Judith Butler in The Guardian

It's interesting how she claims everything good for her side and everything bad for ours with no basis. Of course their side understands that there is such a thing as biology, it just doesn't mean anything. Of course we are the ones that want to force people into roles on the basis of their--wait a minute, the word "gender" is literally that, yet she wants to make it a word that mystically means something very abstract and holy, as if gender did not literally mean "masculine" and "feminine" rather than "man" and "woman."

Just seen this. I've had to stop half way through the article.

What the actual fuck am I reading? It's insane.

She's still around, and thinks Butler is a "slick, super-careerist Foucault-flunky".

Thanks! Yep, that sounds like Camille Paglia, all right.

shes à fucking hack to the start and end of it we are rewarding her mediocrity (generous) with a 100 post thread on here.
please let this person die in obscurity as they deserve.

It's classic narcissism isn't it?

Given that JB has written about Arendt and Eichmann in the past, it feels very odd that she is not seeing the linguistic similarities for herself

I always like to think the best of people so (until proven wrong) I shall assume she's a callous grifter who knows exactly what she's doing and doesn't believe a world of the drivel she spouts. The alternative is much worse.

Butler is providing justification so her followers can shout Nazi at anyone who disagrees. It needs to be fancily phased to fool the stupid but simple enough that bits can be repeated on twitter. Anything more is inefficient.

In Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem , she describes Adolf Eichmann as a pseudo-intellectual who used clichés and platitudes as sufficient explanation and justification of his actions. Among her interrogation of what this means for philosophy, she outlines that these pre-packaged phrases are offered up as a simulacrum of thought and indicate thoughtlessness as an absence of thought. Arendt wrote:

"When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by their existence."

www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContAssy.htm

Given that JB has written about Arendt and Eichmann in the past, it feels very odd that she is not seeing the linguistic similarities for herself nor recognising just who it is who is nudging society towards mumbling clichés as a sufficient explanation and justification of authoritarianism.

I ignore Butlers work when it’s on my reading list at uni these days. I know it’s wrong and I should take on board a variety of viewpoints, but really life is to short. I never have a bloody clue what she’s going on about. And it sounds like she doesn’t either, which is reassuring.

We look at her facile, incompetent work and are unpersuaded and unimpressed. But she's not trying to persuade us. She is proselytising her Gender gospel to as many as will gullibly gulp down her mystical revelations.

I think there is a lot of truth to that. The simplistic, inconsistent arguments are a feature, not a bug. She doesn't need or want to persuade people by logic. Being able to debate her ideas constructively might attract the wrong sort of supporter.

Butler is providing justification so her followers can shout Nazi at anyone who disagrees. It needs to be fancily phased to fool the stupid but simple enough that bits can be repeated on twitter. Anything more is inefficient.

In Germany and throughout eastern Europe “genderism” is likened to “communism” or to “totalitarianism”.

Strange that the area of Europe most recently subject to totalitarian communism should see Butler's ideology as so similar. Almost as if they remember how it starts.

Goodness me.

That's a very long way to go to say, "I have no idea how babies are made or how it's relevant to how women* are and have been treated by societies around the world."

*(the female kind, for the avoidance of any manufactured doubt)

Do I need to now this has been said?

I got half way through. She's telling someone (who?) what "they" believe and yet she doesn't know what "they" believe. She just wants the someone to read the things that she thinks are bad are believed by bad people.

I met an academic that had worked in Hungary who told me the university at the centre of the ban had become a magnet for the most extreme gender ideological teaching possible with some very questionable people involved. It was ordinary people whose kids were affected that lobbied the government to do something.

No "fash" involved.

I think Butler is trying to fill the gap left by Camille Paglia. Does anyone else remember her?

Butler's academic career was forged at a time when their were basically two sides to the debate: those who were in favour of greater freedom of gender and sexual expression and thus who were favour in traditional sex roles. My impression is that she still simply doesn't recognise that things have moved on. Hence why she clearly doesn't understand the GC argument and can only conceptualise it is a manifestation of the trad conservative view of sex and gender.

No, we don't think. Her deliberate obfuscatory misrepresentation ensures that.

You, on the other foot , @9toenails, are an absolute delight. I've just read that perfect analysis three times and I'm still laughing my truncated socks off ten minutes later...!

With no transcendental signified around to help out, and only a Lacanian transcendental signifier () to play with, you will always already be both more and less likely.

This can be clarified, of course, once we avail ourselves of Butler's critique of Lacan's heteronormative identification of the transcendental signifier with our old friend 'P' ... which may or not (or both) find itself barred from a 'V' in (and/or out of) the domain of corporeal legibility.

I'm confused - are you more or less likely to get pregnant if you have PIV sex, but only understand the penis through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility???

I’m confused too, but I’m almost certain the answer to that is “more,” assuming pregnancy is not the desired outcome.

I'm confused - are you more or less likely to get pregnant if you have PIV sex, but only understand the penis through reference to what is barred from the signifier within the domain of corporeal legibility???

They agree that people can't change sex, which is a bit like saying the earth isn't flat, and they support the existence of single sex spaces, but then so do the Taliban. They definitely aren't suggesting women need them for consciousness raising, or to escape from abuse. (See also Putin). They are quite comfortable with the idea that men and women should conform to narrow expectations of masculinity and femininity.

Gender criticism is a specific feminist analysis, which Judith Butler apparently ignores, and American right wing groups deny.

[quote aliasundercover]@9toenails

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the conceptual penis hoax

We argued that climate change is “conceptually” caused by penises

Brilliant.[/quote]
You are more than welcome.

To be clear, and in fairness to Butler, we should also note that since it is above all a psychoanalytic argument that what is exteriorized or performed can only be understood through reference to what is barred from the signifier and from the domain of corporeal legibility, it follows, once the gap entailed by lack of any transcendental isomorphic signified is discursively filled, that climate change – trivially – is always already equally vulval , at least with regard to its physical performative essence.

How this relates to the causal nexus is, of course, and must remain, moot. But it may be indicative. Do we think?

We look at her facile, incompetent work and are unpersuaded and unimpressed. But she's not trying to persuade us. She is proselytising her Gender gospel to as many as will gullibly gulp down her mystical revelations.

I strongly agree.

Vaclav Havel, 1978 has some prescient observations about mantras and the unthinking adoption of an ideology and the true cost of the absolution that it confers.

In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. To wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish. Of course, one pays dearly for this low-rent home: the price is abdication of one’ s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.

hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23

Butler brings comfort and peace of mind to her communities and they idolise her for it because many of them don't understand the personal cost that Havel outlines.