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

Oh get away with the scare quotes around feminists.

I disagree with Butler because I think she's wrong about a lot of things.

"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."

This, for example, is bollocks. As a pp said, it's men's desire to control our reproductive systems that is at the root of our oppression.

theclangersarecoming was criticising, quite rightly, the ridiculous spraying of the word "Fascism/Fascists" at just about everything.

I think I might have posted this at least twice before and asked for your thoughts, seeing as you claim to be "antifascist"

Apparently , sitting outside a cafe, quietly minding one's own business is a fascist act. The real "Fascists" here are the bunch of braying, violent, Antifa thugs.

This, for example, is bollocks. As a pp said, it's men's desire to control our reproductive systems that is at the root of our oppression.

Exactly, and the patriarchal system built up around that since civilisation began, which yes does involve a lot of women working for it. That doesn't mean it isn't men who primarily benefit.

I think they might be BFF. I feel a bromance is in the air,

@GreyCouncil
Judith Butler is the "feminist". She is not being attacked. I criticise her for her obtuse writing style, her self-centred lack of care or interest in the everyday problems of ordinary women and her contempt for her sex. Not for her pro-choice stance.
I support policies and approaches which respect and protect women and girls. I judge ideas, policies etc on their merits, not on who has proposed them. That would be silly.

the attacks on women's ability to control their fertility,

ooooo... WOMEN! So we do exist, then,

Remembering that Nussbaum was writing this all the way back in 1999 when I myself was at university:

In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

Perfectly expressed.

One of the reasons I admire Andrea Dworkin so much is her clear plain language.
I disagree with much of JB's comments. Analysis is necessary and useful, to understand how the opposition use tactics. Its not blaming to state the facts of how we got here.
I think JB fails to realise she is an integral part of the restoration project. Restoration happens after society has been broken down and dismantled. Or 'queered' as she calls it.

Yeah, we all know that few of these activists who promote gender ideology actually believe in it really. The evidence is always slipping out that they know as well as we do that it’s a load of old nonsense.

It’s just a convenient whipping post for castigating women about something, and the goalposts (whipping posts?) are constantly changing. Language not “inclusive” enough? Think that women actually exist? Not solicitous enough of a man’s feelings? Don’t agree with the right kind of “feminist”? Bad, bad fascist women!

Thanks, Screaming! Martha Nussbaum's critique of Butler is excellent:

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

[...]

Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.

Indeed!

I see you are happy to continue to attack me rather than recognise that the chief supporters of your toilet obsession are the extreme right who are in the process of attacking human rights and workers rights all over the world

Thanks for proving my point. The far right use Mumsnet to spray their poison.

“the Conservative Party deporting black people,”

This may not fit your world view, but the Home Office is very diverse when it comes to deportation. To quote their official statistics- “The top 5 nationalities accounted for 63% of the total enforced returns in 2020, and these were: Romania (21%), Albania (17%), Poland (11%), Lithuania (8%) and Brazil (5%).”

Which kind of casts doubt on your other points, really.

Did you mean to post that here? Nobody here has a 'toilet obsession' (except perhaps you, since you are the only person to mention toilets on this thread).

Have a read of this thread to educate yourself about what the discussion here is really about:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3145470-Break-it-down-for-me

I don't know who made that comment, but IMO it affords JB's writing style all the respect it deserves - none. It is execrable.

I don't know what other thread you're referring to.

I see you still find yourself unable to separate a viewpoint from an individual.

I thought JB was NB and used ‘they/them’ pronouns although I can see that some of JB’s most ardent supporters refer to JB as a ‘woman’ and ‘she’? Has something changed?

Your reply makes no sense but I'm taking from it your sympathies lie with that mob?

I have never said a supportive word about Posie Parker.

I do however think "anti-fascist" these days means nothing more than "you don't agree with me, I'm right , you're wrong, so not agreeing with me makes you a fascist"

Anyone who tries to dismiss gender critical views as a "toilet obsession" reveals how shallow and facile their understanding of the issues is.

Bit of an odd duck that one. But a lot of male-centric burble that's successfully got her name in the papers again. Judith Butler; murdering feminism and comprehensible sentences, one paper at a time.

Yup.

I suspect it is a wilful, disingenuous kind of misunderstanding though.