Judith Butler interview

[MotherofPearl]

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther

Apologies if this has already been posted. I found this troubling to read. Am I misreading this or is Butler saying that GC feminism is fascist?

But why a broken link? I think they've pulled them down but not removed that link by mistake. I think they've pulled the whole series.

I don't know why they bothered censoring themselves - I doubt whether even Butler's fans made it much beyond the first couple of paragraphs.
The Guardian needs to be careful: printing an outrageous allegation is one thing but once you start looking incompetent, you're in trouble.

I think they've pulled the whole series.

Maybe the reaction to this first piece got the lawyers' attention, and they've realised there might be even more issues in the upcoming stuff... Enough to put the whole thing on ice?

Would make sense if they're all commissioned from people like this one.

It's not a newspaper anymore

but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare

Just coming back to this ...

This is a really weird statement. I know that LB's feminism rests on the back of Anglophone interpretations of some elements of French feminism, but why privilege France?

And surely GC feminists are critiquing the nuclear family in terms of gender roles? This is what being GC is all about.

I agree that neoliberals or the new right want to entrench the traditional family to responsibility them to provide for family members, thus abrogating the welfare state of this responsibility, but there is no correlation between GC feminism and neoliberalism at all.

NeoLIBERALISM is a form of LIBERALISM and is allied with our LF friends and their choice-based, individualised way of seeing the world. Choose a gender, choose a job, choose to be rich, choose to be poor, choose sex work, choose porn - this is liberal/neoliberal, not GC!

responsibility = responsibilise

I really think they should reinstate the missing question and answer. From what I can see no-one is happy with the redaction, TRAs or feminists.

@Franca123

This is an open case in California. Surely newspapers shouldn't be commenting on it in this manner?

The US doesn't have prejudice rules - I remember with the OJ Simpson case, commentators speculated quite freely about his innocence or guilt both before and during the trial. It feels very strange to those of us in the UK.

I don't think there were any legal issues with what was in the article - no one was named, so there wasn't even a libel issue.

I've learnt a lot from reading the posts on this thread - certainly much more than I've ever learnt from JB.

The anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement, insists that sex is biological and real

I do wonder how many people will read that and question why this is bad?
How many times have we had posters on here saying "no-one is saying there's such thing as biological sex".

The retraction is more of a problem because it' was in fact published and they didn't make the reason for removing it clear. So far as it goes interviews often are much longer than the parts that are printed and they can be significantly reduced to fit in the space allocated. What to include can be based on all kinds of considerations including what is topical, what is thematic, etc.

I wonder where she thinks babies come from?

I find this quite funny. As I understand it, in her view it's kind of random that societies have chosen to create the idea of two sexes, by creating the categories in a certain way.

So perhaps at one time there were all kinds of societies who chose different kinds of categories, more of them or none or maybe based around things like the shape of your knees.

Of course, they all died out.

I like this from guardian

@littlbrowndog

I like this from guardian

You see I’m an academic and I do understand this - it just is very overburdened writing, but it has a meaning. Basically what she is saying is:

Althusserian Marxists understood the relationships of capitalism and society to be static and fixed, but when we started thinking about how they might also change over time, we gained new ways of understanding how power actively works to cement itself into social structures.

The original passage is unwieldy, but it makes sense if you’re someone working in the field and there isn’t much that’s controversial about it - it’s just not written for a lay audience but a technical audience. It’s a shame, because there is plenty of nonsensical guff in her work elsewhere - that passage might be obscure but this one is actually not nonsense 😂

Yeah - I understood that passage too but I also think that it is really, really poorly written. It needs a couple more full stops for a start!

Perhaps they thought that taking something with meaning and making it that obscure was a worse example of writing than pure meaningless drivel.

Not to derail the thread but @IvyTwines2, I am an academic in the social sciences and at my current institution I would have to agree with @YetAnotherSpartacus that there is diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and even class, and that does mean that amongst the faculty there really is a range of 'real world' experiences. Although many of us do have privilege, undoubtedly, the idea that we are all living off the spoils of a privileged background would be far from the truth. I think the sort of culture you are describing is much less common now although there might be pockets where it does still exist.

Anyway, for the most part, I do not know my colleagues take on trans issues and I am too scared to ask, but I do know that many (probably most) laugh and groan whenever Butler's name is mentioned.

Is this a watershed moment for The Guardian, perhaps? Have they finally realised how barking their misogynistic conspiracy theories look when faced with the actual facts?

The reason that passage was a worthy winner is the reason you found it so easy to summarise for us - I'm guessing it took you, what, 10 seconds?

A very common form of bad writing is writing that obscures its meaning for reasons of style. JB perhaps chooses that style because:

a) She thinks it looks clever
b) She's too lazy or thoughtless to consider other audiences other than her peers
c) She's not a skillful enough writer to change her style despite wide criticism of her technique

There has been a lot of discussion and change in editorial practice to make scientific writing generally more accessible without losing precision. It's had mixed success, but the world of the social sciences seem absolutely impervious to clarity.

I agree ditalini but I'm a social scientist and I have never, ever written that way - nor have many colleagues. It isn't all of us.

ditalini - I think there's an option d), which is that she uses that style to disguise the paucity and unoriginality of her thinking.

@YetAnotherSpartacus

I agree ditalini but I'm a social scientist and I have never, ever written that way - nor have many colleagues. It isn't all of us.

No. absolutely not and believe me I cheer internally when I come across good social science communication! (I'm knee deep in academic writing in the field of Education at the moment and there's a lot of grim stuff there, clearly learnt as "good academic writing" as many are practicing teachers who presumably can communicate perfectly well to children!)

I think it was CS Lewis who said that if you can't explain a complicated idea well enough so that a child could grasp it, you don't understand it yourself.

If you can't explain it well enough that another reasonably competent adult can understand it, you've really not got it.

‘- it’s just not written for a lay audience but a technical audience.’

What is the technical meaning of homologous in the social sciences then?

I understand exactly what it means in biology, but I don’t understand what specific technical meaning it can have in terms of society, power or capital, or why a biological term is being used here.

there's an option d), which is that she uses that style to disguise the paucity and unoriginality of her thinking.

There's also option e), which is that she knows there's an audience who will relish the opportunity to show their superiority by claiming the ability to understand an impenetrable work.

It's kind of like a wildcard citation - if you cite Butler, who can say that the citation doesn't hold up? No-one can be certain what it actually means...