On what feels like an annual basis, Judith Butler is dispatched to the British press, mostly for the purpose of reminding us that anyone who thinks that humans come in two sexes is basically the Pope.
"Be kind to our language. *Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does*. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books." (my emphasis.
So much of what has happened and continues to happen relies on the deceptive use of language (intentional and otherwise). Even the efficient use of words to communicate has, like so many other "institutions", been subverted to perform the opposite of its intended - and stated - purpose.
Right??? I remember way back when when they projected 'Repeat After Me: Trans Women Are Women' on the side of the building. It was fucking chillng. No, I will not repeat anything after you thank you very much and the fact that you have told me to means I am now going to resist you with all my strength.
It's so important always that people are allowed to choose the words that come out of their own mouths and how to express their own thoughts. I really am sick to death of writing about Butler, but her showing up expressing her concerns about Trumpian authoritarianism, which I of course share, while refusing any responsibility whatsoever for the authoritariansm she has enabled that contributed to this moment was too much for me to bear.
As is the fact that we're now in an endless version of that spiderman gif with each authoritarian side pointing at the other and accusing them of authoritarianism. Like Vance turning up in Europe and having a go at the European states for abrogations of free speech (which is not entirely baseless), before going home to an administration bundling people into vans for writing thoughtcrimes. And the internet is full of the right identitarians quoting Orwell at the left identitarians, and vice versa. GUYS. He was writing aboiut Hitler *and* Stalin.
Lots of people think JB definitely thought up her own way of speaking 😂😂😂
This is her on "Queer" and it is so queered!
"“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
Raises a lot of queeries tho 😁. I went through having to read a lot of this stuff for my BA, MA and PhD in Art History as a mature student. It literally did me in. I’m so glad that after 15 years I was able to recover and return to art historical research without it. Even then, I was asking in a conference paper I gave about lesbian desire in sculpture practice, ‘is there room in queer for me?’ I already knew the answer - a straight man (who fancied my gf and grabbed my a** when he was on drugs) told me how queer was better because it was ‘more inclusive.’ Well, I’m happy to be left out of that!
I'd me interested to hear more about your work on Lesbian desire in sculpture practice. I'm a lesbian who make sculptures. This roused (teehee) my interest. Where can I read your thoughts on this?
Ask ChatGPT: "Write a thesis that reads eaxctly as if Judith Butler wrote it, but avoid deceptiveness, strawman arguments and intellectual dishonesty."
Go ahead, try. Let's see if the AI gives up or has a nervous fit.
Yeah. It's the equal and opposite type of monocular vision that I find just as enraging.
Often whan I say anything about Trump/MAGA/or right wing populism on the hellsite - which is every day - some kind of rw populist turns up and tells me that it's the left who are the real baddies and to focus on that.
I think JB is motivated to say whatever keeps Gender Trouble in circulation. In this way she is very similar to DJT, her ongoing success relies on her staying on brand.
It is quite true that the Vatican was an early producer of illiterate anti-genderism of the sort that finds full expression in Trump's executive order. It is also true that the Vatican was the most influential producer of antisemitic rhetoric that fed straight into Hitler's. Just look at Cum nimis absurdum 1555, ratified by successive popes for two centuries.
1. Its time ti queer the Pope concept. Anyone who doesnt see the difference between Benedict and Francis isnt doing proper analysis, its tantamount to say Spanish Inquisition and Liberation Theology are the same. For similar reasons, it will never be too soon (speaking as an Italian agnostic) to get rid of the concept that religion is ipso facto bad and conservative. In my experience the most resolute and effettive opponents of religious bigots are RELIGIOUS progressivs (recent history supports this about a lot of issues from divorce to fighting mafias).
2. About I wouldnt count left identitarianism as dead, let alone as not being a threat to democracy. First of all, in Europe everybody is opposing Trump (at least as a pose) and Im still being censored from the left. Secondly, Trump's term will pass and wokism will sadly resurge with double strength and nastiness (in part as a reaction)
<<Radical feminism came under the fiercest attack back in the day, prior to its besiegement by pop-poststructuralists, from the left and from liberals, in response to rad-fems criticisms of pornography and prostitution. This ought to have been surprising, given that the defenses of pornography and prostitution were advanced with a decidedly libertarian framework. The problem was—and I see this now as I’ve become increasingly familiar with philosophy in my dotage—the intellectual armamentarium of liberals and leftists was insufficient to recognize the glaring contradictions between their analyses of, say, economic matters, and their takes on anything related to sex. This intellectual insufficiency was undoubtedly abetted by male self-interest in the continued sexual objectification of women.
