BBC Hardtalk discusses UK feminism and sex differences with Judith Butler

[GreenUp]

Has anyone else listened to this interview? It came out a few days ago and I haven't seen a thread yet. It's only 23 minutes long.

I thought it started a bit slow but toward the end the interviewer Stephen Sackur challenged Butler more about her attitude toward UK feminists and pointed out the fact that women may have issues with people with penises in women's spaces.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct4p4g
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/hardtalk/id494517111
https://open.spotify.com/show/3OLU3WKNozcvpcmgO7PEax

Butler has been doing lots of interviews to promote her new book Gender Trouble. Most journalists who interview her are very sycophantic so I thought it was good Stephen Sackur wasn't bowing and scraping. She seemed quite annoyed by the end of it.

It may be that no to paedophilia on the sign might be referring to Queer Theory.

Well it's written across her face, that seems pretty directly personal.
It cheapens the word to use it as a generic term of abuse - much and all as I dislike JB, I'm sure she's not a child abuser. I don't even believe that all proponents of Queer Theory as a group can be branded paedophiles.
The man who abused me was a paedophile. He deserves the label. JB doesn't.

Alex Byrne has written an interesting review of Butler’s new book:

https://fairerdisputations.org/judith-butlers-phantasmagoric-world/

The book sounds absolutely horrendous. Like a bad undergrad essay based on having watched a couple of YouTube videos and referenced entirely to things they patently haven’t read.

And reading those quotations, who on earth is claiming that she’s writing accessibly for a general audience?

You should read her earlier stuff-the absolute zenith of word salad bollocks. The Graun used to have an annual prize for the most obscurantist single sentence published the previous year. They stopped doing it when it became clear that Butler won it every year, with no one else coming even close. Can someone on here who knows what they are talking about explain why she is held in such high regard (at least in some quarters), because all I read is total nonsense (that's being very polite)

I have read (parts of) gender trouble.

But the claim was that this was the new, accessible butler. Still reads like proper cultural studies and adjacent disciplines bullshit to me.

Love the Alex Byrne review. If someone’s writing nonsense, always check their footnotes.