Hi everyone. At the request of a reader, this post (made 4/5/2019) has been recovered (on 9/30/2020) from a now thankfully banned debate subreddit. I'm no great fan of my thinking from this period, but it's a healthy biographical marker in that it was the last time I ever tried to commune in good faith with women who hate me for being trans. The main point about queer theory sharing much of its thought with radical feminist theory remains compelling. The comments which were also lost were pretty much all cruel, hostile, and abusive, but if you know what you are doing you can recover them using RedditSearch.
Hello everyone. Effortpost incoming. I do not usually post here but have considered starting.
After reading this post and its comments, it is clear to me that most users on this forum do not know what queer theory is. So this is an introduction to queer theory. I am covering basic concepts: use of language, beliefs about identity, and relationship to radical feminism. I am writing this to clear up what I believe are obvious misconceptions both trans-accepting and trans-denialist people seem to have, and to serve as a masterpost link to others making misstatements about queer theory in the future.
I am a queer feminist. More relevant to this forum, I am transgender. I have read feminist theory and queer theory since I was a teenager. I am a queer advocate and a woman advocate. I say this is to make clear that I am partisan. However, I hope this is well-cited enough that all parties find it helpful. I have tried to speak as simply as possible.

What Is Queer Theory?

In this primer, I will repeatedly stress the following analogy: queer theory is to sex-gender nonconformity as feminist theory is to women. I say "sex-gender nonconformity" to express the full breadth of queer theory, which can range from intersex writers (Iain Moorland, Morgan Holmes), to studies in something as seemingly superficial as drag (The Drag King Book, Judith Butler), to racial intersections (Mia McKenzie, Tourmaline) & Che Gossett) and postcolonial third genders (Qwo-Li Driskill).
Like feminist theory, queer theory is not one thing. It is a collection of diverse approaches to explaining the condition of sex-gender nonconformity in society, and, in the case of radical queers, improving that condition towards the radical end goal of the abolition of all sex-gender norms. Like feminist theory, queer theory is theory. Not all feminism is feminist theory. Not all queer advocacy is queer theory. Queer studies is not queer theory. Queer history is not queer theory. Queer praxis is not queer theory. Being queer is not queer theory.

Queer Theory & Language

Not all people who practice sex-gender nonconformity consider themselves queer. In fact, some consider the word exclusionary or pejorative. This is no more exceptional than the fact that some women do not consider themselves feminists, and consider the word exclusionary or pejorative.
Just as some black women reject feminism as being white (Clenora Hudson-Weems), some black sex-gender nonconformers reject queerness as being white (Cleo Manago). And just as some women reject feminist theory as harmful to society (Esther Vilar), some sex-gender nonconforming people reject queer theory as harmful to society (Sheila Jeffreys).
This problem, in which the purported subjects of a theory actively reject it, and even their positions as subjects within it, is no more destructive for queer advocacy than it is for feminism. The challenge has been answered affirmationally in various ways in both queer theory and feminist theory (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pgs. 115-117; Dworkin, Right Wing Women; Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto; Stone, A Posttranssexual Manifesto).
However, because much more of queer theory takes its subject's status as queer to be uncontroversially entirely socially constructed, and its use of language to be therefore open to social change, queer theorists encounter this problem less often than feminist theorists. We usually acknowledge that, in forcing people to be queer or not queer, we are passively reinforcing the exact forms of oppression we seek to end through our analyses. Leslie Feinberg, who did not use the word queer as a political identity, noted in hir Transgender Liberation (1992):

Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes—a wonderful problem.

Today, Feinberg's "transgender[ed] people" is now most often used apolitically, for what was once called "transgenderists": the demographic of those who live or attempt to live, socially, as a sex-gender outside of that first placed on their birth certificate. "Queer" has come to have most of the solidarity-driven political meaning of Feinberg's "transgender." However, Feinberg's conception of "transgender" is not uncommon today.
Insofar as queer advocacy permits its subjects to change, establishing their own voice, own vocabulary, own concerns, and own dissent, while feminism does not, the two must be antagonistic. Riki Wilchins addresses this tension directly in hir essay "Deconstructing Trans":

Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends.

However, Wilchins is wrong: this tension between feminist theory and queer theory is local to specific versions of queer advocacy and feminism, and is not inherent to either.

Queer Theory & Gender Identity

What the hecky, y'all? Queer theory rejects gender identity politics almost unconditionally. Get it right.
There are very few things queer theorists universally agree on: this is one. In fact, queer theorists reject sexual identity politics almost unconditionally (e.g. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism). Queer theorists regularly assert that all identity formation (including identity formation as a man or woman, flat) and even the very concept of selfhood emerge as a regulatory apparatus of power, usually that of The State. These critiques in queer theory are developed out of postmodern critiques of identity and the self. Consider, for example, these quotes from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:

To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it.
There is no longer a Self (Moi) that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.

This denial of self is directly tied to Deleuze's concept of becoming-minority), and is constructed again and again and again in queer theoretic concepts: in anti-sociality, in death drive, in anal sublimation and butch abjection, just over and over and over again. Anyone who does not understand this general concept does not understand a single thing about queer theory, straight up.
Among the transgender population specifically, it is extremely easy to find transgender people rejecting the concept of gender identity as something forced upon us by a cisgender establishment which has all the power. It's easy to find on writing. It's easy to find on video. It's easy to find on reddit. And most of us aren't even queer theorists.
So, what is it queer theorists do, if not snort identity for breakfast? Well, generally, we sort through history, literature, science, language, the social psyche, most especially real-life experience, and whatever else we can ooze our brainjuices over to analyze and undo the structures of our oppression, the very means through which we become "queer." We argue that this oppression and our position as uniquely oppressed subjects within it is socially constructed, unnecessary, and morally outrageous. And, on most analyses, this is what many feminist theorists do with women, as well. Few have even argued that, in a culture that constructs manhood as its norm, there is a sense in which to be a "woman" is also to be "queer."

Queer Theory & Radical Feminism

It has never been clear what radical feminism is. In general, I understand people who call themselves or are called "radical feminists" to be one of the following:

• Socialist feminists, who assert women are a class in some previously understood, usually Marxist sense, who must achieve liberation through techniques espoused in pre-existing theory, e.g. wages for housework.
• Post-Marxist feminists, who assert women are a "sex-class," where "class" is some new, peculiarly feminist sense of the word, who must achieve liberation through some specifically feminist method yet to be decided, outside of Marxist, anarchist, or liberal methodologies. Its origins are often supposed to be Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Post-Marxist radical feminism is usually considered "true" radical feminism, or even just feminism, proper (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pg. 117).
• Cultural feminists, who assert "man" and "woman" compose two competing cultures, and (more importantly) "feminism" as women's culture. Under this view, there can be no end to feminism because women cannot achieve equality, only the dominance of female culture. Men cannot be feminists because feminism is not a political position. Cultural feminists are ambivalent about their positioning on a left or right which are both seen as "male culture." Cultural feminists often call for a return to "the natural order," and approve of "biologism," the belief that one's cultural categorization is and should be derived from biology. Their purpose is to preserve women as feminists rather than achieve the radical goal which is the abolition of all classes. See Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology; Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Not all cultural feminists claim to be radical (or cultural); see écriture féminine.

On cultural feminism, radical feminist historian Alice Echols noted in The Taming of the Id (1984):

I believe that what we have come to identify as radical feminism represents such a fundamental departure from its radical feminist roots that it requires renaming.

Brooke Williams's Redstocking's piece The Retreat to Cultural Feminism (1975) begins:

Many women feel that the women’s movement is currently at an impasse. This paper takes the position that this is due to a deradicalizing and distortion of feminism which has resulted in, among other things,"cultural feminism.”

Inasmuch as cultural feminism asserts "man" and "woman" as essential and non-relative social categories in need of preservation, queer theory can have no truck with radical feminism, because radical feminism maintains a cultural institution which is usually seen as a major genesis of queer oppression.
However, insofar as radical feminism is post-Marxist, it is often deeply aligned with queer theory. Queer theory is also usually post-Marxist, as postmodernism was developed partly in response to the failures of Marxism. Queer advocacy often adopts radical feminist methodology, particularly consciousness raising. Many radical feminists effectively advocate queerness, in what Andrea Dworkin calls a "political, ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system," as a necessary part of feminism. Please consider what radical feminists and queer advocates have historically said about the following topics common to both:

Family Reform:
RadFem: "So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed." (De Beauvoir, Second Sex) "Patching up with band-aids the casualties of the aborted feminist revolution, it [Freudianism] succeeded in quieting the immense social unrest and role confusion that followed in the wake of the first attack on the rigid patriarchal family." (Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 70).
Queer: "The family has become the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations. It falls to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply all the social images to the simulcra of the restricted family, with the result that, wherever one turns, one no longer finds anything but father-mother - this Oedipal filth that sticks to our skin." (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 269)
Pansexuality:
RadFem: "[Through feminist revolution] A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 11)
Queer: "When queerness began to mean little more than 'pansexual activist', Bash Back! became a liberal social scene rather than a space from which to attack, which i think had been the whole point of bashing back all along." (Interview with Not Yr Cister Press, Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology, pg. 385)
Degendered Gestation:
RadFem: "Scientific advances which threaten to further weaken or sever altogether the connection between sex and reproduction have scarcely been realized culturally. That the scientific revolution has had virtually no effect on feminism only illustrates the political nature of the problem: the goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 31)
Queer: "The gender of gestating is ambiguous. I am not talking about pregnancy’s deepening of one’s voice, its carpeting of one’s legs in bristly hair, or even about the ancient Greek belief that it was an analogue of men’s duty to die in battle if called upon. I am not even thinking of the heterogeneity of those who gestate. Rather, in a context where political economists are talking constantly of “the feminization of labor,” it seems to me that the economic gendering of the work itself—gestating is work, as Merve Emre says—is not as clear-cut as it would appear." (Sophie Lewis, All Reproduction is Assisted)
Institutional Debinarization:
RadFem: "[A]ll forms of sexual interaction which are directly rooted in the multisexual nature of people must be part of the fabric of human life, accepted into the lexicon of human possibility, integrated into the forms of human community. By redefining human sexuality, or by defining it correctly, we can transform human relation­ship and the institutions which seek to control that rela­tionship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we know now. Sex as community between humans, our shared humanity, is the world we must build." (Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, pg. 183)
Queer: "'Boy' and 'girl' do not tell the genital truth that Zippora knows. Quite the opposite: instead of describing her baby’s sex, these words socially enact the sex they name... Intersexuality robs 'boy' and 'girl' of referents, but it is unclear how far this intersexed scenario differs from any other gendered encounter... I suggest the claim that sex is performative must operate constatively in order to be politically effective. One has to say that performativity is the real, scientiŽc truth of sex in order to argue that intersex surgery, which claims to treat sex as a constative, is futile constructivism." (Iain Morland, Is Intersexuality Real?)

I hope these few quotations are enough to demonstrate that queer theory and radical feminist theory are deeply interwoven, and the former is in many ways a continuation of the latter.
I have noticed debate here seems quite one-sided, but I think that I could contribute something to fix what I see as a pretty egregious misrepresentation issue. I know this primer wasn't exactly structured for debate, but I can try to answer any questions below. If you read this all, thanks!

