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March 27, 2024 - 1:00pm
Judith Butler is out promoting a new book, the first the notoriously enigmatic theorist has ever written with actual readers in mind. Who’s Afraid of Gender? explores what Butler characterises as a global movement animated by the “phantasm of gender”, which “collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction, resulting in a movement that demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation”. Or, to put it more succinctly, how everyone who disagrees with Butler — from Viktor Orbán to Julie Bindel — is probably just a fascist.
But there’s always risk involved in descending from the ivory tower and mixing with the (suspiciously anti-gender) plebs. In an interview this week with KQED Forum — a public-radio programme based in the San Francisco Bay Area — Butler ran headfirst into some of the hard facts she managed to evade on the page.
For the greater part of the interview, Butler goes on at length about how losing one’s sense of “superiority” or “inevitability” or “natural[ness]” in the face of bold new formulations of gender is a source of “grief” for some people — mostly fascists, who must learn how to live in a “broader and more capacious world” and “accept equality and the expansive nature of kinship and of gender”. She gives little consideration to the possible existence of legitimate grievances, such as female athletes who are being asked to accept inequality in their own sporting leagues and who must contend with the “expansive nature” of certain men’s entitlement.
The terrain shifts when the show opens up to questions from the audience. When “Kevin” calls in, for example, Butler loses her glib sure-footedness. Kevin raises concerns about girls with “underlying conditions, it could be maybe anxiety or autism,” who find themselves drawn to transgender identities but later detransition. He asks if there are “any dangers for people getting wrapped up in this and having it severely affect their life and mental health.”
“Ums” and “uhs” clutter Butler’s response. She wants to be “careful, uh, about making generalisations” — not previously a concern of Butler’s — “and I’m not sure, for instance, what an ‘underlying condition’ is, who’s determining that. My guess is we probably all have underlying conditions! I certainly would be surprised if I didn’t have one [Butler laughs nervously here] and who doesn’t live without anxiety?”
If Butler expected to find an adoring listenership in the ultra-liberal Bay Area, she misjudged how much public understanding and opinion has shifted over the past few years. It’s one thing to endorse vague nonsense about authenticity and self-exploration, quite another to sign on to the trans movement’s actual agenda. Public support for youth gender transition, and policies that put males in female spaces and sports, is cratering. Even in California, over half the residents surveyed said they were against trans participation in women’s sport, while a sizeable proportion (41%) were opposed to gender transitions under the age of 18.
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SubscribeAh, but the world as I think it should be is much more attractive and easier to promote, and anything that detracts from the purity of my vision must therefore be evil.
/sarcasm
The same could be said for numerous academics and ideologues who live in their world of groupthink. Ideas that deviate from prevailing orthodoxy are not debated; they are considered illegitimate and, as such, unworthy of consideration. Whenever challenged on its dogma, the faculty lounge responds in the same sputtering manner ascribed to Butler’s radio appearance.
I would say that these modern pseudo-scholars have learned to write in abstractions to disguise from us– and more importantly from themselves– that they are saying little or nothing, and often what little they say is pernicious.
Alexis de Tocqueville warned in 1840 that “An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom: you can put in any ideas you please and take them out again without anyone being the wiser.”
Couldn’t agree more. It’s language used not to communicate but to exclude. No-one is welcome to their word salad world but those who have learnt this form of impressive looking but almost meaningless verbiage.
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account
Exactly! Orwell warned us!
Ha ha ha! I offer you my most enthusiastic contrafibularities!
Teach me to talk like that. I want people to think I’m smart. Without doing the work, of course.
“exhibits no tendency”? None? Only true if there’s no such thing as innateness, which seems innately true.
Thanks for that excellent quote.
You’re very welcome! Lennon O Naraigh above is directing us to George Orwell’s wonderful essay “Politics and the English Language,” which I can’t recommend too highly.
Not sure that opaque writing and thinking is confined to modern “pseudo-scholars” – I have read quite a lot of opaque crap in my several years of academic study. In many cases it is just that academics can’t write. In Judith Butler’s case I suspect it is smoke and mirrors to get people to believe she is brilliant and to allow people to interpret it any way that suits their prejudice. Personally I find her way too impressed with herself. Kathleen Stock is an exceptional example of an academic who thinks and writes clearly, if not beautifully. I read everything by her for the sheer delight in the writing. I also tend to agree with everything she says.
“In Judith Butler’s case I suspect it is smoke and mirrors to get people to believe she is brilliant and to allow people to interpret it any way that suits their prejudice.”
