Judith Butler interview

From September 2020.

www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organised by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?

I'm always disappointed by the faux naif affection that the fact that a group of people turn up at an event means that they're allies or there's a formal agreement in place.

I don't know if the US has a comparable experience to the fact that many demonstrations in the UK have a cadre of SWP members turn up. These are always photographed in such a way as to imply it was an SWP-organised demo which is an interesting framing for sometimes as few as 6 people who have no association at all with the organisers.

It's similar to the same demonisation of football fans back in the days when there were small numbers of people who used to orchestrate fights. It doesn't change the reality that the overwhelming majority of the attendees were genuine football fans and the fights were a sideshow that attracted a disproportionate amount of publicity.

I can only assume that interview was conducted before the revelation that the Wii spa person was a sex offender - the link is to the July article, not the recent one. And no one at the Guardian bothered to check, of course. Once you know that, Butler begins to look even more foolish than she did already.

I think that this extreme smearing of opponents - calling people fascists is plain silly - is an indication that she knows her side is losing. She's not going to engage with our arguments so she calls us names. She - and the Guardian - are running scared.

It's quite evident from the last interview she gave that she had not paid any attention to the key debates.

It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organised by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?

'It is very appalling and sometimes quite frightening to see how trans-exclusionary feminists have allied with rightwing attacks on gender. The anti-gender ideology movement is not opposing a specific account of gender, but seeking to eradicate “gender” as a concept or discourse, a field of study, an approach to social power. Sometimes they claim that “sex” alone has scientific standing, but other times they appeal to divine mandates for masculine domination and difference. They don’t seem to mind contradicting themselves.

The Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers have also rejected the important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling) in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism. So they will not be part of the coalition that seeks to fight the anti-gender movement. The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. 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.

The anti-gender movement circulates a spectre of “gender” as a force of destruction, but they never actually read any works in gender studies. 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. As important as it is, however, to make complex concepts available to a popular audience, it is equally important to encourage intellectual inquiry as part of public life. Unfortunately, we are living in anti-intellectual times, and neo-fascism is becoming more normalized.'

I had a wry smile at the paragraph on pronouns where she seems (but as we know, things are rarely as they seem in J-Land, or they may be, but also not) to suggest that pronouns are given to you by people who are speaking about you, not something that you claim for yourself.

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.

Exactly! Me too! I thought she was one of the key people who argued that gender was a construction and a performance.

GC feminists see the performative nature of gender as indicating its inauthenticity as a concept, and therefore they want to deconstruct gender for the purposes of getting rid of it (or at least stripping it of social significance).

Queer theorists like Butler see gender perfromance as an expression of idenitity, 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 perfrom it.

Source- I have a PhD in medical sociology. I loved her as an undergrad and now think she's a hack

Well that was a heap of shite. Only to be expected from the Guardian really - I'm actually quite sad that the paper I loved reading has sunk to such low standards of writing and critical though.

*The anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement, insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained, and that gender is a destructive fiction, taking down both “man” and “civilization” and “God”. Anti-gender politics have been bolstered by the Vatican and the more conservative evangelical and apostolic churches on several continents, but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.

This movement is at once anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, opposing both reproductive freedom and trans rights. It seeks to censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education – a topic so important for young people to discuss. And to reverse major legal and legislative successes for sexual freedom, gender equality and laws against gender discrimination and sexual violence*

???????

She does thing gender is a social construction...well kind of, she says it's performative meaning it 'produces what it names'. But, in her later work-bodies that matter- she goes on to say that sex (or 'the sexed body') is also a social construct because '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.

Infuriating!

I [...] have clearly misunderstood aspects of her work.

... as have most of us. Speaking as the person who wrote several essays dealing with her work and scored quite excellent marks for it, too. I, literally, tend to operate under the assumption that obfuscation of meaning is really the essence of her entire shtick. (And I'm certainly not an anti-intellectual; I even quite enjoy me some ambiguity in philosophy, generally speaking.)

In this sense, although I disagree, I actually find it quite refreshing that this time I think I at least know what she's saying after reading it once. Losing your momentum there, Judy!

That was to the OP about JBs being influential, not HJ (whos interlect is not a joke)

yeah, but she is also a joke, so...

Never mind Butler - nicely timed that Helen Joyce has a review of Trans in no less an august publication than the New York Times !

Despite no US publishers being willing to weather the storm that they'd face if they published Joyce's book, there's sufficient demand that the UK version is being sent there.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4342817-New-York-Times-Reviews-Helen-Joyces-Trans

She should stop chewing on a thesaurus.

*she'd ... sorry, phone, work, typos

No idea why anyone would have assumed she's be gender critical, mind. She's one of the core foundational pillars of queer theory.

Did she swallow the 'little book of intersectionality' like Manny did with the 'little book of calms' in that episode of Black Books.

ahahahaha, JB's not like the other girls.....

yawn

She really seems to be upping the ante:

"The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times."

Yup, gender-critical feminism is fascism. That is followed by:

"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."

That sentence is nuts. "So" seems to imply that it logically follows on from the previous sentence, but as the previous sentence is an outright lie, with no supporting evidence, then it can't lead to any reasonable conclusion. The idea that gender-critical feminists - who in the UK are mostly socialists - support fascism and racism is both offensive and ridiculous. The phrase "carceral violence" is just thrown in there - what does it mean? Putting people in prison? Physical assaults on prisoners?

The suggestion that "femicide", which explicitly refers to the killing of women, should include "genderqueer" people is ludicrous and a distortion of language.

She's a nasty piece of work. And not nearly as clever as she thinks she is.

Ah! Maybe she is all things to everyone!

Many words, little meaning etc.

MoP, she's a postmodernist and poststructuralist, so - from her perspective - those are not contradictory statements.

The (implicit) assumption you're missing is that "constructed" can (and sometimes does) boil down to "more real" or "preferable" in this world view.

And, no, I'm not a JB fan. Hate her with a raging passion, in fact (nothing to do with gender stuff, everything to do with the insufferable writing style - bane of my undergrad).