I
I face the first difficulty of writing this document as I am trying to introduce a thing of thought which doesn’t necessarily ever begin or end. For me to be able to communicate this thing of thought to you I must phrase it as though it belongs in time; for me to do so I must first see and then try to convey how my thoughts are presented to me as best I can. Through both courses of Modern Philosophy and Phenomenology with Professor Seltzer, the main understanding of philosophy that was being communicated to me was that Philosophy is thought for the sake of itself, pure thought. The main problem that arises for me is that now Philosophy (Thought for-itself) is now disturbed by things such as class, grades, vocabulary, class standing, age, gender, etc to the extent that that it ‘feels’ completely outside of itself. As much as the topics were impactful for my thought in both courses, as much as there were topics in other courses that were able to guide my thought in a similar manner. Ultimately, what I’m trying to convey is how a series of both random (taken for any reason outside of personal interest) and intentional courses, were things that allowed me to both shape and convey my thought by “validating” my own intuition. What I mean by validating my own intuition, is feeling like I already had a prior understanding of the concepts named and defined in a class setting. I have been put in multiple situations where typologizing my relationships with other people obstructed both my and the person’s view, whether it be a (friend, parent, brother, teacher) of the present. The Stanford Prison Experiment, which I learnt in a prerequisite Psychology class, is one of the instances where a random course not only added to my prior understanding of “social roles,” that I perform but also gave me stronger insight on how much I abide by these roles unconsciously. The conclusion of this particular experiment was that people will readily conform to the social roles they play due to situational factors rather than dispositional ones. In one of the courses I took out of intent, namely Introduction to Sociology, I learned of an example that showed me the extent of which some of these roles I play remained unconscious. “When Simone de Beauvoir claims, "one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman," she is appropriating and reinterpreting this doctrine of constituting acts from the phenomenological tradition.1 In this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time-an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of act,” a quote from Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” A very simple explanation of performative versus performed is that contrary to that of the performed, the performative is as much of an act as the performed, but the only difference is that in the performed you have an awareness of your own performance. Journey I was raised in what I would describe as a loving coptic orthodox household in Egypt. My parents once told m e that I came back from the nursery crying because one of the other kids told me that I was going to go to hell because I was Christian. From that experience I was forced to deduce, because of my situational factor (religion), a perceived role that I played in a social aggregate. Because my parents knew how the christian minority is treated in Egypt, they taught me that I could become a victim of that mistreatment and further taught me various ways in which I can protect my faith when faced with situations like these. Early experiences of competition, particularly those of a religious manner (Muslim vs Christian), resulted in my carrying of anxiety(vulnerability) in the world. The world being in a highly competitive state (for example the school setting which was filled with ideas of which kids are coolest, smartest,etc) was a highly stressful place for me to be in, and for me to be able to cope I isolated myself as much as possible from situations in which I could be defined by my roles. I had no understanding that my going to school was a matter of choice, until I travelled to study abroad where some of my friends would drop out without actually receiving any of the crazy consequences I would’ve imagined for myself in that situation. I went to school in California State University, Long Beach as an Economics major believing that money was “the” main indicator of success. What I lived, however, showed me a side that wasn’t predicated on money and success . I started living my life through that side, and put myself and my thought ahead of monetary motivators. Therefore, my university performance fell and I started not caring about my education as much. I, however, was also bearing the guilt of lying to my parents about my standing, fearing that it could jeopardize my being there. I was later disqualified from school, and my visa was revoked. I came back to my parents in Egypt faced with the idea of being a failure. Initially, that put me in a severe state of depression being faced with things I wouldn’t have been able to say that I could face then, I felt like I still had much more learning to do and wasn’t ready to move back to Egypt, but in order to continue the same learning I thought I needed to return to California. For me to do so, I set a goal for myself to try to balance my life out in Egypt in order to get another chance at continuing my journey over there. I couldn’t do so, without putting aside some of the things I learned over there in the first place. I tried to mediate between both what I learned over there and what I needed to do in order to go back. My coming back from California signified a failure for me, which kept getting stronger with my inability to keep up with my work the way I set out to do. I tried to go about my studying in a way where I appreciated greatly what I was given, I looked at it as a gift from God that I would be undermining if I was to misuse it.
LIGHT OF NATURE
I will use the sentence “Light of nature,” throughout the rest of my writing and I mean it in a way where I received an unanticipated response to a question that I had within, and I will give examples that further reflect that. That same Psychology course mentioned above, I took 2 semesters ago for the intention of getting an easy A grade. I was going into that course with a very solid view of myself as a failure and “the light of nature” turned my eyes towards two defining concepts that are very relevant to my entire journey. The first concept was that of extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation, this is the way that it was both explained by the professor and the way in which I can recall it: I was told that if I wanted to do something for the sake of me being interested in it and an extrinsic motivator(money,grades,etc) is involved then I would be less likely to perform. I made sense of it with an image of a man riding atop a horse dangling a carrot in front of its eyes in order to motivate the horse to move. However, according to the extrinsic versus intrinsic concept, if the horse was internally motivated to run then the carrot’s mere existence would stop it from doing so effectively. I will give an example of my experience as a basketball player and how I made sense of my experience with my newly learned terms. I started playing basketball with my brother when we were kids and a love for the game arose. I kept playing throughout my childhood when one of the other kids’ parents in school saw me and suggested to my father that I play and train for a club. And surely, at the age of 11 I started training with a team (Gezira Sporting Club). That’s when basketball for me started morphing from a thing that I did for the genuine fun of it with my brother, to a thing of competition, performance, comparison, being the “star” of the team, and basically everything but the fun of basketball itself. My parents taught me to be respectful and well-mannered, and that specific basketball environment was directed in a way that was a little too vulgar for me to remain comfortable. My teammates would cat-call the girls in the club, our coach used to verbally insult us, and they used to be physical as well. All of that added to my anxiety of being there, and what started as a love for the game developed into a state of intense anxiety and self-doubt. I started off one of the best on the team, and ended up pretending to sleep during the games as I was too scared for the coach to call me into a game. My fear of the competitive context was another instance in which I felt like a failure. I attributed my performance to a fault within myself, rather than see it explained through the intrinsic and extrinsic model. Another “light of nature” instance was learning the “Self-fulfilling Prophecy” in the same Psychology course. The Self-fulfilling Prophecy is the socio psychological phenomenon of someone "predicting" or expecting something, and this "prediction" or expectation coming true simply because the person believes it will, and the person's resulting behaviors align to fulfill the belief. I had the realization finally through that that I wasn’t necessarily a failure, but that essentially the situational factors were preventing me from doing the thing for itself. Another instance of “light of nature,” was me being chosen to present on Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones that Walk Away from the Omelas” in my Sociology course. The story takes place in a city that was portrayed in the most beautiful of ways, depicted as a place with no pain and only happiness and self-actualization with no ifs and buts. Later after Le Guin describes every corner in the city and the joy radiating from there, she pans and zooms to a house with a basement. In that basement there are no windows, a barely working light bulb, and an extremely malnourished and abused child. She explains that when the children of the Omelas “come of age” they must come to see how their city remains prospering and happy. She further stresses that without this abused child that the Omelas would tarnish; some are sickened by it, some let out rage, some cry, and finally some leave. She explains that everyone living in the Omelas is aware of the suffering child and have come to accept the child’s pain as their only way to attain such a life. The gist of my presentation at that time revolved around explaining that this is somewhat the world we live in in many ways. The child in Omelas could stand for the people in sweatshops in East Asia, that get paid extremely insufficiently for a corporation that makes and has billions. The story expresses the exploitation that is currently going about in the world, and on an even deeper level the child that one sacrifices within themselves to be able to (survive) in this world. The child in that sense can be a representation of the individual and the individual’s sacrifice of themselves for the greater good (society). I made more sense of this story and its interpretations when “Alienation” by Karl Marx was introduced to me by three different classes in the same semester, namely: Modern Philosophy, Arabic World Literature, and Introduction to Sociology. The concept of Alienation was first explained to me as the potter being disconnected or separated from his craft. “Marx believed that the capitalist system encouraged mechanical and repetitive work patterns that do not create any intrinsic value for the workers. The power of workers is transformed into a commodity which is manifested in the form of wages (Carver, 78). “Marx argued that capitalism eventually confines labor to the position of a commercial commodity. This means that social relationships are ignored while human beings under the system strive to attain endurance or betterment. The competitive nature of capitalism eventually creates conflicts and disputes. This can cause high levels of alienation and resentment among the masses (Carver, 80).” The reason I mentioned the quotes and the story of Omelas is to draw parallel with my experiences with basketball, religion, and education. (My experience with religion and God are subjected to the same type of cycles, perpetuated by school and basketball; God became a thing that I learned about from other people (church leaders, parents, pastors) rather than through my own being, became bits and pieces of information that I spew rather than an understanding built from within. I fell into the same pattern of healing myself of this (leaving the church setting, leaving the basketball court, leaving my studying), for it was the only way I could come back and truly learn. The “light of nature” showed me the Banking method.The Banking Method: depositing where the educator is the depositor and students are the depositories. Instead of communication the banking method involves students waiting, receiving and memorizing information, then restating this information back. This is the same model that was used to teach me of God, of course it had to fail!) This idea of Alienation played a rather pivotal role in my understanding of how the world works now, where people’s actions are more motivated by gaining forms of capital. Pierre Bourdieu’s “Forms of Capital,” was one of the topics introduced in my Sociology course where he posits three different forms of capital: Social, Cultural, and Economic Capital. Cultural Capital specifically, represents the “Instruments for the appropriation of symbolic wealth socially designated as worthy of being sought and possessed.” Symbolic elements such as education, knowledge, and skills are examples of cultural capital passed down that grant social advantages. Bourdieu further explains how the passing down of cultural capital is one of the major sources of inequality. I feel like education in this setting, which is a form of cultural capital, perpetuates the cycle of conflicts and disputes that Marx mentions because of it being a tool for endurance and betterment, rather than education for itself. When the topic of “Forms of Capital” was introduced to me it highlighted to me who I was in the world and why, the reason I get to ‘be’ the way I ‘am’ and the reason another person isn’t even given a chance to live . Neoliberalism is one of the final concepts shown to me by the “light of nature,” this quote regarding Neoliberalism, I felt is the most relevant to the overall picture I am trying to paint, “We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.” The last thing shown to be by the “Light of Nature,” the thing that finally pushed me to take the step of reaching out was when my Sociology professor confirmed this semester that, “Competition is a by product of Neoliberal policy,” and further explained how competition didn't even exist in nature but we saw it there because of the place we put ourselves in. (Ilka Eickhof)
Paralysis
The issue at hand is that of a paralysis, not physical, but an overall incapacitation. The current Neoliberal direction of the world has taught us to compete for resources, and on a deeper level we begin to compete within ourselves. We have become ultra-aware of where we stand in the social aggregate to the extent that we are chronically disturbed by our own standing. The fundamentally ‘unequal’ state of the modern world stems from society’s competitive drive and causes the individual to internalize their own adequacy or inadequacy. The self-consciousness/awareness experienced through the social aggregate in turn drives individuals to either fulfill their perceived evaluation or struggle against it. The fulfillment of perceived evaluation is reminiscent of the concept of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, while the struggle against is a form of Self-Negating Prophecy. Ultimately this places humans in a position that prompts us to behave through a mostly external drive. This external seeking is a product of our entangled lifestyles and is the driving force behind modern capitalism/Neoliberalism.
Drawn closer to each other due to countless media, we begin to learn about ourselves in the eyes of others and evaluate ourselves even closer. The famous behavioral Psychologist, B.F. Skinner, states that is undignified to get caught working for a reward. Another pair of Psychologists, Goffman and Johnstone, further explain that it is undignified because it is something children can’t avoid, and adults receive status-enhancement when they don’t. We have learned that material wealth means a bit less than it used to, and identified that it is not the cause of happiness/satisfaction but rather a promise of satisfaction. A promise that I believe fails us, suppresses our soul, and even more prominently, is killing our planet. Individuals learn that there is value in aligning personal energis with societal demand, in other words: finding intrinsic motivation. However, a distinction must be made between the finding of intrinsic motivation that is aimed at status-enhancement from a deeper form of intrinsic motivation. Status-enhancing behavior is one that presents itself in civility and fine manners (etiquette), which contributes to the acquisition of social capital, an extrinsic cause.
A deeper understanding of intrinsic motivation can be illuminated by Freud’s theory of Ego formation. Freud posits that the Ego (the self) is formed as a mediator between two hostile forces, them being the ID (the primal-animalistic drive) and the Superego (the ideal self, the eyes of society). If we are to equate the Superego’s effect on our lives to the evaluative consciousness that was mentioned in the first paragraph, then the ID presents itself in this context as the counterpart to the externalizing pressures of society. True intrinsic motivation is actually child-like, the reversal of the Ego formation process is thus conceptualized as a solution to this problem. However, it will remain that a level of civility and restraint is needed. We must therefore come to be aware of our motivators and attempt to realize which of them are being suppressed in fashion that is detrimental to us while on the other hand realizing which ones are being expressed in a similarly detrimental fashion.
Here manifests the issue of paralysis. We have come to realize the extent to which our motives are detrimental to nature, while simultaneously having to ‘endure’/survive. Death follows life everywhere, with every step one ends the ‘lives’ of millions of microorganisms without feeling an ounce of guilt. That is because the human footstep, in this case, bears no consciousness of what it induces. Therefore, the paralysis comes from our consciousness of malignant intention and simultaneous reluctance to follow through with it given our knowledge of the consequences.
The Historical

The Historical, as handled by Heidegger, is to be freed from its object conception, from its common-sense quality of moving in time. The Historical is experienced immediately in the present in a vivacious manner. Being conscious of the Historical is something that determines our culture by disturbing it in two ways: Primarily by providing a foothold in the diversity of cultural forms, and second by burdening us with that same diversity. Heidegger claims that humans attempt to secure themselves against Historical consciousness by participating in the panarchy of understanding or opposing the ‘obstructive’ quality of it. It dawned on me that the Historical could be understood in parallel to the section on paralysis, as the self-awareness mandated by the social aggregate and Neoliberal considerations. Heidegger states that if a new spiritual culture is insisted upon, one that attempts to quell the disturbance, then we must openly struggle against History. 

Open Struggle

 To openly struggle against the chains of Neoliberalism, which in the context of this message has been derived from the understanding of Heidegger’s Historical, is what we are willing to explore. We want to address the paralysis, and ultimately escape it. Religion My struggle with religion came in the form of unrelenting skepticism. I would not accept anything I could not fathom, and spent a large portion of my adolescent and adult life on a ‘mission’ to disprove its credibility. I believe this stemmed from my initial conception of religion as a man-made fairytale, and even more so an opioid for the masses. Also, my experience of religion being used as a tool of othering and the perpetuation of hatred was defining. The place that presumably resembled God did not resemble God for me, I experienced extreme dissonance due to that realization. The skepticism did not fare well with me initially, it turned me to nihilism and became confused that the ‘truth’ did not set me ‘free’. I would openly discuss religion with many individuals and always end up feeling more skeptical than before. ‘The Light of Nature’ had a huge role in the transformation of my view on religion, I had come to think of God as an everythingness rather than a patriarch. An everythingness meaning literally the total sum of all experience. in the world and beyond. That was established through an Apophatic approach, which entailed a way of speaking about God via what it is not (negation). A narrowed down understanding of God comes in the fantasy-like and utilizing realization of it, which I had been exposed to throughout my life. The narrowing down is much like the narrowed down understandings of language, consciousness and Historical that were addressed in the selected topics for the Phenomenology course. The narrowed down understanding of God is the one I associate with the saying “religion is opium for the masses”. Similar to the Heideggerian method of understanding phenomena, I attempt to approach God through factical life experience, freed from an object-conception. 

Time Time is yet another narrowed down and commonsensical concept that we believe we fully understand . We are tool-using creatures, what we portray must have meaning and familial use. Our object conception of phenomena stems from our tool using character, thus we begin to believe in the concept of time (also God, consciousness and etc.) as being the one at our disposal. A short while ago, I remember hearing about an event that took place in France and involved a dog being used as a witness for a court case. The dog’s recognition of a suspect was deemed as evidence, and was used to conclude the murder case. This raised several questions, since the murder happened two years prior to the case. Do dogs perceive time? The answer is dependent on what one perceives as time. If time is the linear-spatial conception that humans use to structure their existence then one cannot say that dogs perceive time, however if one were to free time from its linear-spatial conception, they can begin to realize that dogs experience time as a motive rather than a numerical system. This reminded me of when my father used to answer my questions about God by saying that God is outside of time and space, which would only fuel my confusion. The Everythingness The concept of the everythingness of God, and its permeation of existence had led me to the following thought: Religion did not mystically fall into the hands of humans the way one would imagine the events of the movie “The Lord of the Rings” taking place, rather it rose out of humans being inseparable from the everythingness of existence. It rose out of Religious consciousness. The Abrahimc religions are openly known to have been compiled literature, albeit the ‘word’ of God, but nonetheless there is an undeniable human involvement in the process. The word “Bible” for example means something akin to a library, the authors were identified through their writing styles. Religious text is aggregated wisdom that attempts to address a separation humans are experiencing, the word Re-ligion itself means to re-bond.
Adam and Eve

The Abrahmic narrative of Adam and Eve is prominently dealing with the idea of separation on many levels. Firstly, the separation of man and woman. It is stated that Eve was born from Adam and Adam from God. This opens up many modern day questions about the sexist implications of religion, however, I believe that the separation of Adam preceded conception of man and woman. It only became man and woman after the separation took place in what could’ve possibly been a hermaphroditic Adam. Adam and Eve lived in paradise, a word that translates to “enclosed garden” from its Hellenistic Greek translations. Paradise being an enclosed garden might indicate “nature but with structure”. The events proceed to the indulgence in the fruit from the tree of knowledge which was the result of Eve being tempted by a serpentine (in some renditions it is Satan himself) creature. The serpent is a widely used symbol of slyness and subtlety, and the use of intellect for self-interest. Eve is tempted and Adam follows, they both become fallen from paradise to Earth, and become aware of their own “nakedness”. The creationism narrative is thus one that essentially deals with a degree of self-consciousness being the ‘punishment’ that humans receive by disobeying God. The facticity of the events to me is irrelevant, given that religion is a consciousness, the events could indicate a deeply embedded psychological angst that one experiences in a state of separateness. Even some of the widely practised eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, essentially deal with the issue of self-consciousness and Ego as being the root of suffering. Naming and Separation Once again we briefly return to the Freudian concept of “Ego”, which translates to “I”, in order to establish a link between self-awareness and a separateness from God. According to Freud children are not born with a conception of the self, and I believe we can all attest to that. Egos are formulated in response to societal values and pressures. One of the primary forms of Ego formation is that of receiving a name. Naming serves to distinguish something from everything, the Ego and one’s name go together in stressing one’s individuality and separateness. Naming is a form of typology that one becomes convinced is the reality, it is a primal form of rationality. One puts together multitudes of information to gather from them a common theme in order to make meanings that allow us to endure (survive), that is dangerous since the common theme becomes more real than the experience itself. The Anti-Christ Prophets of God prophesied, and God is not limited to its temporal-historical understanding here. Therefore prophecy is not an expectation of the future. The Arabic word for prophecy means to tell someone something they did not know, rather than predict the future. Thus it could be that prophets prophesied to that which is extra-temporal, to God and its wisdom, which is occurring eternally. This understanding allows me to remove the concepts of the Anti-Christ, heaven, hell, etc. from their obstructive understanding as things that will only happen in some magical form in the future. These phenomena are occurring extra-temporally and find their way in our lives in varying forms. 

