Judith Butler has spoken

[lionheart]

Damn.

www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

'If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.'

The more I read this sort of stuff, the more pleased I am to have chosen to study and work in a scientific field.

amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/23/jk-rowling-thriller-no-1-transphobia-row-troubled-blood-robert-galbraith

Sold 65k copies in the first week. In your dreams Butler. Who isn't a mainstream feminist again?

It's also very funny to me that she says that gender critical feminism isn't mainstream feminism and is actually a very minor position.

This is where it all falls apart, isn’t it? How can you tell if it’s a minor position or mainstream? Surely you’d have to do some sort of, I don’t know, survey or something. Then you’d have to do some sort of analysis of the results. Wouldn’t that require the use of that most oppressive of all oppressive tools of white supremacy.....maths.

If up is down and queer is normal and minor is mainstream and it’s all just subjective then how can anything be claimed? I could claim that all women (Including trans women) think penises are independent parasitic life forms and oppressive structures have persuaded us not to remove them at birth and she couldn’t prove me wrong with her very own logic (or lack thereof).

Who funds this shit? Don’t tell me, I already know and it makes me very irritated.

But I warn you her writing style is really awful and designed to make you feel stupid

Yeah, that's my experience too. Just why is she so popular?

Despite the grandiose language, she doesn't appear to have a clear view of what biological sex is. She dismisses biological essentialism - fine. But biological sex is still there and is still the root of discrimination and violence against women around the world. I think her views (or at least its expression) are entirely shaped by the fact that in the US the loudest voice against trans recognition (and it really is trans-phobic, unlike GC feminism) is from the Christian right. She is too narrow-minded and dogmatic to recognise that there is a wider, more complex debate to be had.

I think her views (or at least its expression) are entirely shaped by the fact that in the US the loudest voice against trans recognition (and it really is trans-phobic, unlike GC feminism) is from the Christian right.

She also lives in a country where rights to the practical building blocks - access to health care, maternity rights, birth control - that enable equality don't exist.

Here she is defending a (female) academic suspended for harassment of one of her students because her work is too important.

Holy fuck. That letter she sent is awful in the context of what Avital Ronell was accused of.

Imagine being a student with the guts to accuse your big name supervisor and when the case is being heard Judith Butler et al send this:

leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2018/06/blaming-the-victim-is-apparently-ok-when-the-accused-is-a-feminist-literary-theorist.html

Although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have all worked for many years in close proximity to Professor Ronell and accumulated collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar.......We have all seen her relationship with students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her........We deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her. We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare.

There are several quotes from former students suggesting Butler's insistance that Ronell has never put a foot wrong before is bobbins and that her sexualised behaviour towards students was well known. Most are not named by journalists but her former teaching assistant wrote this:

www.chronicle.com/article/i-worked-with-avital-ronell-i-believe-her-accuser/

The poor bugger at the center of this had his career ruined. The Uni found that the many explicit emails from her, the call logs in the middle of the night, the threats to withold his PHd, the contemperaneous emails from him to friends describing how upset her advances were making him and the fact she moved into his one bedroom appartment for a week, without asking did not prove that she sexually assaulted and stalked him for 3 years.

After the uni only suspended her for a year (depsite upholding the sexual harassment complaints) and her famous mates sent that letter saying he made it up (and all those emails were just jokes he encouraged) he finally sued her and the Uni.

blog.simplejustice.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/FINAL-Complaint-Reitman-v.-Ronell-and-NYU.pdf

blog.simplejustice.us/2018/08/17/nyu-sued-over-handling-of-prof-avital-ronells-sexual-abuse/

I'm begining to think that JB is (to quote a muppet) a bad human, rather than just a fool.

[quote YetAnotherSpartacus]I remember crying with relief when I read this back in the day.

It made so much sense.

It is really worth a read. I have no love for Nussbaum, but she nails it here.

newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody[/quote]
This really is an excellent piece. If you only read part of it, read the final section. Judith Butler is fundamentally incoherent, privileged and unethical.

Is 65,000 copies a lot these days for the world's single most succesful writer and the most published author since Dickens? I dunno.

Extraordinary twitter figures from the last 24 hours, never seen anything like it for a 'name'. I thought they must be wrong at first. How do you lose 8,000 active followers in a day?

socialblade.com/twitter/user/jk_rowling

From the article linked by raddle

www.chronicle.com/article/i-worked-with-avital-ronell-i-believe-her-accuser/

"We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means."

Just noticed, the writer of the "I believe her accuser" article is Andrea Long Chu, who I agree does sometimes have difficulty with words and their boring, mundane meanings.

On reality being unknowable and irrelevant - most people use the word 'reality' to refer to the deepest mutually experienced layer we can access; the unknowable and irrelevant layers are not commonly considered to fall under the heading 'physical reality'.

No wonder it doesn't make sense; she's deconstructed the word 'reality' and rejected the common consensus on what the word refers to.

Anyway. Still thinking about queering power - the enbies would be doing us a massive favour if they hadn't been subsumed under the umbrella. They're eroding the power of the "everyone is either cis or trans, and man and woman are gender identities" dominant discourse by accepting that narrative and then identifying as neither female women (cis) nor female men. Accepting them as qualifying for the label 'trans' neutralises this erosion.

No wonder the powers that be are so keen to have us chant "enbies are valid".

Good bit from the "parody" article:

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others.

