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

Yes @WeeBisom very well summed up. A language game indeed. And Butler has the biggest Scrabble bag in California.

Maybe the US is better thought of as two countries, one christian fundamentalist country, and one more closely aligned with western liberal values?

People who live in the US, what do you anticipate will happen in areas where the 2 co-exist? E.g., Christianity seems to be large-scale in New York, especially (but not only) from the African diaspora (I don't know where this sits on the spectrum of Christianity, either more left or right in US terms). Yet, New York seems strongly aligned with western liberal values.

My impression is that the metroplexes of the future (built out from current huge cities/metropoles) will have diverse populations as they currently do. Within these, there will be substantial faith communities that may well reflect the faith in people's country of origin or family tradition. I've seen estimates that there will be 16 metroplexes. If that is accurate, will there be a rump of states with the non-metroplex population that is governed by a range of faiths?

Will faiths in metroplex and non-metroplex areas share a theology but they will live very differently and in a way that reflects local culture?

Maybe the US is better thought of as two countries, one christian fundamentalist country, and one more closely aligned with western liberal values?

Maybe. Or maybe it's that the 'United' states ... aren't?

Maybe the US is better thought of as two countries, one christian fundamentalist country, and one more closely aligned with western liberal values?

Not sure about this. There are many things being described as liberal and progressive which are nothing of the kind, gender ideology being the most obvious example. You must believe women are defined by stereotypes rather than by their biology, and if you disagree, you are a hateful bigot who should be shunned by polite society.

Both the religious conservatives and the "liberal progressives" accept the legitimacy of gender roles. It's just that the religious conservatives think those gender roles should be inextricably tied to biological sex, whereas the "liberal progressives" don't.

I also think gender ideology is more of a religion than anything else. It's a belief in something not proven to actually exist, and a desire to structure society around that thing, regardless of the dissenting views of other people. It's just the new religion for people who think they're too intelligent to believe in God, but still need something to cling to.

In other words, I think I'd say the US is a country at war with itself, with the right wing misogynists on one side and the left wing misogynists on the other side, and everyone caught in the crossfire.

I also think gender ideology is more of a religion than anything else. It's a belief in something not proven to actually exist, and a desire to structure society around that thing, regardless of the dissenting views of other people. It's just the new religion for people who think they're too intelligent to believe in God, but still need something to cling to.

Yes, exactly.

This strange religion where people can believe in Transubstantiation without believing in God.

A religion which has its dogma , sin and guilt but lacks any compassion or redemption.

Where Confession doesn't lead to Communion , Holy or otherwise, but only to banishment.

There’s also invariably (as in many religious traditions) a desire to naturalise the cultural as something innate. It makes no sense to speak of an “innate gender identity” as a “psychological phenomenon” when all of those terms have varied wildly across epochs and cultures (remember too that “psychology” didn’t exist before the 1880s, and earlier concepts of the interior self were often radically different to our current models of it).

In the early modern period, women were considered under the irrational or animalistic sway of their feelings, and men were thought of as the rational ones. A century and a half later, in the eighteenth century, it was only men who were considered capable of the finest emotion and sentiment, and women were base, stoic and subject to lesser and coarser feelings.

In the medieval period, it was women who were considered more animalistic and sexual, and not naturally fitted to the highest forms of love, honour and chastity, as men were. In the nineteenth century it was the exact opposite.

Plenty of traits considered “feminine” today were anathema to earlier ideas of femininity, and the same for “masculinity”. This is hugely culturally variable too: you’ll find different cultural constructions of masculine traits in, for example, India or Mongolia, compared to in the Anglophone West. (Yet despite this, somehow, “uterus havers” end up usually worst off, whatever the cultural and historical variances used to justify this. Funny, that.)

It always amazes me how reductive and historically short sighted gender ideologists are. They inevitably need to learn a bit more about a whole range of culture and history and to understand how the ways people experience the world are fundamentally shaped by cultural assumptions and codes that we internalise as “within” us even though they are demonstrably not.

(There’s actually a name for this in sociology which is habitus — the process by which we naturalise cultural expectations as internal to us, so much that we cease to notice them and believe they are natural and innate rather than artificial and socially produced.)

That reference to "habitus" gave me a flashback to all the stuff by Bourdieu that I've done my best to forget, Clangers!

Of course, even the "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" is a reversal of the situation a century or so ago. As Ben Goldacre noted in The Guardian back in 2007:

"The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: "If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention." Some sources suggest it wasn't until the 1940s that the modern gender associations of girly pink became universally accepted. Pink is, therefore, perhaps not biologically girly. Boys who were raised in pink frilly dresses went down mines and fought in the second world war. Clothing conventions change over time."

Indeed they do!

www.theguardian.com/science/2007/aug/25/genderissues