The world has become dominantly controlled by time and money, the temporal and mathematical (the rational), and thus our understanding of God has taken up a distanced form. All prophets of the Abrahamic religions had their respective miracles. Moses would speak to God, Muhammad was the book of God and Jesus was God in human form. Miracles are thus instances in which humans and divine prominently intersect. In this sense, Christ, for example, is the coming together of God and Human. Thus the idea of Christ being the son of God. The Anti-Christ could mean the distance between God and Human. I believe that the case can be made that the ‘advancement’ of the modern world has also been distancing Humans from God. The fact that the ‘leading’ countries of the world have the highest reported suicide rates speaks miles that ‘advancement’ is not necessarily betterment. The system is beginning to ‘eat’ itself The Anti-Christ is within us.
St. Paul’s Letter

Given that the fall from paradise and the ‘nakedness’ that took place is what the creationism narrative is fundamentally addressing, I think that the grounds of human advancement, that we have been distanced from, is motivated by an attempt to reconcile with God and return to what paradise means: “an enclosed garden”, abundant nature with structure. St. Paul’s letter was addressing those who 

misunderstand what is meant by “the day of the lord comes like a thief in the night”, those who sit around and chat everyday waiting for the cataclysm to come upon us. On the other hand, he addresses those who obstinately (stubbornly) wait as they are face to face with the lord. This first struck me as the foundation of the current morale of the western world, one that attempts to reconcile with God through work, but ultimately one whose work distanced them from God. This is not to say that the effort is vice, but rather to point out that the effort has become misdirected and that we are coming to notice the misdirection gradually.
Science and Rationale

This entire effort is one that is based in rationale and science. If one were to deduce from the creationism story and the renditition of the Antichrist that rationale and science are the root of the current state of the world, then they would be ignorant to the reasons that these factions were developed in such a way in the first place. The human can become so caught up with the afterlife that they cease to make in effort in what they perceive as a temporary life. I believe this is what St.Paul is addressing through the letter. The separation between current life and afterlife is a problem of division of experience that is possibly causing the current rift between God and Human. During the time of the plague (Black Death), for example, people would flock together in places of worship and ultimately spread the disease even further in the name of religion and God. This prompted individuals to realize that religious congregations, which must be differentiated from religion itself, were shrouded with ignorance. Religion would answer people’s questions about death, now however the world has shifted to science because it visibly ‘healed’ people more than religion. People have stopped being consciously concerned with what happens to us when we die. For example, neither a feminist nor a communist are concerned with the afterlife, they are concerned with the ‘quality’ of life (which is why people turned away from religious congregation in the first place). Here is a quote from the progenitor of protestantism during the times of the plague, Martin Luther, who was famous for opposing the catholic in it church for its abuse of power:“I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance inflict and pollute others and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I’m not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me however I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely as stated above. See this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor fool-hardy and does not tempt God.” The Luther quote marks what I believe is a pure motive of science, the betterment of quality of life. 

Relation
St. Paul's letter speaks of an anguish which those who have been 'called' experience and others who are 'blinded' by Satan cannot attest for. The Abrahamic religions preach a working productive life with God that will ultimately grant us our lost place in 'paradise' and relieve us from our 'nakedness' (vulnerability), however the human must become aware that the working/productive/capitalistic ethic of Neoliberal policy has become increasingly reductive and typologizing (scientific/rational) to the extent that it perpetuates cycles of frustration and hatred and in our case a paralysis. The Anti-Christ, an ever-occurring phenomenon, finds its abode in this schism between Human and God. The coming of Christ, another eternally occurring phenomenon, is the gradual realization of our separateness from the everythingness of God which is from my point of view beginning to take place on a large scale. One cannot change the world, the world is already ever-changing and evolving, one can only realize how they change with the world and from that realization openly struggle against History.
We wrote this document in light of everything going on in the world right now and also in light of where our free thought took us over the span of the last 4-5 years.
References:
(n.d.). Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation-in-education-definition-examples.html#lesson (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/hegelphilhist/summary/ Bourdieu, P. (n.d.). The Forms of Capital. Readings in Economic Sociology, 280–291. doi: 10.1002/9780470755679.ch15 Butler. (n.d.). Being Performative. Performativity, 112–138. doi: 10.4324/9780203391280_chapter_6 Chua, E. J. (2016, November 29). Disenchantment. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/disenchantment-sociology Jackson, M. (1996). Things as they are: new directions in phenomenological anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, M. (2001). Knowledge of the body. Marxism & Alienation. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/subject/alienation/index.htm Mcleod, S. (n.d.). The Stanford Prison Experiment. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. (2016, April 15). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ap15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot OliviaN13. (1970, January 1). Banking vs. Problem Posing Education. Retrieved from http://theoretical-lens.blogspot.com/2012/03/reflection-3-banking-vs-problem-posing.html K., L. G. U. (1993). The ones who walk away from Omelas. Mankato, MN: Creative Education.

Hi, girls
Hey! A lot of posts are getting mired in discussion about the the characters themselves, how close they are to Natalie's views, and people taking sides with the two characters. A lot of people are upset with this, but I think it's great. With a few exceptions, most of the discourse going on is wonderful. I feel like there is some really interesting philosophy to talk about that is getting swept under the rug, though!
To get the other stuff out of the way so we can get to this philosophy:

• I think neither character was right and we are supposed to find a middle ground.
• I'm gonna dig into Natalie's twitter for context, but this is not an attack on her beliefs or her motivations for making this video the way she did.
• I'm going to correct these character's philosophy literacy, but I think these character's purposefully have shaky philosophy, and I'm not trying to attack Contra's literacy. I think she is more well read than me by a lot.
• I don't think this video is about anything other than binary MTF transwomen, but that doesn't give us more of a right to talk about it.
• I don't take this video personally at all because I think that it is specifically about being a public figure, and is told by two voices in Natalie's head. More over when we attack these fictional characters, we are saying, "you should feel ashamed for these thoughts" which are very normal thoughts for trans girls to go through. It feels more personal to many. Let's be nice

Okay, some context. I'm a trans girl (well intersex, but I identify as trans), I used to run a trans beauty blog that addressed the issue of passing a fair amount, and I have an undergrad degree in Aesthetic Philosophy, so needless to say this is my favorite Contra video yet, and I'm excited. Let's get to it.
You like philosophy so much, haven't you read Judith Butler?
This is the biggie. This is the idea of the video. "Gender is performance." Judith Butler famously moved away from our sexuality and Lacanian gaze based views of womanhood and what it means to be a woman, and proposed that gender is something we do. Justine is saying that trans women have to perform womanhood, otherwise, are they really women? If nobody sees them as women, are they women? She's saying at least, if not passing, people have to see that they are trying. We hear this idea a lot nowadays, that gender is a social construct. Justine says "haven't you read Judith Butler?"
But has Justine? Not very well. Justine get's Judith Butler totally wrong. Next sentence out of her mouth? "Gender is performance." Okay, define that... "We're all born naked and the rest is literally drag." No, this is totally wrong. Butler uses the idea that Gender acts as a sort of performance to start her discourse, but quickly clarifies what that means. She means gender is a series of actions we take. Butler goes on to clarify that she used performance as a shortcut word, but introduces a new word "performativity." It is not performed, as in our real self faking it, but performative, as in it is something that we actively do, and that action makes it become a part of our real self.
Justine gets halfway there. "I don't mean performance in the sense of pretending to be something you're not. I mean performance in the sense of everything you do, the way you style yourself, your posture, the way you speak." Okay, but Justine never explains the difference. She goes on to act as if the way you speak, style yourself, and your posture are something you should move to be more "womanly" and in doing so, a clear distinction between pretending and "everything you do" is unclear.
The step that Justine is lacking is that she seems to advocate consciously doing these actions. If you do these actions consciously, they are no longer "performativity," they are just "performance." The difference is that in performativity, the actions that you are doing contribute to who you are as a person, and in performance, they do not. A key difference is that performativity is not something you control.
Maybe Justine is aware of this, following it up with "An authentic performance is just a habitual performance." If you do it enough on purpose, it will just become real. But still it's a conscious choice being made. I think that this is adding a bit to Butler. Characterizing this as purely Butlerian is disingenuine on Justine's part.
A Wittgenstein Gal
Sorry Natalie, but I'm diving into your personal views because you say something really useful for my analysis.

Well like all philosophical questions "What is womanhood?" has no definitive answer. But I'll tell you my thoughts. Remember, I'm a Wittgenstein gal: I don't think the answer can involve "identifying" because meaning is public & practical, not private & psychological.

(Let me take a moment to remind you that I absolutely do not think that Natalie and Justine agree, and this tweet is in no way proof that their opinions align; I have taken it out of context).
This tweet gives us something really interesting to go on. Justine would absolutely agree with Natalie on this point. But can she agree with Natalie/Wittgenstein and with Butler at the same time?
Butler's stance is being characterized by Justine to basically be the same stance as this Wittgensteinian "meaning is public" thing. It's close. It's really close. But at the end of the day it's almost more in line with Buddhist philosophy.
Buddhist philosophy basically states that we are only the sum of our actions, and that every action contributes to who we are. But, and this is a big but, it also holds that this sense of being and identity is not solely public. In Buddhism, we are the sum of every action we take, public and private, and peoples interpretation of those actions is not what matters, but the actions themselves, because they are tied to intention at some level.
Let's finally get back to some trans stuff so I can use a metaphor to explain what I mean. To Wittgenstein, if you dress like a woman, put on makeup, grow your hair out, and absolutely never pass and everybody treats you like a man anyways, you are not a woman. To Buddhist philosophy, if you dress like a woman, put on makeup, grow your hair out, and absolutely never pass and everybody treats you like a man anyways, you are still just as much of a woman. It is about the actions you take, not how people see them.
It doesn't depend on other people's opinions.
Back to Butler, note that I said almost. I don't think Butler would totally agree with either camp. But, despite talking about how society has largely shaped our conception of these categories, Butler never really says that society gets to be the judge. To Butler, society just sets up the target, they don't judge the shot. She emphasizes the action itself as the final word. The only other contributing factor she even focuses on is intent, distinguishing women from drag queens by their intention.
I could go on about how intention is tied to identity, and since society isn't the judge, we get to create our own vision of what a woman is and then perform those actions, and how Butler is probably more in line with Tabby than Justine, but a bit moderated, accepting that some of the broad strokes are defined by society. I'm not going to though because that argument would be longer than this whole post. Just know that I think this is the case.
So in Tabby's absurd example, and it is a rather absurd example, of a cis man going through transition for no reason, Justine decides that that person is a woman. Butler would entirely disagree. I think Butler, would also disagree with the characterization of society as a judge and arbitrator in general. To use real examples, I think it would be hard for anyone to make an actual philosophical argument that Joan of Arc or Hua Mulan was a man.
Justine takes Butler's ideas and only says the first half without the very important second half. She says "performance" instead of "performativity" the entire time, which is hugely disingenuous, she sets up society as the arbitrator instead of letting the action be it's own arbitrator, and completely contradicts Butler's view of intent.
She claims to have built her viewpoint on the foundation of feminist theory, deriding Tabby for not being familiar enough with it, but actually has it all wrong. In the end she is not actually proposing a philosophical position of any sort, though she seems to want all this philosophy to back her up. Tabby isn't in a place to defend herself from what is essentially pop-feminism mumbo jumbo, and so Justine uses it to prop up her position, which is not philosophical at all, but is political and practical
Reality plays no role in politics
Now it's my turn to do some analysis about the video itself, and not just break apart the philosophy discussed in the video. Early on, I think Justine is very honest about her goals. She is presenting a very political, liberal not leftist, optics centered argument about one specific person, Tabby. She has a point, the bat thing was bad optics. Moreover, at first, Justine is treating this as a political issue, then expands on it, saying that the world is a world of spectacle and a world of aesthetics, it's not just politics. Time to quote Natalie again. (Once again, I do not want to tie all of Natalie's opinions to all of Justine's. They just provide context).

The way I think of it, the purpose of my transition is to become a woman for most intents and purposes. That's a very public, social goal that primarily involves the interactions I have with people around me.
But pedantically speaking, before I transitioned, I was a man for most intents and purposes. I was socially and publicly a man.

