I have no idea what that's trying to say
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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It's not trying to say anything, that would be a capital mistake. It's trying to appear to say something profound so that the paycheques keep arriving.
It's not that difficult to parse and there's marvelous books called dictionaries that can tell you what the big words mean.
It's an appalling non-attempt at communication. She writes like a student given a word count and a thesaurus, and anyone who uses the phrase 'ontological presence' should be slapped with a fish.
Your translation was excellent but even you had to resort to vaguery when it came to "material process of power applied to the body through gender". What power? Applied externally or internally? What is the mechanism that applies the power?
Too many academics (particularly philosophers and art historians) treat their disciplines as an excersise in being as misunderstandable as possible, and there is really no excuse for it. This is technical writing: presise and meaningful word choice is the name of the game. Jargon where appropriate. "prediscursive surface" never.
I "resort[ed] to vaguery" because I was writing a comment on a website not an essay for gender studies.
But sure, I have the day off so I'll do the exegesis you avoided.
material process - This tells us that the process affects the physical world and/or has real importance or great consequences
power - legal or official authority, capacity, or right, physical might. This is both legitimized violence by the state, actions by doctors, parents, community leaders etc.
Applied to the body carries both of the relevant definitions of material. It has real importance and great consequences on your life depending on which gender is applied to your body. Some of those consequences are physical ones, such as what medical care you are allowed to receive or refuse. Two examples of this are involuntary genital surgeries on intersex infants and bans on abortion for people who can get pregnant.
Your allegations: "It’s not trying to say anything" "It’s trying to appear to say something profound so that the paycheques keep arriving."
I demonstrated that the quote is saying something. Saying that sex is not a pre-existing foundation for culturally constructed gender but rather is imposed on the body by power is an incredibly profound and necessary thing to say. Gender studies and feminist literature is commonly used as an example of a "worthless" degree. You've not provided any proof for this assertion and I can't find any with some basic research so I conclude that you made that up. But enough of me, I'll let Judith explain their position in their own words:
I actually teach in a voice that is for the most part very different from the written voice in Gender Trouble. I have also probably written in ways that are not quite as difficult as that voice was. You make an apt point, though, since when I wrote that book, I had no idea that there might be an audience for it. Indeed, I was surprised by the audience that it has assumed.
I think it is important for pedagogical reasons, especially for a theorist, to know how to shift registers. But I also think it is important not to underestimate the intelligence of lay readers, readers from various backgrounds and educational privilege. I certainly did write that book for an academic audience, but what is strange is that, despite its obvious difficulty, it was read rather widely outside of the academy. I take it that there was something there that people wanted to read, and though I did hear from people who found it difficult, I heard from those who also felt that something was at stake in that theoretical work that made the reading worthwhile.
I don’t know exactly how this can be taught. But I think it is important that critical teaching and critical writing not only seek to be communicable, and reach people where they live, but also pose a challenge, and offer a chance for readers to become something different from what they already are. It is not just that some readers want the chance to understand something new and difficult, but that the received meanings that we have about gender are so entrenched in our everyday way of talking that it won’t make sense to try to change the meaning of gender without critically assessing everyday language. If one were to offer that critical assessment within everyday language, then we would, to some extent, be reaffirming the very language that we seek to subject to critical scrutiny. This doesn’t mean that one should strive to become obscure. In fact, I think intellectuals are under a double obligation to both speak to people where they live, in the language in which understanding is possible, but also to give them the critical point of departure by which they might risk a certain destabilization of that familiar language, become exposed to the new, and begin to imagine the world otherwise.
From “There Is a Person Here”: An Interview with Judith Butler
I never asserted that Gender Studies or Feminism were worthless, they certainly aren't. I do however have little patience for writers who delight in unnecessarily padding out their language with redundant flourishes to the detriment of their message.
My original comment was facetious, but it's telling from Judith's quote that she hadn't considered (or at least anticipated) her audience when writing. Her other comments about wanting to challenge readers as a form of self-betterment are frankly insulting, not to mention completely at odds with her other comment about the obligation to speak to people where they are (with which I entirely agree).
Sex is not a sort of biological precursor to gender. It does not exist before or independent of gender. Sex is produced by gender being enforced by power.
