I first read Butler as a postgrad student in the late 90s (Gender Trouble) and remember being outraged at her inability to account for the real, sex-based oppression of women, and at the immorality of the Foucault-inspired idea that power is neutral and merely negotiated in society, rather than being the cause of oppression for certain classes of people, notably women
...to my mind the word "peformance" here is misleading. To the lay mind, at least, 'performance' suggests something artificial, optional, 'put on'. Whereas IMO, most TRAs are behaving in an entitled way because they actually believe they are entitled, and because their culture facilitates this belief. Am I misinterpreting this?
Yes, there are massive issues with Foucault’s ideas of power, but some of the poststructuralist approaches to power have been useful. When we look at how power is negotiated among people and groups, rather than only consider power as something imposed on people from govermentsand military. We are living through an(other) example of how other groups claim power e.g. by shouting ‘terf’ and ‘bigot’ at any critical voices. We have just seen a person, Aimee Challenor, who did not have any power at all, being used to silence other groups, so this is power working in more complex ways than any “simple” top-down oppression. -although I absolute agree that neither Foucault nor Butler were/are likely to see anything wrong with it!
It has always been a problem with Butlers choice of words when she talked about performativity. She did absolutely not mean to allege that this was an artificial “act” being performed, with some kind of true or real actor behind the performance. What she was saying with performativity, was that this is all their is. And when we see people performing these claims to entitlement, that is whatand who they are. There isn’t anything superficial about it, when they claim they are entitled, as you say Kesstrel, they believe it. This obviously is my take on what we can use Butler for, I fully expect she would claim something else! Although sometimes you get the impression even Butler doesn’t know what Butlers position is.