This is Natalie's take on herself before and after transition. This happens to also be my exact take on myself. This is basically the place where Justine's argument begins. It's very reasonable and hard to disagree with. There is something important here though. "For most intents and purposes." This disclaimer says to me, and I don't want to speak for Natalie, but it says to me that it isn't just public perception that makes you a gender.
Justine does not take that extra step Natalie does. She doesn't acknowledge that identity plays a part in it at all.
As Justine goes one, she starts acting as if she has the philosophical high ground, and that it isn't merely a political position. Perhaps this is where people get a bit confused about this video, because they don't realize Justine's feminist philosophy is complete bunk.
I said I'd do some analysis, and here it is: Justine, as a character, is on the defensive. She has the weak point and she knows it. She goes from saying it's a political optics thing, to saying its just the way the world works, to saying that she has philosophically sound and feminist stance. She just can't defend any of her points and has to move more and more broad. If that sounds familiar, it's basically how Jordan Peterson wins debates. It's impossible to debate against. When the fact that she's going broad is attacked ("Life is not a show.") Justine goes narrow again ("politics is a show."), just to go back to saying it applies to everything in life two sentences later. How do you attack that?
As she progresses she talks about being pretty and the "trans girl black pill" and how Contra lost the debate to Blair because of optics (which at the end of the day, no moderates were swayed by or even watched, the Blair followers agreed with Blair, but it was Contra's channel who grew, so it seems like it raised more awareness for Contra's side. Isn't that winning?). Justine is an embodiment of deep insecurities in the mind of every trans girl. And she just grows more extreme.
As she gets more extreme, her philosophy grows more and more incorrect. I feel like people would be far less upset at this video if they realized that she is completely wrong with all the philosophy that she quotes. (If there was one thing I would change in this video, it's to have Tabby be literate enough to call out this bad philosophy so the audience doesn't actually believe this is Butler's stance). (Also, I know people are upset for other reasons, too).
I know you're a woman
To finish off my point, Justine doesn't seem to even believe what she is saying. She recognizes Tabby as a woman. When Tabby stands up for herself and says she's a woman, Justine says, "I know." Clearly she knows that she doesn't actually have the philosophical or moral high ground, just as, say, Jordan Peterson knows he doesn't either. Both of them just think their political aims are worth pretending that they do. (Or maybe it's just because Justine is one of two voices in Contra's head, and so she only exists in apologetics, not in real opinions).
I think that we are always supposed to find a middle ground between the two sides with Contra's dialectic videos. For this video, we have some help in that we can actually read Natalie's real opinions on this in her twitter thread I keep quoting from, as well as by actually reading Judith Butler's very nuanced view on this situation.
As a tangent about this twitter thread, I actually think, judging by my interpretation of Justine as a Natalie parody who takes from Jordan Peterson and Blair White, that Natalie is much closer to Tabby's view now than she was when she wrote this twitter thread. And I think her view as stated in this twitter thread gave more credence to the idea of gender being more than social than her video on AGP did. It's seemed like a change over time to me. I don't mean to ascribe a position to the video, it's probably my own biases. But I thought that the way the video seemed to stand up for Tabby at the end signaled a clear time where philosophy (especially bad philosophy) can't win out over something that you just know to be true.
The video ends with Justine conceding this point, saying that Tabby is right. She essentially rolls back every argument except for her initial one that the violence was bad optics. To me it seems like a concession that she was exceedingly going broader as a poor defense mechanism, and with the association Contra's audience has between this technique and figures like Jordan Peterson, It seems by association to be a concession that her philosophy was wrong.
I think the final argument about meekness and violence is in a way the only valid argument in the material. It's not hard to figure out that there is a middle ground that is the right answer between their stances on the nature of femininity and presentation. But at the end, this question of meekness and violence lingers. I don't think Blaire is doing our community any favors by playing the acquiescent conservative stepping stone. I don't think Zoey Tur is doing us any favors by threatening to beat Ben Shapiro up on TV. Which of these evils is greater? (cough, it's Blaire, cough) Does it matter?
The video doesn't take a center position of meeting halfway between these two extremes. Rather it poses these two characters, Tabby and Justine and less extreme than Zoey and Blaire, but more extreme than "trans centrists." It shows that anybody in the trans community, regardless of their opinions on this sort of thing, can work together, that we don't have to regress to the center, but we can also keep each other from going to the harmful Zoey and Blaire extremes by being on the same team.
Ugh
I didn't mean for that to be so long. I guess my thoughts were way more complicated than I realized. I just thought the point about Justine not knowing her Butler totally changed the video and nobody has mentioned it yet that I've seen, but it's hard to mention briefly, you kind of have to dive in. I don't mean to be didactic about it, I just wanted to introduce discussion about the philosophy presented in the video into the conversation. Thoughts?

I'm using a throwaway.
I do not know the structure this post will take, but the theme is that basically I am someone sympathetic to conservative and reactionary political opinion (including having favourable opinions of Donald Trump), who understandably seems to think I have gotten something "missing" about the current political zeitgeist, and I'm trying to figure out what.
A few of facts about my life, to contextualise things:

• I am a a mid-20s-year-old graduate living in the UK with a Sociology degree.
• I have lived my entire life, prior to and after university, in a city that is >90% "White British" (according to census data). I identify now as bisexual - having originally identified as homosexual for the first 7 or so years of my coming out. I live in a working-class nuclear family - me, my mother and father, a younger brother, and a disabled half-sister. brother and half-sister are left-leaning, whereas my parents (being a bit older) are more traditionalist, but (I would argue) more politically confused (they are both Old Labour supporting, and yet also fans of Margaret Thatcher).
• I entered university in 2014 with far-left sympathies, and during my degree found my views move further rightward. My university studies landed right in the middle of both Brexit and the Trump election - and, during both, individual lecturers on my degree chose lecture sessions to not teach the syllabus, and have a lecture session to "just talk about" the results and process what had occurred. I recall at the time, already beginning my change in political position, I viewed such lectures as a waste of my student funding (university courses here being funded for £9000 per annum from student loans).
• I was raised secular, but post-university I even joined an evangelical church for a brief time, because I considered that their social positions aligned with my sympathies at the time.
• My earliest political awareness was around the time of Gordon Brown.

During my degree, I read a lot of sources around social theory, and found it difficult to apply to my own understanding of my lived experiences. I found a lot of other social theorists (ones who I would consider more conservative) were left off the syllabus - some even openly addressed, with statements like (as I recall from one lecture) "Don't reference them, they aren't respected in European Sociology, even if they are in American Sociology" (I cannot recall who the figure was - it may have been someone like Charles Murray or Samuel Huntingdon, or it may have been one of the functionalists like Talcott Parsons or Emile Durkheim; I only recall it being a prominent name in the field, and one that surprised me when they were announced).
Having an interest in online privacy, I did my university dissertation on a topic of "self-censorship" in a social media context. I made use of sources such as Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's book "The Spiral of Silence" and Timur Kuran's book "Private Truths, Public Lies". I performed two-hour-long interviews - albeit, limited to university students - and, of the sample I had, the common experience I found that repeatedly came up was that of conservative students feeling uncomfortable expressing their views online, as well as in-person. In spite of other literature I had read, the women, ethnic minorities and LGBT people I interviewed did not provide any information directly related to feeling any sort of self-censoriousness as a result of their particular identity. This only reinforced the conservative political sentiments I had previously been coming to terms with, and led to my scepticism of the sources I was taught on the syllabus.
The syllabus has a lot of material that I found particularly egregious. There was an article referencing race, that took a quote by Michael Jackson and discussed him as being an expert on race issues. Another article was directly on fat pride, discussing the author feeling judged in a shop for their weight, imploring the obese (which I would fit into the BMI category of) to declare "Yes, I am a Fatso!". We also read sources around race and post-colonialism (Edward Said's "Orientalism", Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and "Black Skin, White Masks"), feminist theory (Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble"), and queer theory (Jeffrey Week's "Sexuality"). None of these were materials I could understand, in large part because they had no relevance to anything I was experiencing in my daily life, nor had any relevance to the experience of my immediate social network - rather, it seemed so completely detached to me, that I could only interpret the things described as either historical artefacts or simply things that the author had themselves constructed.

• On critical race theory, the only BME person I knew and could discuss these things with was a student from Hong Kong who became my best friend on the course. He was a free-market libertarian, and similarly so no relation between what he was reading and his own life experiences. As diverse as the university I was at was, I can only recall perhaps two or three ethnic minorities on the course, of which this person was one.
• On feminist theory, it did not match with what I witnessed in my daily life at all, even if I looked at economic data. Of all the women I knew in my social network - i.e. family and friends' families - almost all were employed, and in many cases seemed to be in higher-status positions than their husbands. Of the ones I knew well enough to ask about the issues, by all means some worked part-time but by choice and often at a higher rate of pay than their husbands. I would discuss the sources I had read with them, and got a response dissonant to what I was reading. These were all, given my background, working-class people. Later on, my own anecdotal experiences have involved working in three separate workplaces where women have made up all positions of upper management, and the majority (or all, in some cases) of lower management positions. Although my jobs to date have all been low-status, this is still very discordant from what I was taught.
• On queer theory, my own experience provided no correlation to what I was reading. I came out at a young age to my Catholic mother, and received acceptance. I received no negative repercussions from anyone in my family. I joined a local LGBT youth group in my teenage years, but of the people I had met, none had troubled backgrounds that I was aware of. During my time at university, I also dated a trans man (AFAB) for two years, who I bounced ideas off of (e.g. Judith Butler). While they were radically left-leaning, they simply did not relate to the source material I was presenting to them either. My only time experiencing abuse was once, after years of holding partners' hands in public without response, one guy took offence one time and expressed verbal disapproval.

On the more economic topics, I simply became convinced of other positions. Brexit and Trump pushed me over the edge, to believing that the Marxist interpretation of class was lacking - that, rather than representing working-class sentiment, it was intellectuals trying to predict what the working-classes should want for themselves while being themselves separated (whether that be in terms of educational capital, or social capital - to use Bourdieu's view of different types of capitals) from the working-classes themselves. The exceptions sympathetic to anything left of social democracy in the UK, funnily, are mostly that of working-class (and upper-class, as I met in many cases) socially mobile students aspiring for or attending university but with little working experience, much like the background I was.
So, in regards to Trump and Brexit, all I see is largely the identified "privileged" from my degree - white, cis, straight celebrities etc. - being the spokespeople, and then come to learn of more conservative voices from minority communities (Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Milo Yiannopolous, Peter Thiel etc.) be condemned. I live in a society where the two first woman Prime Ministers - Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May - are not applauded by feminists as progress because they are the wrong type of women; a society where the death of the first woman Prime Minister after a long battle with dementia are celebrated by "progressives" with the song "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead". When I looked on social media - Reddit (e.g. reclassified), Facebook, Twitter - it's not discussions of civil rights that see people hedging their words over, or that I see there being a risk of banning over. I saw all this, even from my far-left bubble, and thought "There is something wrong here", and those were the sorts of things that pushed me right.
However, long story, but I read Reddit and see that my background and views are not the background and views of the majority. I read these sources and see nothing of value; while others read these sources and can empathize with them. I see people here daily becoming more and more leftward, and I find myself understanding them less and less (despite being of a view that I myself once held). What am I missing?

I am non-binary. Gender does not sit well with me - I almost don't "recognize it" in my view of the world/myself. I see gender as performative. I'm really interested in feminist theory, queer theory, the scapegoating of femininity, and I'm wondering how the gender binary is contributing or undermining structures of power.
I'm wondering how gender performativity sits with you all - whether you think it's true, false, helpful or hurtful as a philosophy. Non-binary and transgender perspectives are appreciated; thank you so much for sharing.
Here's a quote that really prompted my internal dialogue on this and why I want all the perspectives I can get:
"Transgender people often think about gender all the time, and because of that intensity we’re able to offer insights that often run counter to some prominent feminist theories. The whole notion that you’re socialised into gender – we are testimony that that is not the case. Society did its best socialising me as a male and it did not work. We know there’s something inside of us that is telling us the truth about our identity and we’re willing to risk everything to own that. It’s not simply that you become a woman because you’ve been socialised into it. Of course, the roles are defined a lot by sexualisation. But gender is a critical piece at the very core of who you are. We know that gender is real and we’re willing to give everything to get it." - Dr. Chloe Schwenke, speaking to Irish Times.
Chloe Schwenke is a transgender woman. She introduced a panel of transgender poets at AWP - a writer's conference I attended this year - AWP being an organization that she now runs. She seems super cool; she's done work in US government during the Obama administration, for LGBTQ policy. I personally don't feel as connected to gender as she does - but this quote really prompted some thinking for me.
Is there a unifying theory for transgender and non-binary identity and gender that you have found? It can agree with Judith Butler or counter Judith Butler, I'm open to all perspectives. Feel free to share below.

I am non-binary. Gender does not sit well with me - I almost don't "recognize it" in my view of the world/myself. I see gender as performative. I'm really interested in feminist theory, queer theory, the scapegoating of femininity, and I'm wondering how the gender binary is contributing or undermining structures of power.
I'm wondering how gender performativity sits with you all - whether you think it's true, false, helpful or hurtful as a philosophy. Non-binary and transgender perspectives are appreciated; thank you so much for sharing.
Here's a quote that really prompted my internal dialogue on this and why I want all the perspectives I can get:
"Transgender people often think about gender all the time, and because of that intensity we’re able to offer insights that often run counter to some prominent feminist theories. The whole notion that you’re socialised into gender – we are testimony that that is not the case. Society did its best socialising me as a male and it did not work. We know there’s something inside of us that is telling us the truth about our identity and we’re willing to risk everything to own that. It’s not simply that you become a woman because you’ve been socialised into it. Of course, the roles are defined a lot by sexualisation. But gender is a critical piece at the very core of who you are. We know that gender is real and we’re willing to give everything to get it." - Dr. Chloe Schwenke, speaking to Irish Times.
Chloe Schwenke is a transgender woman. She introduced a panel of transgender poets at AWP - a writer's conference I attended this year - AWP being an organization that she now runs. She seems super cool; she's done work in US government during the Obama administration, for LGBTQ policy. I personally don't feel as connected to gender as she does - but this quote really prompted some thinking for me.
Is there a unifying theory for transgender and non-binary identity and gender that you have found? It can agree with Judith Butler or counter Judith Butler, I'm open to all perspectives. Feel free to share below.