And here we come to one of the nubs, at least in where, why, and how a God-botherer like me (and some other Christians) can find some correspondence between our profession of faith and the critiques of the rad-fems. We both adhere to the quaint, archaic notion that treating people like objects is wrong. Always. No exceptions. Ever. This includes when another person “invites” one, in whatever manner, to objectify him- or herself. Here is also—and I can feel the patellar tremors from here—where the latent full-spectrum libertarianism of left and right is ignited.
When the left was caught up in the seventies euphoria of tearing down every tradition, demolishing every cultural guardrail, the rad-fems—armed with a theory that at least recognized the problem with objectification—said, “Hugh Hefner’s a fucking pimp.” (screech, crash, breaking glass)
How is it that a leftist who calls someone who crosses a picket line “a scab” (a “voluntary” act by an individual), then reverses their ideological priors when it comes to a woman who “consents” to prostitution?
Rad-fems were the first to center, in a systematic way, the issue of rape in politics, and they did so in a non-compartmentalized way that associated rape—which everyone claimed to abhor—with the sex trade (pornography and prostitution, which are now merging into one online thing). It is not surprising, then, that, as noted above, that this rad-fem attention to women’s objectification (and sexual monetization) corresponds with their over-representation among abused women and-or their advocates.
There is no doubt that sexual harassment laws and the criminalization of marital rape were the work of the rad-fems. We tend to conveniently forget.>>
<<Butler attributes her whole theory of gender performance to Derrida’s linguistic expeditions — as impenetrably dense and ultimately banal as much of Butler — on “performative” speech. A priest who repeats the words of the liturgy, for example, or a couple exchanging wedding vows. Butler took this idea — of performance (like an actor reading her lines) — generalized it to all human action, then applied it to her repurposed idea of gender. This is her preoccupation with drag shows, where men dress in often highly stylized women’s clothing — women and a cartoonish version of femininity are therein re-coupled after the second wave’s heroic efforts to disentangle them — and men play the part of hyper-femmes. Butler seems to have missed the memo that women — adult human females — very often do not themselves behave in typically “feminine” ways, or that femininity itself is a very culturally specific notion.>>
Nice to see you here Stan and thanks for these links. The piece at New Discourses you cite in your piece is interesting (although I do have a quite extreme James Lindsay allergy). I entirely agree with Lord that Butler - and indeed, pretty much most of the Anglo-American academy - doesn't understand Derrida at all. Although the claim that what went wrong is because Women's Studies had no literature except 'The Second Sex' is insane. I'm on my way out but will come back and read your piece and the Lord more carefully.... I was trained in second wave poststructural feminism, and I am very very interested in the question of how the reception of poststructuralism in the US caused such a massive third wave clusterfuck.
<<I am very very interested in the question of how the reception of poststructuralism in the US caused such a massive third wave clusterfuck.>>
Aren't we all? (Hausman sort of gets at it . . . and I was put onto her by Toril Moi . . . I tend to think there was a phenomenological infiltration [the old Marxist in me] of neoliberal economics, structural atomization, transhumanism, def the f*kin digisphere . . . idk, many streams feed the river) My friend Tina Beatty [check her out] would also qualify methinks as a second-wave PS, tho she's also a renegade Catholic like me (helluva Venn diagram we're creating here).
Very grateful to have stumbled onto your site. And for the thoughtful reply. Any errors are my own, as I am not an academic, so my "self" education (an oxymoron if ever . . .) has great gaping faults running across it.
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of [gender and gender identity]. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of [Judith Butler].”
Apologies to Thomas Jefferson.
Though feminists in general bear a great deal of responsibility for that rather sad state of affairs themselves.
I was especially struck by Snyder's ninth lesson.
"Be kind to our language. *Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does*. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books." (my emphasis.
So much of what has happened and continues to happen relies on the deceptive use of language (intentional and otherwise). Even the efficient use of words to communicate has, like so many other "institutions", been subverted to perform the opposite of its intended - and stated - purpose.
Right??? I remember way back when when they projected 'Repeat After Me: Trans Women Are Women' on the side of the building. It was fucking chillng. No, I will not repeat anything after you thank you very much and the fact that you have told me to means I am now going to resist you with all my strength.
