Judith Butler interview

I imagine it might come up at the cringey weekly staff meeting they apparently have at Guardian HQ.

This is what happens when you let "journalist activists" to write for your publication. Facts that don't fit into the approved ideological framework have to be suppressed.

I wonder if word of this is getting round the actual journalists at The Guardian?

In the Vice interview:

“Habitual bigots online are going to do their thing, and usually respond to pieces without even reading them,” Gleeson wrote in a statement sent to Motherboard.

However, Gleeson thinks Butler’s response can be switched to answer a question that she hadn’t seen at the time.

If the Guardian feel unable to include a brief factual note acknowledging recent developments they are in trouble.

Whether or not we like what Butler said, it’s an interview not a news story or Guardian editorial, so there was no reason not to publish it. The Guardian’s key problem is that they are being prevented from reporting news.

@voidifremoved
Replying to

@jessesingal

What I love about this is the idea that Butler's answers are independent of the questions. Which is true, but hilarious

[quote IvyTwines2]@BraveBananaBadge the Wikipedia page on Butler is similarly vague: reading the section on The Guardian, it's now an "unknown individual with a penis"![/quote]
It's so very sinister now. It's not 'being kind', it's turning a blind eye.

@BraveBananaBadge the Wikipedia page on Butler is similarly vague: reading the section on The Guardian, it's now an "unknown individual with a penis"!

So it seems the interviewer wanted to keep the answer but change the question(!)

I can’t decide if this solution is very on brand (queering the concept of an interview) or just the kind of thing you could imagine Country Life doing if publishing an interview with Prince Charles.

This still doesn't really make sense.

More details in that Jesse Singal thread, via Jezebel.

As much as it pains me to click on anything from Vice, their story includes a statement from the Guardian that confirms the 'developments' in question were around Wi Spa (tried to c&p but it didn't work).

What the 'developments' specifically were and the difference they made to what was published and then pulled, however, they don't have the stones to elaborate.

Vice further obfuscates things, like the Graun before it, by describing the charges relating to the perp of the Wi Spa incident without any gendered terms whatsoever. Ignoring this - because who the feck are they fooling by pretending not to see what's going on, or that it doesn't matter - is an absolute disgrace.

Whoever would be happy just to know a 'person' has been charged over this? Who would be so brain dead as not to follow up the implications of this and think about what it really means? It really is Orwellian.

Vice claims the cut was made to the Guardian piece in the face of reader complaints, which again gives them the excuse to blame t*s. This still doesn't really make sense. Why did the Guardian not stand by their writer and/ or how did it get published in the first place? They are far from off the hook.

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

This quote really doesn’t inspire confidence.

Gender Trouble was written in 1990, not 1880 or 1952.

The phrase ‘non binary’ might not have existed, but gender non conformity certainly did.

So it seems the interviewer wanted to keep the answer but change the question(!)

The Guardian wanted a correction, but the interviewer refused to write one.

So it ended up deleted.

Not sure why the Guardian can't do its own correction though in that situation? Maybe figured it was too much effort. If the author doesn't care enough, just drop it.

twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1435674221586305027

newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody

I don’t think the problem is her overly technical use of language.

Her use of ‘TERF’, suggests the opposite - lack of precision. She isn’t saying anything you couldn’t find on Twitter. The overall impression is of a deep lack of intellectual curiosity.

Vice talk to the trans interviewer Jules Gleeson, including the question Gleeson proposed to substitute for the Wi Spa one (about Heritage Foundation/Texas abortion law), and a response to the Vice journalist from the Guardian:

www.vice.com/en/article/7kv3m4/why-the-guardian-censored-judith-butler-on-terfs

Great article by Jane Claire Jones about Enby Putin's latest offereing

janeclarejones.com/2021/09/07/smashing-the-binary-a-dissection-of-sex-denial/

‘That's one way you can use a metaphor. It can also be used to add richness and layers to a description of something, to add greater understanding or nuance.’

But that’s not the type of metaphor we are discussing here.

And I am not asking Judith Butler, or indeed anyone on this thread, to accurately describe the complexity of social and economic relationships as they really are.

I am asking them to simply describe the terms of their model or metaphor, in much the same way someone can very quickly and easily explain terms like habitat or electron shell.

And if you can’t do that then you are creating models and terms for something other than the usual disciplinary reason of creating simplified versions of reality.

It's not like science never has more than one model to describe the same thing.

‘The point isn't the metaphor, it's the thing the metaphor represents, which we think is in some sense real. Why not just describe it directly? We can't, of course, is the reason, and that's just talking about observed material reality, or mathematical ideas.

In philosophy it's quite common to have more than one working model, with it's own language, and quite a lot of the discourse is between models.’

We don’t describe it directly because it is complex and difficult to understand.

That’s the point of using metaphors. We take something very complex and make it simpler.

That is the point - technical language including metaphors is supposed to take things which are difficult to understand and make it simpler and more comprehensible.

Cross-Threading:

....The Young Ones, co-written by Catherine Mayer's sister.

I wish they'd repeat The Young Ones. By the time at was at university, the association of cries of 'fascist' with Rik did make us pause a little before throwing the word around.

In philosophy it's quite common to have more than one working model, with it's own language, and quite a lot of the discourse is between models.

The most enthusiastic advocates of Butler's work I know are men. Which tells you everything you need to know really.

And thanks for the link to that essay. It was a good read