Judith Butler in The New Statesman

[ScreamingMeMe]

twitter.com/NewStatesman/status/1550765835144364040?t=q1JBabwoM_zR2lp91Fml0A&s=19

What does the overturning of Roe vs Wade mean for progress? And where does feminism go next?

@paperdispatch spoke with the philosopher and gender theorist, Judith Butler, about Roe vs Wade, trans rights, and the war on education.

t.co/sQXh7virgB

🔴On the reaction to Roe vs Wade: "I don’t agree with analysts who lay the blame for the repeal on feminists or trans people or the deceased Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg."

"That way of turning against ourselves is too easy and wrong-headed and it keeps us from doing what is most necessary – analysing and defeating the hard right."

"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."

🔴Is the ruling a backlash to progress?

"I think we are witnessing something more serious and dangerous than a backlash. This is a “restoration project” that has as its final aim the reconstruction of an order that some feel has been dismantled by progressive legislation." t.co/j9Pv5lTsqj

"Under this “restoration project”, not only is patriarchy to be restored, protected against its dismantling, but white supremacy, and exclusively heterosexual marriage."

"White supremacists and Maga Republicans are also waging a war against educational institutions from K-12 [primary and secondary school] through higher education, accusing leftists of inculcating ideology."

"We have to understand the attack on movements for racial justice, abortion rights, healthcare justice and legal protections for migrants, support for the gun lobby and the arms industry, as linked with the repeal of Roe." t.co/e9h2uc1qg7

🔴Where do you see hope when you think about what’s next?

"We have to fight for abortion rights, but it is one of many rights that belong to reproductive justice, and that reproductive justice is part of the complex and dynamic struggle for justice."

"Once we realise that, then we are on our way toward imagining a transformative force that would equal and overcome those who promote hatred and inequality."

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

Read the full interview here:

t.co/sQXh7virgB

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

When was the patriarchy dismantled? Did I miss it?

So predictable. So tragic.

"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.

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!

@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.

Sums up my POV

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.

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.

😂

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.

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.

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 charlatan

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.

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...😂

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.

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

That explains a lot, thanks!

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?

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…?)

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

Obfuscation and waffling, Judith Butler? Never!

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.

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.