It's so important always that people are allowed to choose the words that come out of their own mouths and how to express their own thoughts. I really am sick to death of writing about Butler, but her showing up expressing her concerns about Trumpian authoritarianism, which I of course share, while refusing any responsibility whatsoever for the authoritariansm she has enabled that contributed to this moment was too much for me to bear.
As is the fact that we're now in an endless version of that spiderman gif with each authoritarian side pointing at the other and accusing them of authoritarianism. Like Vance turning up in Europe and having a go at the European states for abrogations of free speech (which is not entirely baseless), before going home to an administration bundling people into vans for writing thoughtcrimes. And the internet is full of the right identitarians quoting Orwell at the left identitarians, and vice versa. GUYS. He was writing aboiut Hitler *and* Stalin.
Lots of people think JB definitely thought up her own way of speaking 😂😂😂
This is her on "Queer" and it is so queered!
"“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
Raises a lot of queeries tho 😁. I went through having to read a lot of this stuff for my BA, MA and PhD in Art History as a mature student. It literally did me in. I’m so glad that after 15 years I was able to recover and return to art historical research without it. Even then, I was asking in a conference paper I gave about lesbian desire in sculpture practice, ‘is there room in queer for me?’ I already knew the answer - a straight man (who fancied my gf and grabbed my a** when he was on drugs) told me how queer was better because it was ‘more inclusive.’ Well, I’m happy to be left out of that!
I'd me interested to hear more about your work on Lesbian desire in sculpture practice. I'm a lesbian who make sculptures. This roused (teehee) my interest. Where can I read your thoughts on this?
Hi, my PhD thesis from the University of Leeds in 2007. I am now revisiting that work and am in the process of rewriting much of it.
Ask ChatGPT: "Write a thesis that reads eaxctly as if Judith Butler wrote it, but avoid deceptiveness, strawman arguments and intellectual dishonesty."
Go ahead, try. Let's see if the AI gives up or has a nervous fit.
The “at least he knows what a woman is” Trump voters seem very pleased that they’re keeping TIMs out of the ladies’ room on the Titanic.
Yeah. It's the equal and opposite type of monocular vision that I find just as enraging.
Often whan I say anything about Trump/MAGA/or right wing populism on the hellsite - which is every day - some kind of rw populist turns up and tells me that it's the left who are the real baddies and to focus on that.
I think JB is motivated to say whatever keeps Gender Trouble in circulation. In this way she is very similar to DJT, her ongoing success relies on her staying on brand.
It is quite true that the Vatican was an early producer of illiterate anti-genderism of the sort that finds full expression in Trump's executive order. It is also true that the Vatican was the most influential producer of antisemitic rhetoric that fed straight into Hitler's. Just look at Cum nimis absurdum 1555, ratified by successive popes for two centuries.
This is great Jane.
Butler's tunnel vision is genuinely staggering at this point..
I wish someone would ask her if she thinks evolved sex differences have any relevance to politics at all...
While we're here, a couple tangential points.
1. Its time ti queer the Pope concept. Anyone who doesnt see the difference between Benedict and Francis isnt doing proper analysis, its tantamount to say Spanish Inquisition and Liberation Theology are the same. For similar reasons, it will never be too soon (speaking as an Italian agnostic) to get rid of the concept that religion is ipso facto bad and conservative. In my experience the most resolute and effettive opponents of religious bigots are RELIGIOUS progressivs (recent history supports this about a lot of issues from divorce to fighting mafias).
2. About I wouldnt count left identitarianism as dead, let alone as not being a threat to democracy. First of all, in Europe everybody is opposing Trump (at least as a pose) and Im still being censored from the left. Secondly, Trump's term will pass and wokism will sadly resurge with double strength and nastiness (in part as a reaction)
It’s absolutely beautiful to see the way she gets under your skin.
The glorious Judith!
Reading how much her truths rattle you is as beautiful as watching the morning dawn break on a cliff by the sea.
You claim you are not allowed to speak? Yet, you ARE speaking.
And you will be allowed to speak for as long as you live. You will simply be wrong, and others will say so.
This is the BTL version of blowing a raspberry. Which is entirely to be expected.
