Judith Butler defends Genderism in New Statesman, and Jane Clare Jones critiques it

[kesstrel]

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1087725670988427265

My opinion of Judith Butler sinks still further....

Yes Bernard, and back in the nineties I believed all that. After all most of my female friends were better paid than our male peers, what were all those sour faced women complaining about?

And then we inevitably started to procreate because that is what humans do, and it became clear that growing another human in your body is rather more complicated than spreading your seed.

Sex has onsequences.

Um ... consequences..

If 'people who menstruate' etc can be women or men (flame me!) it takes the sexist imperative out of the equation.

But they can't, can they? Changing a label doesn't change reality. It just means, as the "Women's" March illustrated so beautifully at the weekend, that "menstruator" is used as a lazy "inclusive" shorthand for "woman". They said that 23 menstruators were in parliament in 1973. They have no way of knowing which women menstruated and I believe some were included in that who definitely couldn't have due to age,

It's like renaming mosquitos "otherbees" and then declaring that you've solved the problem of malaria.

You have the best analogies AAK exactly.

How many times have you heard people saying 'if men had period pains we'd have the meds to deal effectively with it by now'?

But they don't. Because they physically can't. So it's not an issue for men. You do have a blind spot with this, don't you?

So much jazz hands.

And so much bourgeois.

And cravenly courting patriarchy itself, too. The thinking appears to be 'attempt to convince the overlords that women and men menstruate, and then they might think that as men are struggling too, they should change the system.'

It's a line of thinking that doesn't acknowledge male power in a patriarchal system, but still absolutely relies upon it to grant permission.

As a child of the 70s, I remember being angry and resentfu missing out on all that let it all hang out sixties hippyshit. Where was my free love?

Now I think a lot of people have been taught postmoderism badly and lack the grounding in basic concepts of objectivity vs subjectivity that makes critical thinking possible.

Saying you don't understand Butler is a bit self-undermining- it sort of invites readers to dismiss your subsequent arguments.

I do understand Butler, or what she is trying to say, most of the time anyway. I just think she writes very badly and I suspect that this is a deliberate tactic on her part - or even if it isn't, I suspect that it greatly contributes to the reverence in which she is held. I don't think everything she writes is nonsense. She is of course correct that religions have very damaging views on sex and gender.

The main sticking point is that however much we might wish it to be so, sex is not a social construct for humans any more than it is for badgers or gerbils. We can't deal with sexism by taking this route. It's never ever going to work because sex-based oppression is, well, sex-based. Human beings actually are a sexually dimorphic species and we can't change sex and that is something we have to accept. We can't theorise our way out of this one.

Quite. You can't end racism by pretending that people of colour don't actually physically exist and have been oppressed because of their inner sense of self.

The funny thing is that race actually is a social construct. But yes, I know exactly what you mean, pretending to be 'colour blind' is supremely unhelpful.

Yes, I was referencing the colour blind stuff.

This whole thing reads like an academic version of a toddler covering their eyes and believing you can no longer see them. It's just not cute and it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's actually maliciously mendacious.

Yes exactly, Floral.

I think Butler saw the direction of travel and wanted to make sure there was no threat to her job security/speaking invitations.

The comparison with Peterson is unfair to Peterson. Peterson's job was on the line. He stuck to his principles. The unexpected bonus for him is he doesn't need his university now.

i dunno

they both seem to be to be people who like to use language to obfuscate meaning

i like people who say what they mean in the simplest language possible

it means that they want to be understood

It increasingly pisses me off, when experienced social scientists completely ignore power structures, as Butlerdoes here.

Judith Butler isn't a social scientist, she's a philosopher. Her aim isn't to investigate power structures, her argument is very much of the angels and pinheads variety.

Isn't it the case, though, that Butler is essentially making the same argument here that she made in the early 1990s? In which case, isn't it all horribly dated? For example, she relies on outdated ways of diagnosing and treating disorders of sexual development (intersex conditions).

Seems to me she has nothing new to say and is enjoying her comfortable status as a revered academic. At some point it will stop being cool to cite her.

We know that she supports other established academics who abuse their position of power, see her support (later taken back) for Avital Ronell, accused of taking advantage of (to put it mildly) her graduate student. Because Ronell was a genius, supposedly, and geniuses are allowed to behave badly.

Making the point more plainly: Butler has supported powerful people who treat others like they own them.

And that thing about the Pope: Butler has so many people venerating her image as if she was a saint, could she be jealous? Does the pope have better iconography?

had never heard of Avital Ronell. just read this very interesting article

www.chronicle.com/article/I-Worked-With-Avital-Ronell-I/244415

it seems that in american academia, paying lip service to the correct things is just as important as here in the UK

this is an interesting take on Butler's ideas about the roots of gender criticality:

medium.com/@Chican3ry/gender-ideology-up-yours-470575a5311a

By "interesting" did you mean "throw a bunch of links at the wall and hope it convinces feminists that they're being duped by the Pope"?

Skyzalimit, you remind me a bit of another poster that used to come on here, spannablue.

Chu's take on humanities departments very much matches what I've heard from friends who've worked in them, as does the description of graduate student hell.

From that Medium piece: "The idea that TERFs are the main driving force behind transphobia is just wild to me." Um yeah, got that right. It's not transphobia, it's being pro-woman.

Religion promotes the idea that sex and gender are the same thing, men must be masculine and women must be feminine.

Feminism promotes the idea that gender is bullshit and should be destroyed as far as possible, nothing should be considered masculine or feminine.

Just because I might agree with the Pope that you can't choose your sex (actually almost everyone on the planet agrees with this regardless of other political opinions because it's an obvious fact) doesn't mean we would agree about much else. We are coming at this from completely different angles.

Chu is also an out transwoman and a very good writer. An interesting and thoughtful person to read, though not everyone on this board would agree with Chu.

I've often disagreed with Chu but agreed that they're a good writer. Less so when writing about gender, which is interesting - too much personal investment clouds the judgement maybe.

Given the background of the current Pope I'd imagine he probably has a compassionate attitude towards refugees. So do I. This can be the case even as we vehemently disagree on pretty much everything to do with religion or the role of women in society.

Looking at Jane Clare Jones's twitter again:

twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1088383267290730497

Quite apart from anything else, Butler apparently subscribed/s to psychoanalytic theory, now largely discredited, despite the fact that an awful lot of stuff had already come out debunking it (some of it by feminists, some not) by 1990 (when that piece was written). That's two armchair "theories" made up by males which she seems to have accepted unquestioningly as worthy of her discipleship...