Judith Butler in The New Statesman

One of the reasons I admire Andrea Dworkin so much is her clear plain language.
I disagree with much of JB's comments. Analysis is necessary and useful, to understand how the opposition use tactics. Its not blaming to state the facts of how we got here.
I think JB fails to realise she is an integral part of the restoration project. Restoration happens after society has been broken down and dismantled. Or 'queered' as she calls it.

Remembering that Nussbaum was writing this all the way back in 1999 when I myself was at university:

In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

Perfectly expressed.

the attacks on women's ability to control their fertility,

ooooo... WOMEN! So we do exist, then,

@GreyCouncil
Judith Butler is the "feminist". She is not being attacked. I criticise her for her obtuse writing style, her self-centred lack of care or interest in the everyday problems of ordinary women and her contempt for her sex. Not for her pro-choice stance.
I support policies and approaches which respect and protect women and girls. I judge ideas, policies etc on their merits, not on who has proposed them. That would be silly.

I think they might be BFF. I feel a bromance is in the air,

This, for example, is bollocks. As a pp said, it's men's desire to control our reproductive systems that is at the root of our oppression.

Exactly, and the patriarchal system built up around that since civilisation began, which yes does involve a lot of women working for it. That doesn't mean it isn't men who primarily benefit.

theclangersarecoming was criticising, quite rightly, the ridiculous spraying of the word "Fascism/Fascists" at just about everything.

I think I might have posted this at least twice before and asked for your thoughts, seeing as you claim to be "antifascist"

Apparently , sitting outside a cafe, quietly minding one's own business is a fascist act. The real "Fascists" here are the bunch of braying, violent, Antifa thugs.

Oh get away with the scare quotes around feminists.

I disagree with Butler because I think she's wrong about a lot of things.

"When some feminists now make claims like, “the patriarchal oppression of women is heavily rooted in our reproductive systems”, it can sound like those reproductive systems are the cause of the oppression. That is muddled thinking, wrong, and does not advance feminist aims."

This, for example, is bollocks. As a pp said, it's men's desire to control our reproductive systems that is at the root of our oppression.

You appear to need some serious reading comprehension lessons because that is not what I wrote at all.

It's a rather bizarre extrapolation that because you said there were actual examples of fascism going on you should accept without question anything this poster and grifters like Judith Butler thinks is "fascism", such women having single sex spaces for their safety, privacy and dignity, and wanting policy to consider our specific needs.

Fascism is growing throughout the world- Orbán, Bannon, the policies of the GOP, the Conservative Party deporting black people, the attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, the attacks on women's ability to control their fertility, the limitations on the rights to vote both here and in the US,

That's what Butler is referring too. This appears to be irrelevant to many mumsnet posters who are happy to ally with extreme right wing forces if they get as exercised about toilets as you do.

Obfuscation and waffling, Judith Butler? Never!

Ah my mistake that was antifashbiscuit there! Have we discovered that Mishy and Antifash are the same poster, always obsessed by fake “fascism”?

You appear to need some serious reading comprehension lessons because that is not what I wrote at all.

But making up completely unfounded ideas of what you want to have been written rather than what was actually written is very much on brand for you, @MishyJDI

(Still waiting for those Girl Guiding cookies, eh…?)

Are you saying that you think that saying "People in the West pointing out that women’s bodies exist is not fascism" is the same as saying "because Russia invaded Ukraine that fascism can't exist elsewhere in the world"?

Struggling to see the logic here. Can you explain?

That explains a lot, thanks!

love to see people who claim to be feminists criticising someone on the basis of their appearance

You appeat to be trying to say that because Russia invaded Ukraine that fascism can't exist elsewhere in the world.

And you criticise Butler's logic.

All her stuff should be edited for length & clarity, or better still ignored completely.

Some wit on Twitter said Butler’ s profile picture makes her look like James Dean’s nan...😂

She’s always been a second-rate Hegelian imitator, with a tendency to intellectual fraud in areas she doesn’t really know about - eg the appropriation of Austin in Gender Trouble and Excitable Speech. What she comes out with today is directly opposed to her argument in those books in any case.

Her best book, Bodies That Matter, is only decent because it’s a passable imitation of Derrida. None of her recent work has any real philosophical coherence. In fact all of her work is patchy - and I’ve read it all.

The idea that she’s a forward thinker is only for dolts and the uninformed. Her work is a backward-looking pseudo-Hegelian pastiche for the most part, and recently she had completely lost the plot even of that.

Fascism? It’s the height of poor taste to trade in hyperbolic accusations of fascism, especially at the current time when we can see genuine twentieth century style totalitarianism at work in Russia’s bombing and shelling citizens of a democratic country in Ukraine. Jackboots and tanks are fascism. People in the West pointing out that women’s bodies exist is not fascism.

Judith Butler is a charlatan

Yes, exactly this. Butler sets up a weirdly simplistic strawman because she hasn't properly engaged with what GC feminists are saying - that it's those who assign the wrong meaning to women's bodies who are the issue - and unfortunately how she represents us will be taken as fact. I wonder if she has properly read Toril Moi who explains the GC position (without calling it GC, given she was writing over 20 years ago) very clearly in her book What Is a Woman.
Butler is in some ways an outstanding thinker but as a public intellectual she is a disappointment.

Judith Butler is a brilliant and insightful thinker who makes some very important points about the "restoration project" through which patriarchy to be restored, "protected against its dismantling, but white supremacy, and exclusively heterosexual marriage."

Unsurprising to see the mumsnet posse who knowingly or otherwise have been at the forefront of that campaign brag about their inability to even read an interview with Butler.

I'm so pleased that you've recognised the endgame of your usual perspective on these boards. It gives me hope for the posters who similarly share your typical viewpoints.

There is a golden bridge when you're ready to take it.