James Lindsay notes that Judith Butler functions as a guru-type figure in the modern cult of Trans/Queer gender nonsense. Cults typically have a leader–or at least an inner circle of those who lead—who is the ultimate and only authoritative voice qualified to determine what The Truth is. The abstract and vague nature of their teachings is an essential feature, because it means that no one person can ever master or understand The Truth on their own. They must always return to the indispensable Master for further guidance and clarification. Butler can gas on endlessly and no one can ever pin her down; no one can refute her because her words are fog; no one will ever know the final truth because only she can certify it.
A few yars ago, I made a short analysis of the infamous passage that had been singled out as an outstanding instance of bad style in English, and I argued that it had a lot to say if you read it properly – and all of it bad. Here is my analysis:
…Let me show you how the famous passage that everyone quotes against her is actually quite meaningful and significant.
“…The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power…”
It’s actually worse than just bad and pretentious, as most people seem to think, What it amounts to is trying to promote actual and very wicked ideas in such a way that their wickedness is not easily recognized. The key words are “hegemony” and “change”, although change is a word she never uses – it would make her meaning too clear. What she is saying is: Marxists (Althusser was an extreme Marxist) understood cultural “hegemony”, the power of culture over thought, as a “relatively homologous” set of facts; that is, they had clear terms to determine the power relationships within culture. In fact, if you read the first part of the first sentence carefully – the part from “The move” to “hegemony,” what she is describing is a “move” (of interpretation, understanding, theory) from “capital” to “hegemony”. And this “hegemony” is “subject to repetition, convergence and re-articulation.” “Capital,” in the end, is clear enough; it is easy to locate it in society, to see who has and who doesn’t, to a considerable extent, to determine what it does and how it affects people. “Hegemony” in the abstract, on the other hand, can only be located, at best, by its effects; that is, whatever has an effect on society can be said to be a hegemony. More to the point, I think, whatever can be said to have an effect on society – that is, whatever I the writer can point to as having an effect on society – is a hegemony.
We also have to notice an even more deeply hidden layer of meaning in this bizarre sentence. It contains what is in effect a one-on-one correspondence between “capital” and “hegemony.” What she is saying is that the position of “capital” within the Marxist scheme of things has been taken, in hers, by “hegemony.” But, quite apart from the fact that in Marxism capital is itself a product of social processes, that is to some extent a contingent rather than eternal category, the role of “capital” in practically all Marxism, vulgar and otherwise, is negative and to be opposed. Marxist morality begins with a rejection of the moral effects of capital. To place “hegemony” in place of “capital” in this uncritical, one-on-one way, is to imply that “hegemony” is bad. And this is not just unacceptable (is the “hegemony” of the opposition to paedophilia a bad thing?), but contains a hideous intellectual temptation; because, as I just pointed out, a hegemony, being so subjected to “repetition, convergence and re-articulation,” can be located practically anywhere in society. In other words, I the writer am going to determine “hegemony” any way I damn well please, because I can find it in all sorts of different places and ways. (For instance – this is my comment on Ms.Butler’s position – I, a powerful and privileged academic, can cast myself as a victim of a “hegemony” if I can locate it smartly enough on a map of the “rearticulation of power.”)
This is the practical sense and utility of this admittedly terrible style. It does indeed have a content: one that sane people would reject, if it was stated in a sane style. Marxism is not defensible, but the clarity of its categories is a defence against worse things, and Judith Butler has removed that defence. She keeps the bad Marxist idea of “hegemony”, whereby the features ofa culture are purely determined by economic and power relationships – that is, the culture is essentially a justification of existing power structures – but removes the objective (and useful) view of economic power within society. Anything can be an oppressive hegemony.
I hope you now appreciate the “practical use” of such overcomplicated run-on sentences, even though I wholly agree that there is no literary value to them. For literary value goes with understanding – not necessarily clarity; Shakespeare deliberately complicated his sentences, but made his mood and sense very clear. But the practical value of Ms.Butler’s s style is that of the stage magician’s hand-waving, trying not to make you see what the other hand is doing. And there is a hilarious corollary to this. Ask yourself: who, in recent years, has shown, in spite of a privileged background and even more privileged social position, a practically infinite ability to consider himelf oppressed by all sorts of wicked hegemonies? That’s right. Ms.Butler is the spiritual mother of Donald Trump.
Fortunately, Judith Butler’s writing is so impenetrable that it stands little chance of influencing any thinking whatsoever. An irresistible exhortation to revolution written in a completely indecipherable script would not cause harm because nobody would understand it. Such is Butler’s work.