I basically applied Christina Hoff Sommer's definitions of each. I tried to be kind to gender feminism but failed a little. 'Quasi-Marxist' was used, as wasd'victimhood' and 'agency.'
They messaged me shortly after.
They offered me suggestions on reading because the answer I provided was 'problematic' and I was using the authoritative voice on a topic I was not an authority of. I tried to defend it. Another person created a straw man where equity feminists are happy for girls in Saudi Arabia to go through honour killings, therefore we need to be gender feminists; they were not messaged. The person did not know of them despite that person having 20 times as many followers as me, and being an ACTUAL professor (as posed to a shit-posting unemployed 23 year old graduate)
The person who messaged told me I need to:
Read Judith Butler on gender performaitivity (I have done, critique left below)
Read Ms. Magazine #1 (hesitant because Robyn Morgan's fun quotes)
Read 'Ain't I A Woman' by bell hooks)(considering it)
They said they didn't wish to assume I hadn't read the stuff.
They also linked a bunch of quotes of scholars criticising Sommers and denying her place in the canon-specifically that Sommers is too conservative and white middle class to represent the third wave:

Anne-Marie Kinahan of Wilfrid Laurier University places Who Stole Feminism? alongside Rene Denfeld's The New Victorians and Katie Roiphe's The Morning After in the context of a "post-feminist" movement, and contends these books signalled a collective "fear of the perceived radicalism of feminism on university campuses, a radicalism which these authors attribute to the increasing influence of queer theory, 'radical' lesbians and feminists of colour." Kinahan charges Sommers, Denfeld and Roiphe with attempting to "reclaim feminism as a white, middle-class, straight woman's movement" and defending "traditional hierarchies of morality, religion, and the nuclear family." Kinahan finds Sommers to be contradictory in asserting that students are resistant to radical feminism, yet also claiming that feminist indoctrination of students poses a "drastic danger" which "powerless, naive, and unthinking students unquestionably endorse."
Political scientist Ronnee Schreiber of San Diego State University noted how the conservative Independent Women's Forum continues to use the book to portray feminists as scheming falsifiers of statistical data.

I brought up a critique of Butler as subscribing to the postmodernist school and adopting its language (Derrida's semiotics), which obscures the path towards understanding in its attempts to subvert oppressive modernist modes of understanding.
Quoting from the Butler link above:

Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.[31] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:
Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance. This concept is linked to Butler's discussion of performativity.[32]
Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.[jargon]

I said that all of this, while intriguing (and I having studied post-structuralism and semiotics somewhat understand Derrida and his successors such as Foucault) does not make much sense/is basically inaccessible to a layperson or politician, and we cannot rely upon such a philosophy to determine institutional, social and legal policy-which is what patriarchy theory does. But a semi-educated person trying to make sense of this will basically conclude something close to a masteslave dialectic. Without understanding the nuances of Butler, Derrida or Hegel, this would loosely translates into 'I am an object acted upon; you are an agent acting upon me.' I.e. the oppressooppressed dynamic.
I'm not the first person to suggest these criticisms of Butler, they'repretty well known ones actually:
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia01/parrhesia01_boucher.pdf
http://www.academia.edu/2199506/The_Limits_of_Performativity_A_Critique_of_Hegemony_in_Gender_Theory
I also mentioned that post-modernism and gender performativity subscribes almost entirely to social constructionist theory, and therefore somewhat denies evolutionary psychology. I argued that (given the quotes about queer theory and 'concerns of radical feminism' above) [critiques to gender performativity do not have to undermine the civil rights or LGBT movements since we have the Kinsey scale, among other means.
They messaged me like I'm an emotionally abusive spouse who just betrayed them. We've been talking for 10 minutes. They disappeared on me shortly after this and I'm still waiting for a response.
Apparently I said the wrong thing. I welcome the suggestions but I dismissed them without saying anything else about them. I haven't read 2 out of 3 so could only say thank you...? It's freaking me out. They're acting like I've just shat on their Bible. I'm getting the impression that they must think I'm a KKK and WBC sympathiser lol.
Can anyone help explain what horribly sexist/racist thing I have done by bringing up Ms. Sommers to have committed emotional abuse on an Internet stranger, please.

Primer, Introduction, Theorem 1 (part 1), Theorem 1 (Part 2), Corollary 1, Scholium 1.1/2/3, Theorem II (Part 1), Theorem II (Part 2), Theorem II (Parts 3 & 4), Corollary 2, Scholium 2.1/2/3/4, Judgment Derp, Theorem III (Part’s 1,2,3), Theorem III (Part’s 4,5,6), Corollary 3, Scholium 3, Theorem IV, Corollary 4:, Scholium 4, End of Reading Groups Synopsis
u/chauchat_mme’s post this week I found exceptionally clear and shows a good understanding of the topic, you would do well to read it carefully if you want to understand this vertebrae in the backbone of Žižek and Lacan. It is a difficult area to really understand and many throw the terms of sexuation around without having insights into the deeper implications. Make sure you include u/chauchat_mme’s name in your comment if you want to ask them a question.
I was going to tag the next section of the book on the end, but decided this week’s post should stand alone as it is important area. Next week I’ll be posting Sexual Parallax and Knowledge and will try and cover The Sexed Subject too, if I have time. Any offers from anyone to write up a section or two? If you’re a student especially, summarising helps you understand the topic.
Please comment again so we can keep a rollcall of attendance and know folks are still reading!
Before we jump in, here's a great synopsis of what's been covered so far, very kindly put together by u/Achipinthearmor:
To begin again from the beginning—
Theorem I elaborates Zizek’s crucial philosophical axiom: reality is incomplete, non-All, traversed by an ontological crack perpetually thwarting any efforts at complete conceptual capture; the ontic and the transcendental can be neither synthesized nor isolated but must be perceived in parallax as bound by the very gap that appears to separate them.
Corollary I examines Kant’s postulation of the “intellectus archetypus” as basically the mind of God in which thought and actuality would be united and indistinguishable; an impossible Ding-an-sich, this ultimate instance of the noumenon must nevertheless appear within the phenomenal horizon of the “intellectus ectypus” as its own ideal type. Between Kant’s insistence that it was thinkable yet impossible yet still sufficient only in being thought, and Hegel’s rejection of it as an unnecessary eidolon of the Understanding, the efforts of other emissaries of German Idealism to claim the notion as their own actuality under the banner of “intuition”—truly the apotheosis of subjective Idealism—are criticized and found wanting.
If the actuality of intellectual intuition qua subjective omnipotence is dubious, Scholium 1.1 takes up influential attempts from the West and the East to perform precisely the reverse procedure and “”“bracket””” the perceiving subject as a laughably contingent yet loathsomely necessary sensorium in the Husserlian phenomenological epoche, on the one hand, and the Buddhist reduction of the subject to a hapless spectator in the dream of life, on the other. Although both attempts are philosophically myopic and frankly wrong, they nonetheless provide a useful counterpoint to the delusions of intuition detailed in the Corollary and thus represent a vital impulse or moment within the dialectical movement of thought.
Scholium 1.2 historically concretizes the notion of parallax by specifying the interlocked lodestars of Hegel’s hot and heady Phenomenology and the coldly cerebral Greater Logic as the unsurpassed masterpieces whose problematic parameters remain the horizon for genuine philosophy today.
Scholium 1.3 provides a sharp contemporary conclusion to this long excursion through the muddled relations of subject and object by taking seriously the puerile shrieks of the “death of truth” coming from religious and political fundamentalisms, internet echo chambers of conspiranoia, and the bemusing flexibility of postmodern relativism according to which everything is subjective yet objective facts are out there. In every case, fear of error reveals itself as rather the fear of truth.
Over to u/chauchat_mme
Theorem II: Sex as our brush with the Absolute (Part 1): Antinomies of Pure Sexuation
In 1994, Joan Copjec published Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. The last chapter, Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, brings us back to Kant. He uses the expression euthanasia of reason to designate a possible reaction to the antinomies that he has worked out in his Critique of Pure Reason: the deliberate induction of death to reason, the submission to desperate skepticism. Copjec starts with the strong claim that Judith Butler's answer to the challenges for theorization that the field of sexuality poses, is an example of this euthanasia - even though it appears as “skepticism's sunny slipside – a confident voluntarism”. Starting from this promising claim she unfolds her diligent criticism of and counter-draft to prevailing critical gender theories. In her short text, Copjec undertakes a waterproof demonstration that Judith Butler's theory is untenable from a Lacanian perspective – in theoretical respect as well as in respect to the political goals that Butler has in mind (the latter is a figure that we can frequently find in Zizek as well when he charges that authors or emancipatory movements don't go far enough, get stuck half way, or thwart the good intentions). Kant's antinomies of pure reason aren't used by Copjec as a purely rhetorical analogy for a similar deadlock in sexuality but she meticulously identifies the antinomies with Lacan's formulas of sexuation.
In passing, Copjec answers an important question: why is a binary distinction between male and female – from the viewpoint of the theories Copjec criticizes – automatically accompanied by a support for heteronormativity? How can hetero be derived from binary? Copjec explains

this argument makes no sense unless we state its hidden assumption that two have a tendency to one, to couple. But from where does this assumption spring? From the conception of the binary terms, masculinity and femininity, as complementary.

If this implicit assumption is unfounded though, a major objection against a psychoanalytic theory of sexuation implodes: the charge of promoting and supporting heteronormativity. This also foreshadows the Lacanian insight that there is no sexual relationship. She then poses the crucial question “what is sex?“. If it is, as Freud already put succinctly, not "anatomy or convention“, i.e. neither pre-discursive nor discursive sense, what else is it? She provides the reader with a sort of working definition:

We have no intention of denying that human sexuality is a product of signification, but we intend, rather, to redefine this position by arguing that sex is produced by the internal limit, the failure of signification. It is only there where discursive practices falter – and not at all where they succeed in producing meaning – that sex comes to be.

This definition requires further elaboration. An obvious question that can be asked is the question how it is possible to derive two sexes from one internal limit/deadlock. Copjec explains that here again an unfounded implicit assumption is made which she dispels: “failure is assumed to be singular. If this were true, if language – or reason – had only one mode of misfire, then the subject would in fact be neuter. But this is not the case; language and reason may fail in one of two different ways“. And here enters Kant.
I will only very briefly summarize the internal failures of pure reason and their solutions as a short reminder, and then read Lacan's formulas of sexuation through them:
The four antinomies of pure reason refer to the World (the totality of synthesis)
The two mathematical antinomies refer to the quantitative dimension of the World: extension outward, and divisibility inward:
(I) reality is infinitely divisible vs reality is composed of indivisible, finite parts;
(II) reality is finite vs reality is infinite.
Solution: Both propositions, rather than formulating an antinomy, form contraries and therefore they can both be false – that's what Kant argues for: They are are contraries not condratictions and they are both wrong because the assumption "the World is“ that is implicit in these propositions is too much, an unwarranted “plus”, and must be negated.
The two dynamical antinomies refer to the qualitative totality of the World:
(III) The World is only fully determined by the causality of natural laws vs there is another form of causality, spontaneity;
(IV) There is an absolutely necessary being, either as cause or as part of the world vs an absolutely necessary being exists nowhere in the world.
Solution: Both propositions are held to be true by Kant despite their logical incompatibility because (brutally simplified) appearances must have causes that are themselves not determined by appearances, this “minus” is covered by a free causality.
The Lacanian formulas of sexuation, as presented in Seminar XX: Encore, formalize the two modes of failure of language and show the same formal structure as the antinomies of pure reason.
The equivalent to the dynamical antinomies is the masculine version of the deadlock of language: There is (at least) one x which is not submitted to the phallic function Φx, one that is not castrated and has access to full enjoyment (think of Freud's primordial father, or of the Other of man: the Woman). By excluding this One, by making it an exception, a negative reference point, everything else can appear as everything else. All x are submitted to Φx. Alenka Zupancic puts this in memorable terms: “The exception (the 'killing') of the One frames the renunciation common to all“
The equivalent of the mathematical antinomies is the feminine version of the deadlock of language, to which Copjec assigns priority because it articulates are more fundamental impasse. The possible exception is negated: There is no x which is not submitted to the phallic function Φx. Why is there no possible exception? If Woman is the Other to man (see above), then there can't be an Other to this Other, and then there is no guarantee to consistency – it is included in this Other, or in Copjec's words she “is limitlessly inscribed within the symbolic“, no universalization is possible, and hence, not all are submitted to the symbolic function.
Zizek adds an extra layer to the connection between the Kantian antinomies and the formulas of sexuation by rendering the connection through Kant's concept of the Sublime. Zizek claims that “it is easy to see why this move from antinomies of pure reason to the topic of the Sublime makes the link between antinomies and sex (sexual difference) palpable“. One can argue whether this is really “easy to see“ without further inquiries into the critique of judgement or into the sublime object of ideology (where he explains the link in detail), so I will provide material from both sources to clarify his move.
Zizek mentions Kant's own attempts to link the Sublime to sexual difference: in a pre-critical essay he identifies the sublime with masculinity and the beautiful with femininity (Kant cannot generally be praised for his great entertainment value, but this essay is an enjoyable read). Zizek corrects Kant's own classification though and locates sexual difference in the interior of the Sublime itself.
The Sublime is an aesthetic judgement that can best be understood through its various oppositions to the Beautiful:

The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in (the object's) being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness, either as in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality. So it seems that we regard the beautiful as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, and the sublime as the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason. Hence in the case of the beautiful our liking is connected with the presentation of quality, but in the case of the sublime with the presentation of quantity“.

The beautiful calms and comforts, invites for contemplation, while the sublime agitates, moves. The beautiful is characterized by an immediate harmony between the sensuous matter and the powers of the mind, and thus can be said to follow the pleasure principle. The specific pleasure found in the sublime is mediated through unpleasure because:

[...] this liking is incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is not just attracted by the object but is alternately always repelled as well, the liking for the sublime contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure.

The latter are the main features of the Sublime that Zizek highlights in The Sublime Object of Ideology: "The Sublime is 'beyond the pleasure principle' […] this means at the same time that that the relation of Beauty to Sublimity coincides with the relation of immediacy to mediation". In short: the Sublime is not a feature of the object but of the idea. It is evoked by the confrontation with a formless and boundless object. The immediate reaction is displeasure because of the impotence of the power of imagination to match the object with the ideas of understanding. This unpleasure shifts into pleasure when one notices that the capacity of reason is up to the challenge.
What is most important for understanding Žižek’s turn to the Sublime is the prominent role of failure for the experience: it is the very failure of the power of imagination, the failure of representation that

provides a view, in the negative way, of the dimension of what is unrepresentable. It is a unique point in Kant's system, a point at which the fissure, the gap between the phenomenon and Thing-in-itself, is abolished in a negative way, because in it the phenomenon's very inability to represent the Thing adequately is inscribed in the phenomenon itself

- and indeed, this is not a Lacanian reading forced onto Kant's text because it suits Zizek's parallax ontology, but something that Kant says very clearly in various formulations. If the Sublime therefore provides a view of the dimension of what is unrepresentable, then we have also found the bridge from the Sublime to sublimation, this is why Zizek can move without much further ado from the Sublime to sublimation.
But let's take a closer look first at the relation of the Sublime with the formulas of sexuation, the two modes of failure. Just like the antinomies of pure reason, the experience of the Sublime comes in the two modes of the dynamical and the mathematical. Instead of paraphrasing Zizek, I provide the Kant quotes here again (if only because I was so amazed how clearly he expresses that which Zizek is after):
It's an instant of the mathematical sublime when the experience is effected by a large, formless object:

We call sublime what is absolutely (schlechthin) large [...] in every respect (beyond all comparison) [...] in that case, we do not permit a standard adequate to it to be sought outside it, but only within it. It is a magnitude that is equal only to itself. […] our imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea, and so (the imagination,) our power of estimating the magnitude of things in the world of sense, is inadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacy itself is the arousal in us of the feeling that we have within us a supersensible power […] Hence what is to be called sublime is not the object, but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgment [...]. Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.

