless, to say that they are born and socialised into these relations is not to say that they are already entirely constituted by them. Individuals are still capable of the sort of agency that is not itself power but rather overcomes it.

Why bother saying people are 'socialised' if they are in fact individualised? The fact is, because the fitness landscape is uncertain, rigid socialisation may lead to the relative decline of that society.

There was a racist version of First Wave Feminism. However, the Second World War showed that Societies which were more flexible in utilizing female manpower conquered and raped countries which promised to make their women's lives better at the cost of some other race's enslavement. Second Wave Feminism was about insisting that Women be helped, at least to help themselves, here and now rather than after the triumph of the Revolution or the invention of robots to do all the unpleasant chores.

For her part, Nancy Fraser, professor of political and social science at the New School in New York, asks why we should assume that resignification is always good. While drag performances and butch-femme relations might point to attractive new possibilities in gender and gender relations, what about resignifications that move them in more restrictive directions? If the camp in a gay pride parade works to try to undermine conventional ideas about a gender binary, what about the resignifications in alt-Right demonstrations against gender and racial equality? What about the subversion of norms of civic behaviour and civil discourse?

Talking nonsense is never virtuous because evil bastids can talk nonsense too. Actual Science or proper 'Law & Econ' can 'pay for itself' and generate a surplus. This means people will pay attention to its arguments. However, those arguments will still be judged by their results.

It also remains unclear how far resignification can take us in a more straightforwardly political way. In the years since the 1990s, gender categories have become increasingly fluid and flexible, and in the United States sexual norms have loosened considerably. According to a 2017 article in Time magazine, 20 per cent of millennials say they are something other than strictly straight and cisgender. Facebook has about 60 options for a user’s gender, and the dating app Tinder has about 40. Yet a widespread gender binary still generally structures people’s circumstances and prospects.

Nonsense! Citizenship or its lack structures 'people's circumstances and prospects' more than gender. Educational Credentials, Work History, Wealth etc. are far more important.

Even if we agree that this binary is socially constructed, to say that gender and possibly sex are effects of power is not to say that people do not live as men and women, any more than saying that witches don’t exist means that no one was ever put to death for being one.

What happens when we agree to a false proposition? Ex falso quodlibet- there is an explosion of nonsense we are obliged to assent to. Thus we should not agree to an obviously false proposition like 'gender is not a product of evolution, it is socially constructed'. We could as easily say 'gender is the effect of weakness, or eating too much cheese, or the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat.

However we conceive of women – as constructed by or born into relations of power – and however we resolve questions of inclusion and exclusion, it is clear that, broadly speaking, they are worse off than men.

Nonsense! We may conceive of women as the intrusion into our dimension of an all powerful, blissful being.

Being economically worse off is not necessarily a bad thing. Many chose to do work they find rewarding even if this means they will have a lower standard of living. What matters is that there is a decent Social Minimum and incentive compatible routes to achievement in desirable fields.

According to Legal Momentum, the Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in the US, women are 35 per cent more likely than men to be poor. Likewise, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reports that, in 2017, women in the US earned on average 80.5 cents for every dollar that white men earned.

This may be a good thing if women are doing jobs they like while men aren't. However, this is not the case. The problem here is that measures which help the vast majority of women will also help most men.

Broken down by race and ethnicity, Latinas earned on average 53 cents; African-American women 60.8 cents; and the data from years before 2017 show that Native-American women earned on average 57 cents. According to the National Women’s Law Center, women comprise two-thirds of minimum-wage earners in the US, a wage that has remained at $7.25 an hour since 2009, and has lost about 9.6 per cent of its purchasing power through inflation.

This is one reason that working class Americans may re-elect Trump. Immigration erodes the equilibrium real wage.

Yet we need to pit struggles for greater freedom in gender identities and relations against struggles for greater equality in material conditions. Tithi Bhattacharya, professor of South Asian history at Purdue University in Indiana, suggests as much in her recent Guardian article on the teachers’ strikes in the US. Fighting for higher wages, these strikes are also bound up with gendered identities. In public schools in the US, 77 per cent of teachers are identified as women, a feminisation of the profession that Bhattacharya says began in 1900 and might have started because teachers’ salaries began to decline as the school year lengthened.

Bhattacharya was saying Feminists should support the teachers. However, female taxpayers want better education for their kids, without any increase in taxes, even if this means eroding job security and real wages for teachers.
America could shift to the Canadian system- i.e. paying teachers well, giving them sabbaticals etc- but this would disproportionately benefit the kids of immigrants.
One reason why teachers are getting the short end of the stick is because pensions were underfunded- i.e. current teachers are paying the pensions of retired teachers. This is unfair. The profligacy of previous administrations is to blame.
Even if the majority of people in a particular profession are women, raising their wages benefits men in that profession just as much. That is why American women don't think this is a 'feminist' issue any more than putting Hillary in the White House was a feminist issue.

But with feminisation came a ‘deskilling’ of teaching as less a profession than a continuation of stereotypically female care work.

This is nonsense. Finland and Canada show that 'skilling' has to do with paying a good wage and increasing the prestige of the teaching profession.

Teaching along with nursing and childcare can be paid poorly because the care work it exemplifies is supposed to be something that women do naturally, from birth.

Female prostitutes and porn stars tend to earn much more than their male colleagues. So what? Effective demand and restrictions of supply is what establishes market clearing prices.

The same presumably holds for housekeeping and similar minimum-wage jobs that keep many in poverty.

Very true! The reason security guards are poorly paid is because such work is considered female by nature.

In short, conventional ideas of the innate biological capacities belonging to women and men remain structurally embedded in significant institutions and practices.

Nonsense! Women have no innate capacity to look after kids. They have to learn how to do so- same as men. When hiring a nanny, nobody hires a woman who says 'I've never looked after a baby' whereas a guy who has a diploma in Infant Psychology and previously worked as a Nanny for Angelina Jolie gets hired straight away.

Institutions may reduce 'search costs' by hiring from a specific pool but they have evolved methods of weeding out people without the required skills. So, if you have a Wharton MBA, you do get hired by an Investment Bank. However, they sack you when they discover you can't count or spell reel gud. Then you end up in Academia.

To the extent that resignification helps to undermine such presumptions by unsettling our conceptions of sex and gender, it can be part of the solution to gendered economic disparities as well.

Very true! If women get paid less then men, what they should do is to call themselves Dapper Dans and dress up in zoot suits and stick fake mustaches on their faces. Also they should pretend to be sexually attracted to fish. This will unsettle everybody and lead to a new Utopia of gender equality and sexually harassed goldfish.

This intervention can reflect a more modest form of resignification than what some feminists have in mind: what is at stake is less parodying and undermining the male/female binary than overcoming its more pernicious presumptions about people.

pernicious presumptions about people is the sort of thing a Dapper Dan might say while twirling its fake mustache.
How does this help anybody in the real world?

Nevertheless, to the extent that doing so denaturalises care work and similar equations of gender and ability, such resignification can also help to effect the structural changes needed to improve the conditions of the poorest and most marginalised, both in the US and globally.

The extent to which doing stupid shit naturalises or denaturalises anything is exactly zero.