Judith Butler interview

It's just more luxury beliefs from the great and the good of the identitarian Left, trumpeted loudly and performatively as one would expect from those with a narc bent to their personalities.

Looking down on the lessers and throwing everyone/everything that they don't like into the "basket of deplorables", making sure all the while that everyone notices while they do it.

As I said, fuck off Judy you're tiresome.

I've been thinking about this for a little while anyway, but thought I might take it here - after seeing what Butler had to say about us 'never reading any gender studies'.

We should all start systematically reading gender studies, and start 'listening to trans women'! See exactly what the best and brightest of them have to say, so we can refute it exactly as it's written and argue on their level. We need to know the enemy! Every GC feminist should start getting very familiar with the foundational arguments and literature of contemporary trans ideology.

I'm going through Serano's Whipping Girl right now (very important book, whose arguments are constantly reused online) and seeing so much that's just ridiculously easy to refute. Also reading Andrea Long Chu's Females with a friend. Is there any scope for starting a thread on this forum where we can read, pick apart and discuss notable books by the opposition?

This is why we'll probably win tbh - they don't read books we write, but we read books that they write. Even though their ideology falls apart in a long-form book format.

Queer theorists like Butler see gender perfromance as an expression of idenitity

I think you need to be careful saying this, this isn't quite right. Butler doesn't say that gender is a performance but rather is 'performative'. What this means is that there are a series of culturally informed behaviours and acts that, from a very young age we learn and then enact (e.g. ways of walking or speaking that are stereotypically 'female' or 'male')....it is these repetitive acts, which everyone is engaged in, that themselves produce the 'illusion' of two stable genders. In other words the culturally learned gendered behaviours constitute, rather than express, any apparently stable gender identity.

Where she gets more into performance is when she talks about things like drag- she says drag- which is an overexagerated and self conscious performance of gender- reveals the illusion of gender and, through that, can subvert rigid gender binaries

All bullshit of course but worth getting the finer details ironed out for engaging in arguments about her

Talks about forming a coaltion of 'the poor, the precarious, the dispossessed, LGBTQI+ peoples, workers and all those subject to racism and colonial subjugation....'

This is how a lot of people on the left seem to see their struggle now: as banding together various marginal and minority groups against the establishment. Hence why they no longer have much truck with feminism unless its intersectional, because women are not considered marginalised (or not marginalised enough) to need support unless they also happen to belong to one or more other minority groups as well.

It is hard to get hold of a sensible description of Queer Theory as apparently it is by its nature indefinable, or something.....I did some of this stuff at uni (including JB) but would be grateful for any clarity you can bring to my muddled understanding.

And she's employed the very techniques that HC Andersen came up with in his cautionary tale: "Quick and fearful conclusions take the place of considered judgments. Yes, some work on gender is difficult and not everyone can read it, so we have to do better in reaching a broader public."

i.e. if you don't agree with me, you're thick.

Good work Judy. You're just as much of a con artist as those two blokes who flogged their invisible coat to an intellectually vain but stupid emperor.

When I wrote Gender Trouble, there was no category for “nonbinary” – but now I don’t see how I cannot be in that category.

When I dribbled impenetrable cobblers into book form before, I missed a fucking trick by not coining 'non-binary' didn't it? Never mind, I am still the grateful recipient of adulatory hagiographies from all these pricks, and since 'non-binary' seems to be top of the apex right now, I think I will be having some of that, thenkyewverymuch.

Butler doesn't believe words have meanings, I understand. She uses "fascism" to mean, basically, "Satanic". Something of and to do with "the enemy". Which is probably why she sees no reason to actually present a case for anything she says. Actually, she seems to see no reason. Full stop. Period.

Unless of course there was endless careful and rigorous reasoning in the interview which the interviewer just chose to leave out.

JB has rescued ALL Afghan woman, she mearly needs to speak it in to creation, isen't that how it goes.
Being violently oppressed is how they perform their 'gender', dontchano.
Or maybe they need to change their 'attitude' to one less femm?
Who knows, its all bullshit.

During the general stike of 1926, when he heard that the strikers were playing football against the police, Stalin is alleged to have said that this was why there would never be a revolution in "England."

No Joe, it's because the overpriviliged bourgeois self-appointed vanguards are a bunch of useless tossers who couldn't change a light-bulb.

one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people."

A complete lie.

It's funny, isn't it. She says "So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence."

Just after that, a message from Glinner's substack arrived in my inbox, leading me to this:

Team of Radical Feminists Rescues Thirty Afghan Feminists

4w.pub/team-of-radical-feminists-rescue-afghans/

I wonder how many Afghans Judith Butler has rescued.

I think that is Tatchills argument.

Queer theorists like Butler see gender performance as an expression of identity, and therefore want to deconstruct traditional gender categories not to get rid of gender as a concept but to give people greater freedom in how they perform it.

I'm not an academic and even I can see how that can lead to sex offenders being free to 'perform' their identity in really dangerous ways. That doesn't even have to have anything to do with the trans debate, if a moderator is reading that.

'There is no matter outside of discourse' ...or in other words, the way we describe and classify things produces them and gives them ontological significance'

If everything is constructed, paedophila arguably isn't a problem. Isn't that wonderful, this huge societal problem solved in an instance. There is no tangible harm done, it's just something that's been constructed as harm. If you were raped as a child or teenager, no bother, learn to classify it in a different way. Don't impinge on the freedom of those whose sexual equality and freedom counts no them being able to attack children. You are a fascist supporting oppressors in the church if you say otherwise. Right?

"So the Terfs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people."

ODFO Judy, there's a dear.

None of it is backed up with anything, and most can be very easily disproved.

But, it is still bullshit.

The usual obfuscatory word salad, with some outrageous accusations of fascism thrown in for good measure. Why anyone takes this person seriously is mystery to me - Emperor's new clothes, I guess...

Talks about forming a coaltion of 'the poor, the precarious, the dispossessed, LGBTQI+ peoples, workers and all those subject to racism and colonial subjugation....'

Well good luck with that to you and all your friends in white Western academia.

And regards the actual kinetic physical fight against actual fascism, it could never have been won without the assistance of the arguably equally odious Stalin.

Cba to read it all- bull
Why the need to expand the category of women? Why not expand the category of men???
Somebody tell her Terf is a slur. Outrageous

In fact, there were a few little nuggets in there that out of less exalted mouths may have attracted shrieks of "transphooooooobia" from Bluehair Twitter.

Which is why it's surely quite important that she doesn't let her prose get any less impenetrable.

If the gender loons started actually reading her, they might decide she needs to be cancelled.

but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.

Quite funny. In other words unemployed "queers" don't want to go home to mum and dad but they can't extort a free ride from the state for being queer because of neoliberals.

Get a job.