The dynamical sublime deals with the experience that is occasioned by a powerful natural force:

If we are to judge nature as sublime dynamically, we must present it as arousing fear. […] We can, however, consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile […] consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on. […] the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul's fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage (to believe) that we could be a match for nature's seeming omnipotence […] In the same way, though the irresistibility of nature's might makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.

In both instances of the Sublime, the experience consists in the recognition of the superiority of the powers of reason that we have within us, powers that allow us to transcend the natural boundaries, powers that testify to a radical disconnectedness from nature. When Kant calls it a self preservation quite different in kind one can hear a backward echo of Freud, who also assigned a nature of a different kind to the drive, a nature that cuts it off from any origin (remember: the sublime is not a subjective reflection of objective properties of the natural objects).
Zizek particularly stresses the ethical overtones Kant assigns to the experience of the dynamical sublime as a "resource for heroism“ - rational disinterestedness as the basis for ethical action. As u/wrapped_in_clingfilm has already pointed out before, an ethical act should not be equated with a morally good act though – the discomforting message of Lacan (conveyed in Seminar VII as well as in Kant with Sade) was to explain in how far Sade is the truth of Kant by pointing out “the ultimate consequences and disavowed premises of the Kantian ethical revolution“ (Zizek). Lacan makes the paradoxical move of showing that not ceding on one's desire is the ultimate disinterested ethical act in the Kantian sense.
The example Lacan chooses to demonstrate his point is Kant's famous example of a man who will be hung on a gallows the next morning if he spends a night with a beautiful lady. Lacan not only wittily remarks that from the clinical experience a gallows-like threat is a necessary prerequisite for many people to be able to enjoy the night at all. But he gives it a more universal twist by quoting Juvenal and his emancipatory call: Et non propter vitam vivendi perdere causas - 'do not forsake the reasons for living in the interest of staying alive', and argues why desire, as paradoxical as that may sound, is the non-pathological driving force. Alenka Zupančič explains this in the real of an illusion:

If one follows Kant's suggestion and renounces the night of love, then one decides for the pleasure principle as the final principle of one's action. If one decides, however, to spend the night with the coveted lady anyway, then this does not prove an inability to renounce the desire, but it proves the opposite. So one decides for the night of love not out of pleasure, but, as they say, on principle or even duty.

As an aside: Zupančič also puts forward an another aspect in Kant that links it to Sade via perversion: the role Kant assigns to a proper and safe distance from the natural phenomena or objects that must be maintained in order to experience the sublime; she links this to masochism and a fantasm of passivity, in so far as “Kant introduces a dimension of the spectator […] we have to be able to observe our impotence calmly […] the second movement of the sublime […] depends on the same window frame […] thereby the law becomes a power that scares the subject instead of being that which awakens the powers of the subject […] now it is powerful, omnipotent, it observes and speaks“.
Back to the text:
For Kant, our faculty of desiring is pathological, a pathological driving force, while for Lacan desire can be said to meet exactly the criteria for a disinterested act (he even claims that compared to the moral law “desire can claim it more legitimately”), it is a “pure faculty of desire“. This is why, Zizek argues, Kant identifies the non pathological with reason and moral law – and therefore privileges the dynamical, male sublime.
The mathematical sublime supplies a different kind of experience: not that of a higher faculty, an exception to the order of the sensuous. What one experiences is an immanent tension within the sensuous which cannot totalize itself although (or rather because of) there is no exception from it. In Kant's words: “Now the proper unchangeable basic measure of nature is the absolute whole of nature, which, in the case of nature as appearance, is infinity comprehended. This basic measure, however, is a self-contradictory concept (because an absolute totality of an endless progression is impossible)”
Sex is the point at which the break with natural life takes place, it is not anchored in nature but cut off from it. The tension that is at work in the Sublime is the tension that is also at work in sexuality. The immanent and repeated failure of sexuality produces negative pleasure, and “sex in-itself” can only be evoked by a perpetual failure that circles around it as a virtual attractor. This of course, leads us again to the definition of sublimation that Lacan gives: the object raised to the dignity of the Thing. Sublimation is not, as superficial Freud interpretations would have it, an exchange of sex for social recognition, but sublimation is equivalent to sexuality. The elevated object (which can also be an act) takes the place of the Thing, that which “by definition falls outside the field of signifiers, but around which, as the 'extimate centre', everything rallies” (de Kesel). Sublimation is not the substitute for sexual passion but that which makes it possible in the first place. The thing can only “transpire“ through the object, as Zizek puts it, or, as Mari Ruti expresses it, we can only hear the "echo of the Thing“ in the object, under very fragile and brittle circumstances: sexual passion is always one small step away from desublimation or from the comical or ridiculous.
Zizek concludes the subchapter with two aspects that I have mentioned in the beginning of this text: He gives sexual difference a formal twist that he has also applied to the field of political positions (left vs right) before, a formal twist that reinforces the insistence on the non-relationship, the non-complementary: sexual difference, he posits, “is its own meta-difference“: From inside the masculine perspective, there is male universality, and the feminine exception, from inside the feminine perspective the difference presents itself in a different way: it is the difference between feminine non-all and masculine no-exception. So the difference splits sex from within – which brings Zizek back to Kant: the Kantian transcendental is also split from within, and recognizing this internal inconsistency, Kant concludes, reason might either cling stubbornly to its dogmatic assumptions or fall into the despair: the “euthanasia of Reason“. The very attempts of reason to guarantee its consistency and to guarantee unity to knowledge produce the unique kind of error that Kant calls “transcendental illusion“. Hypostatizing the “I” of apperception to a substantial object, the soul, is according to Kant, a paralogism, which here means: a fallacy that illegitimately applies the concept of substance to a non empirical entity, the “I“.

I'll try and write these summaries within as short a time as possible after having had the lecture, in order to work with fresh and hopefully accurate information. I make no guarantees when it comes to quality, but will strive to make it as high as possible, as I intend to revisit these notes come the exam period. I'll also attempt to present the information presented in the course and the material, and leave out opposing information I believe I have access to, if I did not share it with the rest of the course.
First, quick information about the course. It is explicitly made with a Nordic perspective, and carries clear influence of this. Additionally, it is meant to be a critical course, with an understanding of academic work as intent on influencing society. Finally, it focuses on a sociocultural approach, taking primary inspiration from the social sciences and the humanities.
As an opening to the course, this lecture focused mostly on the historical development of the perspectives on sex and gender, and a brief introduction to most perspectives. While it did not define any lens that is the right one, it was helpful in deciding on one that is wrong. We proceed to biological determinism
First, the lecturer did grant that biological sex is a thing, and that it causes certain differences between men and women. Among these differences were: Genitals, different on a rather essential level, serving different functions and the like; differences in anatomy, physiology, and hormones, which are relatively small and nearly all biologists agree about that. Furthermore, the small sex differences in biology are not big enough to offer a valid explanation of societal differences between the genders.
Biological determinism was seen to rise out of the inception of the two-sex model. This segment takes Thomas Laqueur's book "Making Sex" as the primary source. In it, a history of views on sex is detailed. Put briefly, for a while it followed the logic of a one-sex model, where men were men, and women were incomplete men, where the differences between men and women were in degree. On the other hand, coming around with biology and anatomy research, a dichotomy of the sexes as different in essence came around. This difference was seen as an absolute, and separated the sexes with little to no acknowledgement of overlap. This information was used to discriminate based on sex, fueling such arguments as different voting rights, or different pay.
When asked whether the fault in this lay with the underlying facts, or the reasoning that accompanied them, the lecturer called it a good question. It was extrapolated upon that the reasoning was not necessarily wrong, different lengths in parental leave being brought up as a reasonable way to discriminate based on biological facts. On the other hand, it was acknowledged that it depends on whether one were to identify as a "liberal" or a "radical" on the matter of equality, where the former would be more prone to want equal treatment, and the latter more likely to condone differential treatment.
Then we asked the question of what defines sex. What counts, who decides, and when/where is biological sex important? Intersex examples were offered to outline the blurring of the line, the ethics of sex conforming surgeries on intersex infants was questioned. Hormones and chromosomes were offered as possible measurements of what biological sex is. As for when it is important, reproduction was a clear example, while sports was mentioned, and the lecturer offered that one might find some other metrics than genitalia to sort people in categories that might be just as fair for the competitors. Affirmative action was also mentioned, where a counter that it regards social gender, was offered.
The matter of gendering items was also discussed, where the students were prompted to find different items that were gendered, and discuss how they were gendered, and why. This takes inspiration from this research, featuring a broad set of household items, and how they have been gendered. The example I will bring up is an electric screwdriver versus an electric whisk. Where the purpose of both is to make things spin, they tend to be different in design. More rounded lines, lighter colors, less accessibility to dismantle, and ease of operation were things described to be associated with gendering an item as feminine. Social commentary about how we in turn treat these items was offered. In this sense, designers were presented as ignorant as to what gender their product was getting, and unconscious bias was briefly mentioned, but not elaborated upon. I don't completely understand the offered perspective, but will try and dive deeper into it if anyone is interested in discussing the gender of things.
The matter of social gender was next up. With the defined areas being gender role, gender identity, gender relations, gender in relation to society, and gendered language. The main argument seemed to be that sex and/or gender inform all of these, who in turn affect gender.
After this primer, the course proceeded to extrapolate on how the different understandings of gender were created. We have the biological-medical perspective, which has been extrapolated on, and will not be very relevant going forward. Then we have sociocultural perspectives, and critical perspectives, forming the main categories that will be brought forward into the course.
Margaret Mead, an anthropologist and the author of "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive societies" (1935) was used as an example of a sociocultural perspective, representing anthropological and ethnographic studies of gender which challenged biological understandings. The research is an example of criticism against understandings of gender based on white, western culture. Outlining three societies living on a single island, with widely different gender expressions, it was used as activist research, prompting the quote: "if the characteristics we consider as feminine can easily be considered as masculine in other cultures, there is no ground for linking these characteristics to the biological sex." On this note, the book does briefly acknowledge that her research has been criticized for being overly simplistic, stating she did it to clarify her arguments in relation to the American society. It (the book, not the lecture) concludes that even though her overarching points underline cultural organization of gender, and are correct, her handling of details in research shows that the relationship between activism and science at times can be strained.
Simone de Beauvoir, with her book "the second sex" (1949), forms a representation of gender seen from the humanities. And Toril Moi, with her interpretations and critique of Beauvoir was brought up in the same category. In this case, it was described that Simone described society as she saw it, with gender roles put on women, and being something that was learned. While transcendence was something she considered tied to the masculine, she argued that the immanence of women was a necessary contrast in the dominant system. Transcendence in this sense refers to a certain accessibility of the future, and freedom of action, while immanence is the lack of awareness of free choice brought on due to oppression.
Our ending note is on Judith Butler with Gender Trouble (1990), whose attributed view is that sex is as much a product of social construction as gender. A central theory is centered around performance. Where one performs gender in ones daily life, and thereby reproduce the social norms connected to that gender. An additional note is that she doesn't consider gender to be something one is, but rather something you do, act like, and look like. Her view of gender comes across more as if it was a tradition, where stepping too far outside ones gender causes social sanctions, and seemingly arguing that "misquoting" ones performance of gender serves as a way to change gender. Strikes me as very "be the change you want to see in the world."
Next week, we will look at feminism and gender studies, the former being another category of lenses to view gender through. I have noticed that I haven't been able to get everything down, but this was a four hour course, and a couple more hours of comparing notes, literature, and the slides. I'll try and see if I can produce a more accurate transcript to work with next time. I'll also, happily accept comments on the format. Could be that I should use bullet-points, and extrapolate on the most interesting bits in the comments upon request.

