Episode 45: Could we ever abolish gender?

This episode focuses on the radical feminist idea of gender abolitionism and asks, could we really ever fully abolish gender? Gender, here understood as the ideological norms and social expectations of the sexes. We discuss what abolishing gender would look like, and also take a rather large detour into Critical Race Theory and Robin DiAngelo for the first half of the episode, before bringing it back to the question of gender. Topics include 'white woman tears' as a form of feminine policing that appeals to authority, Lacan's understanding of being 'born into language' (and thus society, ideology, and culture), Foucault's conception that power, as dominance and submission, is inescapable, and how this lead to Derrida's deconstructionism as a kind of doomerism that necessarily forecloses liberationary ideas like gender abolition. Those three post-structural thinkers informed Judith Butler, who therefore accepted gender as immutable and unchangeable, and so attempted to instead reconceive sex as mutable and changeable. This, we argue, is a disastrous concession that reflects the turn away from meta-narrative structuralism, one that implicitly heralds the possibility of structural change and remaking the world, towards a pessimistic and individualistic deconstructionism (a pessimism that developed in part through disappointment at the failures of the USSR) where all that can be remade is the individual at a micro-level and in a very limited sense.We also explore the framing that "all politics is, is what happens to a man and his family" in relation to divorce and secularisms impact on 'social reproduction' (a Marxist term meaning how society and cultures reproduce themselves). This leads to admitting, and scrutinising, the tension between the family as a unit of private social reproduction (socialisation in the home and through the family) and public social reproduction through the state (socialisation through schooling, universities, healthcare, and childcare settings).