Butler's is 'easy fake feminism' isn't it for the post-modern age. No-one espousing it has to bother with the hard work of trying improve material reality and seeking justice for the world's women and girls, they can just be 'subversive' by dyeing their hair blue, saying they're enby, and getting women sacked from much-needed and much-loved jobs.

Well men don’t exist. I know that because I keep hearing about single mothers who go around getting themselves pregnant.

Stripes

She's factually wrong about a large component of what GC feminists supposedly believe, which indicates to me she is answering a straw man argument. Whether she's lying or just embarrassingly mistaken I don't know.
"The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside." (My emphasis)

I don't assume that any man would identify as a woman for bad purposes. That would make me quite insane. I would imagine hardly anyone "holds such a view"?

Does she really think that we think that ALL MEN are just waiting to [waiting for what?] do this Literally any man?

She evades every question and just repeats her point that GC feminists are not real feminists.

And yes, this. It's incredibly striking how little she has to say other than to point this out repeatedly (reminds me of certain me-railers here!), pretend that male violence is a rich, rich fantasy baby, and misrepresent the GC view.

I wish more people would start articles/interviews with a summary of what they actually think the opposing view is, that is accurate enough that a holder of the opposing view would agree that it's representative. I'd say nearly all arguments I've read on this subject are based on misrepresentations of the opposing view, which doesn't really get anyone anywhere.

Butler thinks that gender isn't a real thing but is something we construct on a daily basis because we perform it. When I put on lipstick I am performing and strengthening the concept of 'woman'. So gender is something we make real by 'doing'. It is a social construction.

I've been wondering about this. Isn't it terribly offensive to suggest that gender isn't an innate biological thing? I'd agree with the quoted text above, with the exception that the concept that is strengthened is 'femininity' not 'woman'. To 'perform' suggests there is a 'real' thing inside that is different from one's gender - surely the opposite of what many vocal trans activists are insisting all over social media?

Aye, Butler's actual work is way out of line with the current "gender identity" concept.

They just don't know or care because they don't actually read her or use her theories - they just point at her word salads for justification and mock anyone who suggests that Judy has no clothes.

[quote Lisz]Is 65,000 copies a lot these days for the world's single most succesful writer and the most published author since Dickens? I dunno.

Extraordinary twitter figures from the last 24 hours, never seen anything like it for a 'name'. I thought they must be wrong at first. How do you lose 8,000 active followers in a day?

socialblade.com/twitter/user/jk_rowling[/quote]
The first week sales for this book are double those for its predecessor, according to The Bookseller. So yes, it's currently doing twice as well as her last book did.

As to how you lose that many - start with 15 million, and say things that a platform tilted to one slanted view tends to dislike? If Twitter were any indication of public opinion, Corbyn would be in 10 Downing Street. Instead, we had a Tory landslide. Bit if you are a JK Rowling fan on Twitter, and enough of your Twitter friends start loudly witchhunting anyone who follows her, then you'll hit the unfollow button pretty damn fast. Doesn't mean you won't still be hitting the order button on Amazon for her books, games and films.

She Who Cannot Be Cancelled is doing just fine.

now I am humming Mariah Deacon

@WeeBisom

About the reality point - Butler would say that whatever reality is, it is unknowable to us and irrelevant. She would say the very emphasis on focus on 'reality' is privileging a particular picture of the world. For example, MacKinnon gives an example she heard from a postmodernist (male)scholar - imagine an island where the men believe they have to sacrifice a young virgin girl every year or otherwise they won't be able to maintain erections (yes, really, that's the example :S) That's nonsense, an anthropologist says. Killing the girl has nothing to do with your virility. But in fact, because this culture believes it so deeply, if they don't sacrifice a girl each year they get so anxious they can't actually get it up. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Their beliefs and reality combine to form a new reality. It really is true for them that they have to kill a girl each year to maintain erections. (MacKinnon hated this example and wryly commented that of course the men couldn't just be told to change their stupid beliefs. Of course a woman has to die for men's boners.)

By the way, I also think that Judy doesn't really believe any of the shit she spouts. In her feminist texts, she tells women that we can't actually overthrow patriarchy, or get out of oppressive power structures, but we can always be 'playfully subversive' of the dominant paradigm. Yet if you read her later works on Gaza you get the sense she feels very strongly that there is an injustice going on here, an injustice that has to be combatted. She doesn't tell Palestinians just to 'queer' their oppression. It's also very funny to me that she says that gender critical feminism isn't mainstream feminism and is actually a very minor position. Um...isn't her whole schtick to be deeply critical and skeptical of mainstream ideologies? Gender critical feminism should be praised as the plucky subversive postmodern underdog - gender critical feminism IS queer feminism because it turns standard feminism on its head.

It's crazy, isn't it? This isn't about reality not existing, it's about when realities clash and I'm sick to bloody death of privileged academics pretending they don't see this.

My last comment was a bit glib. If people do want to go deeper into this, I can't recommend anything more strongly than Jane Clare Jones herself, in a three-hour discussion that spends a long time on the key philosophers, including Butler, upon whose work the current gender bollocks is based.

Three hours, but much more accessible than anything Butler has ever written. And you'll feel a lot less stupid after watching it.

Well worth it if all this stuff has got you interested, and you want to enjoy JCJ able to really get into her subject.

And another three hours of JCJ about more recent events if that isn't enough:

@TheChampagneGalop

But I warn you her writing style is really awful and designed to make you feel stupid

Yeah, that's my experience too. Just why is she so popular?

Because nobody wants to admit that they can't see what everyone else says they can.