Not just feet of clay, but a faceful. Justin Trudeau went into Canada’s election on October 21st amid a row about his past penchant for applying black and brown make-up in the name, supposedly, of a laugh. The contrast between past blackface and current carefully cultivated wokeface was sharp. But the prime minister’s right-wing adversary, Maxime Bernier of the Canadian People’s Party, raised a question that has troubled feminists for a while. Why is it blatantly unacceptable for white people to dress up as black or brown, but harmless fun when men dress up as women? Aren’t drag queens effectively doing womanface? In a month when the BBC splurged publicity on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (pictured, right) the question deserves attention here too.
In a 2014 article in Feminist Current, Meghan Murphy argues that just as white people in blackface appropriate exaggerated cultural stereotypes of ethnicity in order to mock black people, drag queens mock women by appropriating exaggerated cultural stereotypes of womanhood. These include hairstyles, make-up, nails, dresses and supposedly feminised traits like “cattiness”. Worse, just as white people who don blackface typically have whiteness-related privileges that black people lack, drag queens typically have male-related privileges that women lack.
So do drag queens mock women? Individual intent is less relevant than it might seem. In his defence, Trudeau rightly avoided talking about whether he had intended to mock anyone, referring instead to racism he didn’t see at the time. The real question, raised by Murphy, is if drag has a mocking cultural meaning beyond its practitioners’ intentions. In fact, drag often isn’t directed towards humour at all. In his book The Changing Room, historian Laurence Senelick describes the antecedents of modern drag: shamanism, aimed at ends like divination and the expulsion of spirits, and various stylized forms of theatre, such as Japanese Kabuki and English Elizabethan. Even so, he does little to dislodge the suspicion that drag is very often misogynistic. “[T]he contaminating reality of woman was to be sublimated by means of abstract, masked impersonation”; “The perfect universe of poetic illusion is best configured by a youth in women’s garb, rather than a girl in men’s clothes”; and “women in local theatre troupes . . . faded into the background because they were being women, rather than playing women” are just a few sentences from the book.
The central question is whether drag’s modern, Western, humorous incarnation has a misogynistic, mocking cultural meaning. I think it does. As with blackface, a fundamental source of humour operates independently of any wittiness, observation, or timing. Namely: a white person as a black person, or a man as a woman, is found by audiences to be hilariously incongruent, given the presumed superior social status of the performers relative to the “inferior” groups they respectively impersonate. The temporary, assumed degradation of a performer’s status is in itself funny. This explains why drag kings—women performing as men—or black people playing white people, are not usually found funny at first sight, though witty or well-observed material may make them so. It also explains the outcome of the following thought experiment: for any given drag performance, an identical performance, though this time given by what the audience knew to be a woman underneath equally heavy make-up and sequins, would not be as funny.
Some in the gender studies field argue that drag queens positively “queer” gender: that is, they subvert otherwise rigid cultural binaries that would put men and masculinity on one side, and women and femininity on the other, and assign heterosexuality to both of them. The philosopher Judith Butler argues (jargon alert): “Parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalised or essentialist gender identities.” Yet drag has been around for millennia, and the binaries still look pretty stable to me. Far from drag queens making it more acceptable for men to exhibit femininity, in the UK at least it seems rather to have become more acceptable for young women to look like drag queens. I am not sure if that is much of an advance.
A further problem with Butler’s thesis is that contemporary drag queens tend to aim for humour, and humour is often highly conservative. Many jokes depend on shared norms between the performer’s persona and the audience, in order to subvert those norms for comic effect. But usually the subversion is only temporary, and purely instrumental—to produce the belly laugh, leaving the norms untouched, and arguably even reinforced by the enjoyably cathartic experience. The laugh reveals, at least to others, if not to its owner, the structure of prejudices but does not challenge them. Much laughter towards drag queens depends on, and simultaneously nurtures, the attitude that a man can be made to look preposterous by dressing up as a woman, but not vice versa.
Performers can and do use creativity and intelligence to try to work subversively against drag’s inbuilt reactionary grain. To that end, they may call upon its long, rich history for inspiration, to quote or satirise. (As Ru Paul has said: “I don’t dress like a woman, I dress like a drag queen”.) The fact remains, though, that in uncreative hands, drag collapses all too quickly into “look at the silly man in the dress”; with an accompanying persistent undertone of “aren’t women silly?”
If there can be non-misogynist drag, then the door is left open, in some distant but possible world, for a performance in blackface to challenge and genuinely subvert the racism in which actual cases of blackface, in our actual world, are thoroughly grounded. Those who reject this suggestion as outrageous need to explain why creative recuperation is eternally impossible for blackface, but not for drag. And the answer can’t simply be “because misogyny’s fine, but racism isn’t”.
(source: https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/november-2019/blackface-is-evil-why-isnt-drag/)

I know, I know... what does this have to do with KIA?
Well, obligatory: "How to Get A Girlfriend and The Peanuts Movie: How Heteronormativity Gets Pushed on Kids" by The Mary Sue (SocJus +1, self post +1) http://archive.fo/afyXA, but I think the concept of it is important to understand so people know what they are fighting for, or what it is when they encounter it (in case they don't, like me previously).
Have you noticed Twitteetc profiles containing description of the person as 'Queer', or people refering to themselves as such, or even the people that are pushing "I can be whatever I want to be!" when it comes to trans community?
In following, I'll describe what it means to be 'queer', and further explain the purpose of it (with various quotes, which for the most part I agree with); any constructive criticism when it comes to further understanding it is appreciated.
What is Queer Theory?
"The core of ‘Queer Theory’ is questioning the norms. Queer is related to what we perceive as normal in our society and is directly linked to power and status quo."
Gender as 'performance' (social construct)
"This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an 'essence’, but instead a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory."
"It’s not (necessarily) just a view on sexuality, or gender. It also suggests that the confines of any identity can potentially be reinvented by its owner..."
"'There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.'"
What they say it means to be 'queer':
“Queer” can be used to describe someone’s sexual orientation or stand as a political statement. Its definition has many dimensions, from gender identification to a resistance against structural rigidity to a strange sensation or state of being.
Being queer is first and foremost a state of mind. It is a worldview characterized by acceptance, through which one embraces and validates all the unique, unconventional ways that individuals express themselves, particularly with respect to gender and sexual orientation. It is about acknowledging the infinite number of complex, fluid identities that exist outside the few limited, dualistic categories considered legitimate by society. Being queer means believing that everyone has the right to be themselves and express themselves without being judged or hated because that doesn’t fit in with what’s normal. Being queer means challenging everything that’s considered normal.
To be queer is to know tragedy in your bones. It is woven into the fabric of our history. As we face another tragedy of precious queer lives lost in Orlando, I think of my predecessors who fought at the Stonewall riots. I think of all those in the queer community we have lost to the HIV/AIDS crisis. I think of the violence targeting queer black, indigenous, and other POC lives. Queer stories and lives are mired with struggle and death. However, our stories are also empowered by love, strength, and community
What it actually means to be queer:
Taken from a blog: http://archive.fo/tE2YO
"Queer is an identity that is possible and necessary for all people to join according to the premises of queer ideology which state that straitness, normativity, and heteronormativity are oppressive and need to be stomped in the same manor as capitalism/privacy and “the patriarchy”."
You might wonder (if you're like me) what the fuck does this have to do with patriarchy, which bring us to my own, but less eloquent words, and creation of "Queer Theory".
Basically, queer theory was influenced by several feminists (Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), and several men who've based their work on things such as feminist theory, gender theory, and critical theory.
To quote, again:
"Being “queer” and “”lgbt(etc)”” and the concept of a “”sexual identity”” -which is all an idea of a constructing a collectivist identity for gay people created by feminism for the cause of social justice/marxian/leftist ideology (feminists, the people who expanded upon conflict theory and brought us the “personal is political” slogan which was intended to make womanhood an all-encompassing political issue) based on queer theory in order to make gay people an allegiant political block with a FLAG to represent their identity- is specifically intended to make everything about gay people about the fact that they’re gay. The entire idea of queerness, as presented by its very origins and premise, is: We’re here, we’re queer. It’s not “we’re here, we’re people”, no, in the same way that feminism’s brand of collectivism is gynocentricism, queer ideology is centric to queer identifying people."
Radical feminists oppose it, though, and blame it on... men, of course:
"Many feminists have critiqued queer theory as either a diversion from feminism issues or as a male-dominated backlash to feminism. Lesbian feminists and radical feminists have been the most prominent critics of queer theory and queer politics. Sheila Jeffreys' Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective harshly criticizes queer theory as the product of "a powerful gay male culture" which "celebrated masculine privilege" and "enshrined a cult of masculinity." She repudiates queer theory as anti-lesbian, anti-feminist, and anti-women."
Why you should care:
1) Because it's becoming somewhat prevalent, and it's its form of 'oppression' that will undoubtedly continue to be pushed; at very least you should be aware of it.
2) Because it's becoming somewhat prevalent (not the same as above; the above is more about being 'queer'), and some people will undoubtedly think it's a good idea to push it into school and indoctrinate kids. Case in point: Children should learn queer theory in elementary science class, argues science professor
And describes it as (which now you're familiar with): "“It challenges categorical thinking and specifically aims to disrupt the hetero/homo binary,” she wrote. “Queer theory examines how the social construction of sexuality is normalized so that heterosexuality is portrayed as the only normal and natural form of being human.” Gunckel accused “schools,” without being more specific, of being “highly homophobic and heterosexists institutions,” and said queer theory promotes social justice by aiming to make education more egalitarian."
Because: "“Queer theory exposes the many ways that the science curriculum is heteronormative, promotes binaries, and bolsters the construction of limited identities,” she wrote.".
"“Queering science education means exploding binary gender and sexuality constructions, collapsing heteronormativity, and opening spaces within science education for the marginalized identities,” she said." ("Heteronormativity is oppressive").
Queer studies already exist, obviously:
All right – we’ll admit it. A major in LGBT/queer studies does not necessarily prepare you for any specific career track. However, therein lies the beauty. The skills you’ll both acquire and hone are applicable to a variety of fields and professional pursuits.
Queer Studies at Oregon State University.
20 Best Deals on Colleges for LGBTQ Studies.
3) The study, while not great (online), shows: "20 Percent of Millennials Identify as LGBTQ".
"Around 12 percent of Millennials identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming".
And another:
"Less Than 50% of Teens Identify as Straight, Says New Study".
Now, let's be clear, the questions they asked were bs, and I wouldn't really care if someone's gay, bisexual or whatever, in fact I don't. I know, I know, it's usually used by those against such people, but I honestly, don't really care. My issue is with:
"But for kids these days, embracing a queer identity while rejecting the gender binary is less a trend and more a reflection of growing up in a world with unprecedented access to information and communities, at a time when the concept of identity is open to interpretation."
Because I find it incorrect, and because they are effectively joining a movement that they (perhaps) might have no idea they are part of, and because "Gender is a feeling", "I can be whatever I want to be", is bullshit, and that in itself harms trans community, trans individuals, and harms people - or better said kids - who might not know better, and make them think they are 'trans' without actually, you know, having gender dysphoria. And those that are trans are fighting back, so to speak, against 'transTrenders'.
To quote, two last times: “The problem with transtrenders is that they don’t know their identities are politically driven. They literally think they are the same as trans people who actually transition or have dysphoria. Gender theory and queer theory wasn’t presented to them as part of feminist theory, part of critical theory, or part of marxist theory, it was presented to them as a stand-alone, post-structuralist philosophy in a way that made it sound like it was just true. They think their sex/gender are icky because they were told it is part of a system of oppression against them, and that gender is basically art. They learn this stuff through media and essentially through social osmosis too, not just from unsecular neo-marxist university courses.”
And: "Everything, in the “queer” perspective, is a social construct connected to capitalism and patriarchy and heteronormativity (”oppression” and hierarchies), and “queer” is their social construct -a worldview and cultural identity- that they deliberately made for “marginalized victim” groups collectivized in the acronym “lgbt(etc)”. And so everything else that is not queer is necessarily considered a modality of heteronormativity predicated on “oppressive normative ideas”. That is what they teach in queer studies, but they posit these claims as facts, just like they teach and train you to be a feminist activist in gender studies and teach you the ideas of patriarchy theory as though they are facts."
Edit: To add this link: http://archive.fo/f3chP

So despite my being a master's student in philosophy and educated in Hegel and Marx, I've only just got around to reading Zizek - both as a matter of personal interest and probable benefit for my thesis.
After a little bit of research, I decided to pick up Violence as the first book of Zizek's I would read. I just started the fifth chapter, "Tolerance as an Ideological Category", and I'm finding his analysis of the Cartesian subject really fascinating, especially because I want to explore the idea of escaping the rational and autonomous actor.
These are the quotes that have stood out to me so far:
"To cut a long story short, philosophically, there is no Judith Butler, or her theory of gender identity as performatively enacted, without the Cartesian subject. Whatever else one can accuse liberal multiculturalism of, one should at least admit that it is profoundly anti-'essentialist': it is its barbarian Other which is perceived as essentialist and thereby false." (147)
"The key moment of any theoretical - and indeed ethical, political, and as Badiou demonstrated, even aesthetic - struggle is the rise of universality out of a particular lifeworld. The commonplace according to which we are all thoroughly grounded in a particular, contingent lifeworld, so that all universality is irreducibly coloured by and embedded in that lifeworld, needs to be turned round. The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes 'for-itself,' and is directly experienced as universal. This universality-for-itself is not simply external to or above its particular context: it is inscribed within it." (152)
"This is the moment of truth in liberalism's claim to kurturlos universality: capitalism, whose ideology liberalism is, effectively is universal, no longer rooted in any particular culture or 'world.' This is why Badiou recently claimed that our time is devoid of world: the universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a 'civilization,' for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly economic-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others." (156)
My initial thoughts on the first quote are of disagreement. I understand that Zizek is arguing that only an autonomous subject that can step out of his/her lifeworld could recognize gender as performance (and from then on consciously choose the nature of that performance), but where does the phenomenological experience of gender come in here? It is not too difficult to suppose that transgender men and women experience a sense of phenomenological urgency to rectify the mismatch between their performances and selves, and if we grant this, then you can avoid the Cartesian subject altogether - you're trading one set of external symbolic-cultural-metaphysical norms for another.
I'm more curious about the second quote. Zizek is obviously working with Hegel's ideas of particularity, universality, sublation, etc. here, but what exactly has Badiou said about this? I haven't read him myself, but I'd love to see an example of what he means. I can think of one - maybe what led to the Russian Revolution were the masses of proletarians experiencing themselves as proletarians - but I'm not sure if I'm understanding it correctly.
As for the third quote, I want to know what Zizek's exact position on this is. I recognize that many other theorists, like Baudrillard, Jameson, etc. charge capitalism with being "universal" in the same sense Zizek uses the term here. But what does Zizek want to do? Does he want to reclaim the sense of particularity that capitalism and liberalism are supposed to have done away with?
Last question - which book should I read next? I know absolutely nothing about Lacan, but I'd love to learn some. Zizek's oeuvre is just so huge that I have no clue where to go.
Sorry for the long post!
Ref: Žižek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. 1st ed., Picador, 2008.