<<Radical feminism came under the fiercest attack back in the day, prior to its besiegement by pop-poststructuralists, from the left and from liberals, in response to rad-fems criticisms of pornography and prostitution. This ought to have been surprising, given that the defenses of pornography and prostitution were advanced with a decidedly libertarian framework. The problem was—and I see this now as I’ve become increasingly familiar with philosophy in my dotage—the intellectual armamentarium of liberals and leftists was insufficient to recognize the glaring contradictions between their analyses of, say, economic matters, and their takes on anything related to sex. This intellectual insufficiency was undoubtedly abetted by male self-interest in the continued sexual objectification of women.
And here we come to one of the nubs, at least in where, why, and how a God-botherer like me (and some other Christians) can find some correspondence between our profession of faith and the critiques of the rad-fems. We both adhere to the quaint, archaic notion that treating people like objects is wrong. Always. No exceptions. Ever. This includes when another person “invites” one, in whatever manner, to objectify him- or herself. Here is also—and I can feel the patellar tremors from here—where the latent full-spectrum libertarianism of left and right is ignited.
When the left was caught up in the seventies euphoria of tearing down every tradition, demolishing every cultural guardrail, the rad-fems—armed with a theory that at least recognized the problem with objectification—said, “Hugh Hefner’s a fucking pimp.” (screech, crash, breaking glass)
How is it that a leftist who calls someone who crosses a picket line “a scab” (a “voluntary” act by an individual), then reverses their ideological priors when it comes to a woman who “consents” to prostitution?
Rad-fems were the first to center, in a systematic way, the issue of rape in politics, and they did so in a non-compartmentalized way that associated rape—which everyone claimed to abhor—with the sex trade (pornography and prostitution, which are now merging into one online thing). It is not surprising, then, that, as noted above, that this rad-fem attention to women’s objectification (and sexual monetization) corresponds with their over-representation among abused women and-or their advocates.
There is no doubt that sexual harassment laws and the criminalization of marital rape were the work of the rad-fems. We tend to conveniently forget.>>
https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/radical-feminism
<<Butler attributes her whole theory of gender performance to Derrida’s linguistic expeditions — as impenetrably dense and ultimately banal as much of Butler — on “performative” speech. A priest who repeats the words of the liturgy, for example, or a couple exchanging wedding vows. Butler took this idea — of performance (like an actor reading her lines) — generalized it to all human action, then applied it to her repurposed idea of gender. This is her preoccupation with drag shows, where men dress in often highly stylized women’s clothing — women and a cartoonish version of femininity are therein re-coupled after the second wave’s heroic efforts to disentangle them — and men play the part of hyper-femmes. Butler seems to have missed the memo that women — adult human females — very often do not themselves behave in typically “feminine” ways, or that femininity itself is a very culturally specific notion.>>
https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/trans-ideology
Nice to see you here Stan and thanks for these links. The piece at New Discourses you cite in your piece is interesting (although I do have a quite extreme James Lindsay allergy). I entirely agree with Lord that Butler - and indeed, pretty much most of the Anglo-American academy - doesn't understand Derrida at all. Although the claim that what went wrong is because Women's Studies had no literature except 'The Second Sex' is insane. I'm on my way out but will come back and read your piece and the Lord more carefully.... I was trained in second wave poststructural feminism, and I am very very interested in the question of how the reception of poststructuralism in the US caused such a massive third wave clusterfuck.
<<I am very very interested in the question of how the reception of poststructuralism in the US caused such a massive third wave clusterfuck.>>
Aren't we all? (Hausman sort of gets at it . . . and I was put onto her by Toril Moi . . . I tend to think there was a phenomenological infiltration [the old Marxist in me] of neoliberal economics, structural atomization, transhumanism, def the f*kin digisphere . . . idk, many streams feed the river) My friend Tina Beatty [check her out] would also qualify methinks as a second-wave PS, tho she's also a renegade Catholic like me (helluva Venn diagram we're creating here).
Very grateful to have stumbled onto your site. And for the thoughtful reply. Any errors are my own, as I am not an academic, so my "self" education (an oxymoron if ever . . .) has great gaping faults running across it.
Not quite on the same topic, but what do you think of Alex Byrne's Trouble with Gender?
Mom, Dad & my born female friend who died from gynecological cancer @ 37 convinced me not to get involved in gender.
"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of [gender and gender identity]. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of [Judith Butler].”
Apologies to Thomas Jefferson.
Though feminists in general bear a great deal of responsibility for that rather sad state of affairs themselves.