If you’re unacquainted with Judith Butler, you’re in for a real treat. Judith Butler “is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.” If you don’t agree with her ideas about gender, you are a fascist.
Her latest pronoun of choice is they, but I will refer to her as she because (1.) she is a single, and not plural, unit and (2.) I just feel like it. She is a professor at Berkeley and has received 14 honorary degrees. In other words, she is a big deal. According to many, she is among the most influential intellectuals alive today.
Let’s start with this: In her book Gender Trouble, Butler claims that biological sex, like gender, is socially constructed, with its physical manifestations mattering only to the degree society assigns them meaning. Well, no. I would say nice try, but no. Gender critical feminists (i.e. feminists who aren’t on board with her ideas) come in for some of her most scathing attacks. They are the victims of “phantasmatic” anxieties and also are big stupid liars whom she compares to Richard Nixon, of all people.
Personally, I don’t give a shit about gender, or not enough of a shit to ponder its meaning. I came across Butler in a critique of her assertion that the events of Oct. 7 constitute “resistance.” Reading her put forth this idea, I thought, “Who is this pretentious idiot?”
I was delighted to find that she had won first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature – a prize given to “the ugliest, most stylistically awful” sentence submitted by its readers . Here is her winning sentence:
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.
You have to love her, right? I mean, she gave us the concept of gender performativity!Wikipedia notes that
Butler also explores how gender can be understood not only as a performance, but also as a “constitutive constraint,” or constructed character. They ask how this conceptualization of an individual’s gender contributes to notions of bodily intelligibility, or comprehension, by other individuals. Butler continues to discuss bodily intelligibility by means of sex as a “materialized” entity, upon which cultural, collective ideals of gender can be built. From this angle, Butler interrogates value conscription upon various bodies as determined theories and practices of heterosexual predominance.
Whatever. I suggest that you don’t waste your brain cells trying to decipher this gibberish, just be aware that you’re not allowed to object to any of it. If you’re a woman (a human born with a reproductive system that produces eggs) or a non-man, as some gender identity theorists might say, you are a TERF for taking issue with Judith Butler. If you’re a man, I don’t know what happens. Probably you’re just a homophobic colonialist defender of the patriarchy.
Please do your own research on Judith Butler, I promise you it is more fun and rewarding than anything you can do online besides getting into arguments on Instagram. Also, note that I didn’t title this “Judith Butler: What a fucking cunt!™” She’s more of an irritant, albeit a uniquely flagrant one. And I realize she is low-hanging fruit, but try to resist taking a whack at her!
I have just finished reading an article in Canada’s national newspaper on the subject of Gender fluidity and Transgendered people. The author is quoted as saying that this affects 1 percent of the population. Why so much press when it affects a minuscule part of the population? I am also tired of this discussion. As JK Rowling said ‘a woman is someone who menstrates. However, she had to profusely apologize to the transgender population and ‘got cancelled’.
I wonder if she would enjoy Dr. Murphy’s big baby farm….
I once had a student who was one of her acolytes–like, from afar. This student didn’t go to Berkeley. It was a fiction-writing workshop, and one of this student’s characters was really into reading Judith Butler. I didn’t know who Judith Butler was and assumed she was a romance writer based on the character’s other attributes. The student was upset and said, “She’s the most important cultural critic alive!” I said, “Actually, Sister Wolf is the most important cultural critic alive.” Consternation washed over the student’s face. I went home that night and read some Judith Butler. I returned to class the following week and said to the student, “I kind of think Judith Butler is a romance writer.”
P.S. I also think it’s interesting that a vanguard like Judith Butler would adopt the ‘they’ pronoun so late in the game–like a middle-schooler from Indianapolis who wears nail polish and dyes his hair blue. She should have adopted ‘they’ decades ago.
Hillary Wright – I think the reason it’s such a flashpoint is because to progressives, all that matters is gender identity and colonialism. They both involve oppression. Make it go away!!!
Alison – HAhahahahahahahaha!
Marky – Thank you for setting this student straight. I agree about the timing of Butler’s “they.” There should be a deadline. Also! I just read that some They’s don’t want a penis or vag, but just “smooth skin.”
Good God!
I’m too dumb to know how to respond in any way that would make sense, or add one jot or tittle to the what I suppose is discussion, or argument, or “any-thing-you-can-obfuscate, I-can-obfuscate-more-ostentatiously” girlyrama that’s going on there.
But! I was really pulled in by that ugly, stylistically awful, migraine-inducing spew of prize-winning bung-chowder sentence-words that had me running to all my “How to Write” books and thesauruses, knowing that I might not be able to equal its unfathomable smartypantsness, but I could give them a run for their ugliness and baroquely pretentious pretension. As a former female menstruator woman, I feel like I have to try.
I’m working on it!
Yes, the menstruating woman thing took me aback as well. The whole subject is garbage. There are two sexes and no ideology can change reality. In my humble opinion.