Don't know how reddit works yet, so I might post this where I shouldn't, but fuck it. I wrote a kilometer of mail for Dr. Peterson, but realized with a delay he doesn't respond to mail 'cause he is overflown so fuck it once again. I'm just gonna post what I've written.
Dear professor Peterson,
I'm a graduate student of comparative literature writing to you all the way from Serbia to express my interest and admiration for your lectures and speeches that I stumbled upon on youtube. The way you articulate and defend your attitudes against the plague of millennial radical left is both rhetorically and philosophically a thrill.
It'll be a longer mail, so I'll state its purpose in media res. It's a long expression of solidarity and an effort at forming a correspondence concerning your more detailed views on postmodernism which I am really interested in. Also, I'd rather you take your time with answering the email than just giving a formal response because I'm really interested in your opinion on the matter. Here goes nothing, I hope you'll bear with me...
When "scandals" began, I really liked your composure and the way you managed to keep your cool when confronted to the exasperating and feeble minded attempts at undermining your stands. Keeping cool is, of course, only an achievement when "the cool" is threatened by a stirred temperament. It's a pleasure to see how you balance the two - charismatic hints of outbursts and academic composure. Of course, as a psychologist, you know how to read a room and which one of the approaches works best, so bravo (etymologically - bold)... I wish we had more professors such as you are in Serbia.
From personal experience I know how irritating a "dialog" with radical leftists can be. Neo-marxism is deeply rooted in humanities departments in universities across the countries that belonged to former communist/socialist countries of Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia). I've had some clashes with the defenders of the left ideologies and I was countered with their mechanical categorization of any opposing arguments as essentialistic, ahistoric, logocentric etc. That's just to say - I've seen how generic it gets.
I've also given lectures about the ideological implications on/of the dystopian novels such as 1984 by Orwell, Us by Zamyatin (which I humbly recommend since it is written in the lair of Soviet communism) and Brave New World by Huxley, which in my opinion is a critique of both radical-left and radical-right ideologies. It's apparent that you're a well read man, even beyond the field of your expertise, so I suspect that you've read the first and the third novel. If not, it will give a fuel to your rightful rage at the very least.
I'm saying all this in length to express, not just solidarity, but a certain degree of like-mindedness, not just in the product of thought, but in the method of thinking as well. Like-mindedness between you and me, that is, if I dare say so... Not that I can even hope to level with you when it comes to your psychological training which I envy as I am hoping to somehow become a clinical psychologist as well (almost impossible in my country).
Now to the threat of postmodernism. I absolutely agree with you on the metaphysical, scientific, ethic and aesthetic abominations of radical-left discourse, but what I'm having doubts about is the connection you draw between the original post-structuralism and its "practices" by modern extremist half-wits.
I want to state right of the bat that I've only partially read original works of mentioned authors and thus I won't be able to quote sources. I can only review my notes and ask your opinion on what I've been taught at the university, because I noticed some discrepancies between what I was taught and what you are teaching. I consider you my long-distance teacher as well, so consider this my attempt at an informal consultation.
It appears to me that you developed your views on postmodernism alongside professor Stephen Hicks' whom I've listened to as well and it appears to me that some claims about postmodernism you both make may not be rooted in the... well roots of postmodernism. I'm not claiming they are not rooted, I'm just questioning the possibility of you being mistaken about Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and the crew. It's professor Hicks' premise that they all had the insidious intent of preserving the marxistic core and infesting modern philosophy with the appropriations of its discourse, but isn't it a bit far-fetched? Professor Hicks' quotes some Derrida, Foucault etc. but out of context and in the key of the mentioned interpretation of historic facts. While it is a fact that Derrida and the others were members of Tel Quel and such... I think they all abandoned the organisation exactly because of the Maoist, marxist and generally ideological convictions. They've taught us that post-structuralists were highly critical of ideologies in general and that most of them were left-liberals and not commies...
Do you think it's possible that the plead for an oxymoron of ABSOLUTE RELATIVISM was not what Derrida and the rest had in mind? It seems to me that total relativism is a strive of deconstructionISM. We've been taught that Derrida insisted on distinctions between deconstruction and deconstructionism. We've also been taught that Derrida emphasized, not destruction (as you say in one of your clips), but a critical revision of the given structures... that is not to dismantle the system, but to revise it and reaffirm what's been suppressed... which is what psychoanalysis does to, right? In other words, Derrida, by my understanding of deconstruction, doesn't seek to annihilate the binary opposition nor does he seek to completely reverse the hierarchy between the oppositions (so that the suppressed becomes the suppressor). I think he rather wanted to state that the hierarchy is not that one-sided hierarchy, static and simple, but that the "original" is defined by the "other" and vice versa, that the structure is dynamic and ambivalent. It's not the same as claiming that there ain't no structure...
Isn't it what Freud did when he said that Ego and Superego are based on and perhaps in (if we want to be grim) Id? It's not to say that we are only and utterly Id, nor it is to say (if we apply deconstruction to politics and ethics) that LGBT rights should be imposed on rights of heterosexual community or that feminine should be imposed on masculine... I believe that the point of post-structuralism/postmodernism was to remind that oppositions both work together to form an integrative structure which is kinda what Jung was aiming at with anima and animus if I'm not terribly mistaken*.*
In that way postmodernism could be tied to the corpus of eastern philosophy (Daoism, Zen etc.) which claims that the reality/Being/existence/identities etc. are formed by correlating oppositions. Now the opposition to rational/logical is irrational/illogical and one should be immersed and concealed in another so, in that aspect, postmodernists try to debunk the irrational aspects of rationality which are many, as I'm sure you're well aware. It doesn't mean that all reason is beyond reason nor that all science is a simple relative narrative, but isn't some of it indeed based on narrative and interpretation? I mean, science can often give us facts, but the conclusions and implications we draw from those facts can differ, right?
Especially if you apply analogy and derive political conclusions from metaphysics or even physics. You mentioned the postmodernists' misuse of Einstein's theory of relativity and said that they associate it with relativism without understanding it and that it's not saying that all is relative, but it does say that time indeed is relative in relation to e. g. speed of movement? Also what seems puzzling is the dual nature of particle mentioned in the quantum mechanics. If you draw an analogy between that and the linguistic premises of postmodernism, don't they correlate?
I mean, Richard Rorty and the rest that Stephen Hicks criticizes, claimed that language is figural/polysemic/ambivalent and that knowledge itself demands analogies etc. Their basic premise is that we can not logically denote language and derive one-sided conclusions out of it because language is polysemic and it can't be deprived of opposing meanings rooted in it, that work together to constitute each other. From a literary point of view, that is not to say that the text necessarily doesn't have a meaning, but can't it have more than one or must it always have one? E. G. Professor Hicks quotes Derrida's comparison of his philosophy to Marx's and draws the conclusion that Derrida indeed has found a new discourse to appropriate and disperse Marx's ideas in the metaphysical aether, but I think that Derrida just wanted to say that his efforts are to reaffirm the repressed.
Now I agree, what some of the post-structuralists claims were radical and extreme. E. G. Rolan Barthes and his self-explaining concept of the death of an author. It is extreme, but in relation and reaction to the former extremism of autorial intention that was deemed to fully govern the text. I myself am opposed to people claiming that the text or utterance means what the author meant it to say or that it means what the reader implies or that it means something by itself. The meaning of the text is constituted by all of the mentioned, is it not so? So yeah, postmodernists can be extreme, but when clashing their extremity against positivistic extremity, we get a balanced scale, is it not so?
That is precisely why language has connotations and denotations. Objectivists try to exclude connotations, relativists try to exclude the other, but isn't "truth" somewhere in the middle? If we would look at ambiguous images or lenticular printing, what would be the nature of the content? In one case what we would perceive would depend on our expectations and in other case the content is dynamic and depends on the movement so you can't really fix it into one, singular definition or image or percept, isn't it so? I mean, we would perhaps perceive one, perhaps both images, one at a time, but the nature of the content would still be ambivalent?
Paul Ricoeur pleaded that identity, as our sense of unified personality, is based on narratives such as our life story that we present to ourselves and others. Story would in that case consist of causalities we project to fill in the gaps between events that actually occurred etc. It's his idea that all knowledge is in that way narrative and that the story is an archetypal system or mode of knowing. I was surprised to see that Zen Master Doshin Roshi agrees with your critique of postmodernism. Isn't it Zen that claims that Being is fixed on/by emptiness, just as postmodernists claim that our signs are empty forms that relate to the content only by referring to the absence of content? Isn't one of the reasons we speak a necessity to REpresent logos/truth/being/meaning exactly because it is not present(ed) by itself? Isn't it true that the meaning of the text is not just in the text, but between the lines too? ... That we speak, according to Jacques Lacan to instill and suppress the trauma of unfathomable Real? I do not ask you this as someone who wants to convince you you are wrong, but as someone who wants to know what you think of those concepts that seem plausible to me even though I don't consider myself to be a post-structuralist, marxist, leftist or any IST.
I'm trying to settle the disturbance in my inner value "system" as I think you might call it. It's your calling, as a professor, to somewhat reflect on the disturbance your teachings caused. I'm kidding, it's not your responsibility of course, but I'd still like your thorough answer if possible. It took me hours to articulate all of this. You seriously undermined what I deemed to be a moderate critical revision of stability of rational systems of structuralism and positivism. In other words, post-structuralism unsettled structuralism and in my mind that destabilisation was both balanced and balancing. Now I'm at unease :) Now on with my examples. I'd like to know what you think about each of them.
Freud, who was in his time and still is, feared and despised, claimed that the structure of identity is not that unified as we might think. It's not to say that it's utterly plural and that we are all schizophrenic, but many conflicting tendencies coexist in our psychic structure, so why would you consider postmodern affirmation of pluralism so toxic? I don't think that all of them claim that the Being is strictly plural and that there aren't any unifying principles in existence etc. They claim that the potency of our epistemology to grasp the UNIVERSAL is still at low rates, and we ought to be careful when we assume something is universal, true, rational and so on, don't you think? I mean, it was Descartes who affirmed the skepticism. Of course, it's not to be pushed to extremes for we must start at something we deem obvious, but isn't there a place for mistakes even when we consider something to be apparent? Jung too spoke of the role of shadow in knowing oneself so isn't it what Derrida and the others are saying that the metaphysical identities/entities/truths/values also have shadows to them?
If anything, Freud claimed that the unconscious was a place of Chaos that we can interpret only to a certain extent, but that we can never fully grasp and he wasn't criticized as a skeptic because of it. Jacques Lacan claimed that the Unconscious is structured like a language which is even a more structuralistic approach to it than Freud's. Of course, Lacan had in mind that the structure of language itself is porous due to words explaining each other and calling for each other with no end to it and thus no definition of it. That's the reason they claim that there is nothing outside of language, no metaphysical signifier or signified. It doesn't mean that there isn't a reality outside of language, it means that, in the structure of language, everything is defined in relation to language... In comparison, it could go for reality beyond language as well - nothing in metaphysics stand for itself and by itself, nothing is beyond universal field of correspondence, everything is connected. I'm interested in what you think about that, beside that it's mystical, relativising mumbo-jumbo, for it ain't. Butterfly effect is like a physical law, right?
If you got so far, I implore you not to bracket me with extreme relativists and extreme whatevers that pissed you off. It's not my intention to convince you in anything nor am I myself convinced in anything, I'm just trying to be metaphysically, ethically, politically, psychologically, physically centered (neither left nor right)... which is possible only if the line of variables I'm accounting for is limited. If we have an unlimited set of variables, isn't it arbitrary where the center is? I hope you see my confusion. Relativism is tricky and it's my thing as much as the objectivism is. That said, I have a mind of a both essentialist and constructionist. As a psychologist, you must too... I mean, as you said, Judith Butler, when she says that sex is a performative category, kinda exaggerates (that's me avoiding saying she's full of it), but when it comes to gender... I mean of course gender is biologically grounded, but it's also socially constructed, upon those biological grounds, don't you think so? And of course postmodernists who claim that it's just a social construct are full of shit, but isn't the positivistic approach to it being strictly natural and biological a reduction of the forces at hand?
Professor Hicks spoke about Kantian transcendentalism which supported relativism, but Kant is saying that we have inherited ways of perceiving the "objective" and that our perception is inevitably "colored" by immanent structures of our faculties such are space and time. Kant doesn't say space and time don't exist, but that we can't know if they do exist because we are inclined to perceive in relation to space and time. It means that some objectivity exists and that it's our job to, as best as we can, align our faculties with it although we'll never really know what it is. That's my reading of Kant. Perhaps I should ask professor Hicks this, but how can Kant not be right by saying that? I mean, he said a basic thing there. Subject can't fully know the objectivity, that's why he is SUBJECTed to it. For subjectivity and objectivity to fully align, for one to fully know the other, one would have to become the other. That's the point of the Christ's descendance, isn't it, to transcend the cartesian dualism? So, we can object as much as we want, but it's not objective for it derives from the subject... we don't know and are not the whole of it so, how can we be sure that what we know isn't somehow fitted in the context of the whole in a different manner than we believe it is? That's why Kant says we can't... but he also avoids relativistic subjectivity and says that we are, to extent, biologically if you will, uniformed... and are we not? It doesn't mean that we are all the same and equal, but it doesn't mean that there aren't any grounds for equality...
There was also Hume who tried to undermine the category of causality. He said that we mistaken temporality for causality. In other words that there is no logical proof that there is a relation between cause and the effect... that when I throw a ball, I can't prove it flies because I threw it. In 10 out of 10 times it does fly WHEN I throw it, but that just proves it statistically and perhaps it just coincides with me throwing it. Perhaps not, but perhaps there's a bunch of other causes for it flying, besides me throwing it. And if we don't have all the variables (all the causes and forces that impact the flight) how can we claim anything? Of course that way of thought must be abandoned because it disables your function to assess and act accordingly if you doubt your own senses and common sense, but that's the thing... What Hume said is logical, ain't it (not in the formal sense)? It is rational? And common sense, by which we are guided and must be guided in our everyday lives, isn't always rational. I mean, if we were to question, analyse and prove every single thing we encounter or should decide upon, we would get hit by a bus or something...
On the other hand what logic proves has no ethical or political or practical value to us, only the implications we draw from that logic and those implications are formed by analogies which formal logic does not recognize as valid. And there's the other connotation of logic. We have what we in our dialectics freely refer to as logical which is a claim of rationality, but rationality isn't that one-sided as we would like it to be, is it? That's what Stephen Hicks said about Kant's terms of antinomies - that we can with equal success make rational pleads for opposing conclusions - for example that there is and that there isn't a God... and that we will never know, either because we are not equipped to know or because it's not a quality of the entity of God (if existent) to be knowable... like silence - you can't speak the name of silence or call for it because silence flees the moment you speak, right? I'm not trying to say that we don't know anything, but we don't know all and isn't there a possibility that, what we now consider axiomatic, will change in light of further discoveries? I'll compare it to knowing yourself - If I know myself, that knowledge as an addition to what I was, necessarily changes me, so I am no longer the person I've just known, so I don't know myself anymore, right? Isn't that the logical paradox? And if it is irrational... isn't irrational part of the truth, part of being rational, part of being who we are? Not the only part, but a legitimate one we can not and should not neglect or suppress for it too defines its counterpart?
I am well aware that I went over the line here. Some of the questions I raised you might find banal, some I should have omitted or asked professor Hicks perhaps.. I still chose to address you because I thought I found a similarity between our ways of thought (which you probably won't deduce from this text). Even if you don't read it, it will, I am sure of it, serve some purpose as it has its reason, both in cause and the effect.
I apologize for the mistakes I made in writing or any other mistakes possibly related to English not being my native language. I probably should have said this at the beginning. Anyway, stay fierce.
Best regards,
Janko Vukotić