Judith Butler in The New Statesman

Not so much dismantled as remodelled. I think they took it down, swapped out some word-meanings, and then gave it a respray and launched v2 in rainbow colours.

😂

Read another Judith butler article? Not whilst the option of driving six inch nails into my bollocks remains available.

I was thinking that I have no plans in the immediate future to become so drunk that I don't care.

Sums up my POV

@ScreamingMeMe
Thanks for posting the link to the Martha Nussbaum article. It's very interesting and readable. She explains Butler really clearly and lays bare the moral vacuity at the heart of her thinking. What Nussbaum calls (Butler's) quietism - her conviction about the impossibility and undesirability of changing or dismantling power structures - is deeply immoral and self-centred and nihilistic - and so conservative! Her popularity with progressives is yet another paradox. The focus on playing with words or parodying at a purely personal level also explains her appeal narcissists and why some people think dying their hair/growing their hair/altering their bodies are important political acts which society should applaud. Also I now understand the proliferation of so-called feminists and Twitter commentators who are too lazy or cowardly to work for the liberation of women in the real world or (as some of us have always suspected) don't think it's exciting or sexy or validating enough to bother with.
Very illuminating and informative read.

Not so much dismantled as remodelled. I think they took it down, swapped out some word-meanings, and then gave it a respray and launched v2 in rainbow colours.

Ta-daa! The patriarchy is dead - long live the patriarchy!

"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.

1st Rule of Misogyny, isn't it: Women are responsible for what men do.

Also 6th Rule:

Women who go around being female AT men by menstruating and breast feeding babies deserve punishment.

So predictable. So tragic.

When was the patriarchy dismantled? Did I miss it?

I concur, and I don't even have bollocks.

I think it's our soft, fluffy hair?

I wonder where they thinks it is rooted? Presumably clothing and make-up.

I'm not interested in anything Butler has to say.

She's an academic of literature and fiction. Her grasp of reality let alone contemporary social theories of how the world work is questionable. She certainly has no serious intellectual training in feminism.

Gender trouble, her book, pretty on silky shows how little previous feminist writing she has read. And in it she explicitly says she's not interested in women vs. Men as a Power dynamic - only in internal interpretations of gender roles (for which read sexist stereotypes). How anyone could have the arrogance to think her uninformed opinions are of any use to anyone else...

Exactly

That is muddled thinking, wrong, and does not advance feminist aims.

Pretty much describes most of what I have read by JB.

It's one of the very few comprehensible articles I've read by her

Anyway, this is just Butler trying to hitch queer theory on the back of the struggles of other groups, like they do with racism. Abortion is a political issue that affects women, and not only those women who can become pregnant, but all women, because its denial is a symptom of the systemic oppression of all women. It’s the same oppressive force that means people don’t want to hear us when we say no, those are our words and you can’t have them; no, we don’t want to be naked in front of males: no, we don’t want to share our sports with males. It’s about people thinking women are less fully realised as people than men.

It’s true that the female reproductive system doesn’t automatically produce male dominance. Society has to create the assumptions about the female reproductive role, and other aspects of being female, before the system we call ‘patriarchy’ is produced. But the female body is still, while the not the cause, the reality that enables that oppression: we’re not as strong as men, so they can (if enabled) dominate us.

Alexa, give example of 'forced teaming:

'We are gathered as targets by a well-coordinated Right, so perhaps we should decide how we want to gather, and for what aim'

So abortion rights for men as in they can insist on a woman having an abortion when she doesn’t want to as well insist on her having a baby when she doesn’t want to?

So what is the source of women’s oppression then, wearing dresses? But what about women who wear trousers do they never suffer male oppression?

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

Has anyone actually heard feminists saying exactly that? Because what I've heard feminists say is much more that patriarchal oppression of women is heavily rooted in mens wish to control our reproductive systems.

Perhaps she doesn't listen to other women very carefully.

‘The exchange has been edited for length and clarity.’

LOL.

Butler never uses ten words when one hundred and fifty four will do.