Regarding your response to Bevitron, stating that there are 2 sexes: I agree with you, not that there’s anything to “agree” with. That includes my feelings about intersex individuals, who are neither one nor the other, even at the chromosomal level. I’m very distantly related to a sociologist (this is in Canada) who is prominent in the field of intersex studies and activism (I also discovered to my dismay that I’m not supposed to have liked Middlesex, although I don’t hear anyone raising a hue & cry about Orlando).
For me the problem isn’t the definition of male or female (or let’s say, the determination), but our collective attitude towards it. Our wretched tribalism causes us to get up in everyone else’s business, eg. the clitorectomy performed on this relative as an infant to presumably save the parents’ future difficulty in dealing with a confused and troubled offspring. Well, welcome to the world.
Alison – No one should have a clitorectomy! They banned it in Gambia abut recently repealed the ban.
I think it;s stupid to argue with biology. There are two sexes, and the rest is cosplay.
It is not stupid, instead it is ignorant to just deny, what every biologist can confirm, there are way more than just two easypeasy dichotome sexes. Instead it is more than a individual hormonal scale with a wide range and there are “men” with more estrogen than “women” and vice versa with testesterone, causing a lot of effects. Why is it so hard to acknowledge? Why not just be happy, you feel fine with your biological sex and support others who do not?
Luzie – I’m sorry but it is science. There are two sexes; there are male gonads and female gonads, ie. primary sex organs. Females have ovaries and men have testes. Hormone levels can vary, but that doesn’t change one’s sex. It’s just reality and wishing or “feeling” can’t change that.
The major takeaway from this post is that you don’t actually understand Bulter’s position. That tracks with your ignorant reference to Al Aqsa Flood and your ideological understanding of the world.
As an aside, singular “they” is older than singular “you.” It’s literally used in the Bible.
Mike – Not going to argue with a jew-hater! Thanks for weighing in though.
I’m months late to the party, but if Luzie ever comes back, they can defend this ridiculous othering of males and females with differences of sex development on behalf of males and females with differences of gender identity. Exactly why would we argue a man with outlier levels of estrogen is less of a man, when it’s the reason men who abuse steroids grow tits because aromatase converts excess testosterone into estrogen? I have a medical condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, basically it’s like PCOS and my body produces too many androgens because it doesn’t produce enough cortisol. Those with the classical form have to supplement with corticosteroids, and males especially in youth have a much harder time with it. Oh dear, that’s a problem, right? There are cases where girls with CAH are masculinized enough at birth where a doc would overlook labial fusion and assign her male based on abnormal clitoral length, but even having to deal with stocky builds and chin pubes, we’re female. If we were males with CAH, the salt-wasting side effect is a lot more dangerous and there’s a different medical protocol. But is that even possible in Judith Butler’s world, where there’s no male or female?
There are gender transgressive individuals who say someone’s gender is whatever they identify as, and most of us are fine with that until they argue that people with intersex conditions are not what we’ve been identified as. My condition is one of the few that occurs in both males and females. It’s an inconvenient truth that intersex disorders are sexed. You don’t get women with Klinefelter’s syndrome. They want to believe just like there are trans women who’ve taken hormones and makeup lessons long enough to pass, there are whole ass men out there with fully formed uteri and XX chromosomes, as if what circumstances masculinized them allowed them to simultaneously develop a healthy female reproductive system somehow and there are no health consequences to having these mismatches. The gender brigade sometimes takes a break from arguing with us being one sex with an intersex disorder makes us a weird third or eighth sex, like birds or fish, always something non-mammalian, to argue with us our conditions aren’t disorders. They never listen to us. Not all of our symptoms require intervention, like all the cosmetic surgeries on otherwise healthy but abnormal looking genitals, but we’re still disordered for being a man with too much estrogen or a woman with more testosterone than a man (although that man probably has a condition too if his testosterone is that low).
Judith Butler not only came to neopronouns too late but also to the defense of trans people much later than her other academic jo’s like Judith, now Jack, Halberstam. And yet they don’t see through the laziness any more than the deceit.
Lara – Thanks for your enlightening comment. Have you read about that professor who got in trouble for suggesting to her class that there are two sexes? She was ordered to apologize and retract her statement.
No, but it isn’t surprising. The gender advocates eventually tired of hearing “there are only two sexes so there are only two genders” by saying both are a spectrum. Guess they got tired of saying “sex and gender are different”. It’s lead a lot of people with intersex conditions to lose a lot of our empathy for them when they push misinformation about our medical situations and human biology and sexual development to benefit themselves as what we understand is a sociocultural view of gender.
There’s an old essay you might appreciate from someone who considers them both, “Dangerous Intersections” by Raven Kaldera if the link doesn’t go through.
https://www.ravenkaldera.org/archive/gender/intersection/dangerous-intersections.html