Judith Butler: irony?

[AnotherAngryAcademic]

Judith Butler is opining on the Hamas/Israel war, and on student protests.

JB says:

any student who says “I feel unsafe by what I hear another student say” is saying that “My security and safety is more important than that person’s freedom of expression.”

And then:

And if we countenance that, if we give too much leeway to that claim that a student feels unsafe because, say, an anti-Zionist — or a statement in support of Palestine, or a statement opposing genocide makes that Jewish student feel unsafe, we are saying that that student is perceiving a personal threat or is threatened by the discourse itself — even when the discourse is expressive rather than portending physical harm.

And:

if calling for an end of genocide against Palestine is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then we see that the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student.

I am fascinated by the way Judith Butler has framed these concerns about feeling threatened by discourse.

(JUDITH BUTLER WILL NOT CO-SIGN ISRAEL’S ALIBI FOR GENOCIDE

Edited for formatting, and because the link disappeared!)

Decades ago I read a political cartoon in which the cartoonist gave up halfway through and had one of the characters say “You simply cannot satirise this shit”.

I’m saying the same right now.

It's almost as we can discern logic and structure to everything that's happened a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang, which happened 13,700 million years ago and is buried under background radiation and very peculiar particle physics, but cannot pierce through the exotic codes of queer theory and need ascended beings like her to decode it for us.

I mean, zir.

A 68 year old lesbian, who is actually not a woman and had plenty of straight sex in her uni days. But she's still a lesbian.

I mean, zir is a lesbian.

I do wonder about this. Racial categories are a heck of a lot less discrete and concrete than sex categories.

True. Skin colour is on a spectrum, sex isn't, yet the same people who rightly recognise that Black lives matter don't recognise that sex matters too?

LGBTaxi Drivers

An LGB taxi company is a great idea! No risk of being stuck in a cab with a homophobic driver.

@PinkoPonko I assume it's JB you're quoting...
What is fascism if not a deeply enunciated claim to be heard, to dominate the linguistic field?
And there was me thinking that Fascism was an organised far-right authoritarian political ideology.

Because in my experience, 'deeply enunciated claims to be heard, to dominate the linguistic field' tend to come from toddlers, jumping up and down and screaming that they don't want THIS biscuit, coz it is BROKEN, they want THIS biscuit in its unbroken form because it is their biscuit!

How do people get paid nice salaries and get to work in warm office for writing this twaddle?

Now, let us not be so naive as to think that speech can be neutral.
What I found, during my encounter with The Academy in all its glory, was that that the paid academics were VERY hot on talking about the wickedness of power relations and the difficulty of 'speaking truth to power', and how one must respect all those brave people who stood up etc etc.

But if you told them that you thought that they might be wrong, or if you disagreed with some fundamental belief, suddenly you were treated like an imbecile, found your work returned with nasty comments all over it and had to be extraordinarily persistent in explaining why you might in fact have a point.

If they did back down, it was with very bad grace.

So I think that The Academy includes a very large bunch of posturing hypocritical dickheads, and the respect that I used to have for academia has been much diminished by my more recent contact with it.

Sorry, I was parodying Butler. 😬

So I think that The Academy includes a very large bunch of posturing hypocritical dickheads, and the respect that I used to have for academia has been much diminished by my more recent contact with it.

You're not wrong. In Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, the charismatic history teacher coaches the boys through the Oxford entrance exam by telling them they can stand out from the crowd by writing something that runs counter to the received wisdom. So, for example, if you have an essay on the First World War, make the argument that the Allies' leadership were strategic geniuses rather than complete dunderheads.

Butler has made an entire career out of adopting this principle. If you want to get yourself noticed, argue that black is white. Or rather, argue that biological sex is irrelevant but gender identity matters. Being male or female is a matter of performance, not of material reality. And having come up with this frankly insane proposition, dress it up in impenetrable language to make it look more impressive than it is.

The result is a stellar career because people are too frightened to point out the obvious, namely that Butler is a total fraud.

Sorry, I was parodying Butler. 😬

Sorry, I was parodying Butler. 😬

Well you have a glittering career in academia ahead of you😂

My apologies everyone here. I dashed off my parody of Butler in a rage because zir raises my BP. I didn’t stop to consider the difficulty of deciphering tone with a post like that.

Bloody hell! 100% success!
You should get a job in a SocSci department.

The worrying thing is that we can absolutely see that exact argument playing out in every captured university across the land.

Very Orwellian but entirely plausible that academics such as Butler could/do parrot something similar to justify their desire to silence those voices challenging Butler’s cognitive dissonance.

…or, is it as simple as Butler making zir entire career out of adopting the principle of arguing a contrary position?

I think JB feels empowered to deny womanhood because she knows she actually is a woman and therefore can speak with authority about not being one, if you see what I mean.

Whereas with race, she'd be taking it upon herself to speak for a group she does not belong to, and she probably doesn't feel she has the (social) authority to do that.

Her theories of course deny the validity of social authority or an authorative view in the first place , but just because a person theoretically believes something doesn't mean they emotionally believe it. Our subconscious is a strong master.

I also think many educated women / relatively financially independent women prefer to believe that womanhood is a choice because they don't want to live with the knowledge that women are ultimately vulnerable physically because our bodies are weaker and socially because society privileges male bodies.

It was a thing of beauty.

😂😂😂

Top work, there. @PinkoPonko ! 😀

…or, is it as simple as Butler making zir entire career out of adopting the principle of arguing a contrary position?

The really important stuff is the blurring or dismantling of boundaries, though. If it was just the gibberish generators, we could just point and laugh.

And quite convincingly, if I may say so.

It was perfect!

You may well be right but I think that is putting a gentle spin on it.

The other possibility, which seems more likely to me, is she knows very well she would be out of step with the cultural elite if she wasn't onboard with BLM, and then she would need to put up with being unpopular.

I think we are saying the same thing, w we just differ in how conscious we think she is of her own motives.

It's not so much that I'm gentle, more that I'm very cynical about people's capacity for self deception.

Brilliant! You're wasted here! There's a job in a Department of Something Fashionably Obscure somewhere with your name on it.
'Dr PinkoPonko, Professor of Something Fashionably Obscure' has a nice ring to it, hasn't it?😃

Hahaha! It was completely believable. Apply for her job!

I'm now significantly less pissed off that I spent my time parsing it 😁