Judith Butler defends Genderism in New Statesman, and Jane Clare Jones critiques it

What pretentious nonsensical word salad.

Emperor's New Clothes.

Butler's main trick is to produce such tortured prose so thick with jargon that people can't understand what she is even trying to say. They then mistakenly assume that it must be something so profound that they are just too stupid to understand it. She deliberately writes to obscure and confuse.

I see she has made some effort to write in plain English for this piece (it is honestly quite clear by her standards) and it will therefore be obvious to a lot more people that it is complete bollocks.

Ha. Utterly hilarious that the Pope would be the leader of the GC movement. He's having trouble shepherding the people that actually believe the religion, he'll have a job leading the atheist radical feminists too.

On a related note, DP found a copy of Butler's "Gender Trouble" in a public rubbish bin last week! Made me chuckle.

I too assumed Butler must have some level of intellectual nuance. At uni others must have pretended to understand this nonsense in order to be cool/get onto PhD programs. (I thought I must be either too thick or too innately modernist to comprehend the reasoning).

On the plus side, how many people who aren't already confirmed genderists will be won over by that kind of waffly incoherent nonsense? It mostly seems to work on people who desperately want to think of themselves as clever but who fear that they're not and therefore assume that if it doesn't make sense it's their fault.

(It's not your fault, the reason it doesn't make sense to you is because it's nonsense.)

Dear God. I always rather assumed that (given her prominence and esteem) Butler would be insightful and able to form a strong argument. I imagined that there must be good reasons, with some important truth amongst the mistakes, why her arguments were so widely accepted.

I was so wrong. It's the same drivel as we always hear and she doesn't even argue it very well.

How did this nonsense, with no actual evidence to back it up, rise to challenge basic facts of our material reality, with which everyone is familiar?

Even the article's heading is a command...

As Jane says, Butler knows full well that most of the opposition is coming from feminist women, not from the Pope, but admitting that would undermine the narrative and force her to confront the fact that she's actively engaged in the suppression of other women's voices, so hey ho, Pope it is.

Thanks JCJ for doing this. Judith Butler makes my brain hurt.

I've never listened to anything a pope has said. Evangelism just makes me laugh. I'm really happy I managed to get a timely reasonable cost termination many years ago and I'm a member of the Labour Party.

Humans are two sexes, male and female, it's as simple as that.

Butler et al are bought and paid for aren't they? Dishonesty for cash. I suppose it is a human failing either sex can succumb to but it is as laughable as evangelism and the Vatican bank.

It's just so befuddling isn't it - to reach her position Butler has to pretend that opposition to 'genderism' comes mainly from the Pope and that sex has absolutely nothing to do with women's oppression.

She's a fucking knob head. JCJ is a bloody shero for wading through that soup

Bloody hell, what a mish mash of absolute rubbish. It’s just so disengenuous and poorly thought out, apart from just being WRONG.