I just want to preface this by saying I am not coming into this with hostility, but because I'm curious about this and would like to understand a bit more about where you're coming from (if this is something you believe and you're not just explaining what the meme says?)
I agree with and understand the first statement in the meme, that "sex" is how we describe various biological differences (e.g. "sexual dimorphism") and how we categorise people medically (afab, amab). I kind of viewed sex and gender as two different things, one medical and one personal/cultural. Neither binary, just to be clear, I understand that biology isn't a binary thing and people are often born with a mix of sex characteristics, which is part of why I thought "assigned gender at birth" terminology was quite good as it just describes what a person was assigned at birth, rather than conflating gender and sex and asserting that a person is a particular sex, and that it can be useful to have afab and amab as medical shorthand for things to look out for when dealing with surgeries or medication or diagnoses (e.g. amab people aren't likely to be pregnant for instance, I dont know if that's true but as an example).
But my understanding of what you're saying is that sex and gender are much more closely linked, and that neither are biological/medical in the way I described above - in fact that gender informs sex, and is in turn informed and enforced by culture and power structures.
Is that an accurate understanding of what you're saying? Or is that much too simple? I'm not a scholar, obviously, but I am interested in making sure I understand how people interact with and understand their own bodies and identities etc as I have trans and non-binary friends
(disclaimer: not OP, but I'm a trans woman with an opinion) Thanks for being inquisitive. It's really hard to speak for all trans people, as even trans people will have different personal takes (some can even be based on internalized transphobia - e.g., transmedicalism - the idea that one is only genuinely transgender if they change their physicality completely)
I think your reading of Butler's quote (through the OP's explanation) is correct. (Also feel that this is true for science in general. Bruno Latour writes about the social construction of objectivity in scientific discourse.) I very much ideologically agree with Butler, with their idea the sex binary is an extension of the gender binary. On a social level, I wish we didn't police these binaries on people.
But I feel conflicted because it's different when it comes to how I feel about my own gender. I feel like I'm on the right hormones when I'm on HRT, and I can't see how that's just social conditioning. Same with dysphoria. I can see that some ways in which I feel dysphoric is socially driven, but it also feels like my brain literally has a map for "female" genitalia (acknowledging that plenty of trans women also don't have bottom dysphoria, and that's fine). There should be a way to reconcile this difference, and maybe they are compatible (that the sex binary is made up and built on top of the gender binary AND that gender affirmation can be biochemically contingent as much as socially). But I don't have the language to make sense of it yet.
Anyway, at the end of the day, what matters most is not that you understand us, because even we don't understand ourselves but we have chosen to love ourselves. I believe that the rest of the world can do the same too! Happy new year, stranger!
Thank you for your answer, I appreciate it! The world might be a nicer place if we could love ourselves and others! Happy New Year!
I agree with Judith. Assigned at birth terminology is attempting to convey the same sort of thing that Judith is in the quote. Gender and sex don't arise from the body, they are applied or assigned to it by various forms of power. They aren't based on a holistic understanding of what the body is or who the person that inhabits the body will become. They are based on the perception of a few small external features of the infant. And when those are inconclusive, doctors perform surgery on the infant to assign a binary form based on how they think the body should be gendered.
I will note that these surgeries on intersex babies are not what fascists and transphobes refer to when they describe gender affirming care as mutilating children. They are perfectly ok with surgically altering a person when it enforces a gender binary. They also don't advocate for the banning of circumcision, another form of cultural genital mutilation.
Even sexual dimorphism isn't a binary, but rather a distribution with a lot of overlap. In most medical situations, amab or afab carries a lot of assumptions that may not be true but nevertheless the treatment of the patient will be based on those assumptions and may harm the patient. For example, HRT changes the risks of certain illnesses and a doctor ignorant to that (a common problem for trans people getting healthcare) wouldn't treat the patient appropriately. This is another example of sex being gender applied to the body through a material process. It's not figurative. It has real consequences that are played out in physical bodies.
I appreciate the response 😊 thanks!
English, please
Just need to add Jordan Peterson to the mix and be even more entertained with nonesense
I know several of those words