Iin other words, it’s a way of making people think you’re clever when actually you’re extremely stupid. That’s the academic world I know and, er, love.
A propos, a great photo, in it this Judith Butler looks like a 100% fraud.
One would think good writing would be an a priori for academics. But one would be wrong. I agree that Kathleen Stock is the real deal: a rigorous academic who writes clearly and well. But then, she didn’t shackle herself to a nonsensical field like “gender studies”. Having spent time around graduate students doing pretty questionable degrees in gender studies in the early to mid-nineties I tried my best to read Judith Butler et. al and some of it was fun fodder for stoned speculation. But it wasn’t fun to read nor was it serious scholarship. And that has not changed. Gender isn’t the only thing being performed in Judith Butler’s case: she does a credible job of playing an academic on TV, but she’s not a real one.
As “gender-affirming care” comes under pressure in the United States, public relations specialists at the recent US Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Denver instructed clinicians to avoid specifics in favour of unobjectionable generalities: don’t say mastectomies. Do say “medically-necessary care”. This is why trans activists are advised to avoid public scrutiny — the better to pass unpopular policies.
—
This is the point at which it is time for the doctors involved in this matter to be hung from ship’s yardarms, and for figures like Judith Butler to knock their brains out.
Good job, Eliza! We have to save these girls
I’m surprised JB took questions from anyone anywhere. They almost always stick to the same playbook – the science is settled and anyone who disagrees is a hateful fasc!st who wants to kill granny or the grandkids.
No, they might mean that but nobody could possibly understand that from their super long, impenetrable sentences
Much more interesting than anything Ms Butler has to opine, is why anyone listened, and took her seriously, in the first place.
If only we had a modern Diogenes willing to publicly mock these pseudo-scholars in person.
Or indeed Aristophanes could write a play where an ordinary Joe gets into their faculty common room and sits amazed at their ‘intelligence’ to the delight of the audience.
If only. I’m nominating Trump. He could do it, and it would keep him out of trouble.
Hmm – a rather odd casting choice for Diogenes.
Her behaviour’s very like yours, Mr Wright !! A lil’ bit of bigotry and a lot of gutless running away when called out. 🙂
‘The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand’ – Donald Fagen
All ‘elites’ are toppled.Their ideas always seem bizarre and weird as f**k once they are gone. How close is the West to revolution?
‘Stubborn opacity’ is a good phrase for it. Puts me in mind of a lyric from the great Donald Fagen: ‘The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand.’
I actually think Judith Butler is analogous to a pure mathematician who came up with some very esoteric math of no interest to anybody outside her highly rarified academic area, and then somebody comes up with a technology where all of a sudden the math is applied.
I think for Butler it was smart phones and social media. It meant that for a significant minority of the population, particularly the “laptop class” in media and academia, an online life lived through representations on a screen became a part of their personal experience. So, Butler’s ideas about gender being a performance and being able to make up your own labels suddenly made sense and resonated with a lot of extremely online people.
What is driving the activism and advocacy underlying gender ideology is people who want to be able to select their own avatar, name, and desktop in 3D-meatspace in the same way they do on their phones. And they get very upset whenever other people, not so screen-oriented, insist that actually that isn’t how real life works.
There are two differences. Firstly, mathematicians are usually very keen to try to include others. Secondly, abstract pure mathematics often turns out to be shockingly useful.
… and true
Yes, the gender orthodoxy that came after JB’s key work over the last 15 years is a creation of an Internet imaginary.
No, it’s the work of creation itself, and dates back a lot farther than the internet.
I like the idea that the abstract of an academic paper should be accessible to a non-specialist, perhaps an interested amateur. This is a bit optimistic. Clearly, impossible in advanced mathematics, or science or very specific areas of study.
It would seem, however, that while fully understanding papers about society, people, sex etc, writers should be able to communicate, to some extent with a general audience. We should be able to follow what the writer is trying to prove without being able to follow the proof.
At least, there should be an attempt. Who understands the slightest concept that Butler discusses that is not a specialist? Moreover does Butler care?
One thing about mathematicians is that they are generally desperate to make people interested in their work.
Reminiscent of the Sokal hoax, which showed quite clearly that in modern social ‘science’ debates, once the jargon becomes sufficiently clotted and curdled, it’s who you are, not what you say, that gets your voice heard – as long as your language is sufficiently incomprehensible and imparsable.
Good God, why do people give a moment’s thought to this hideous woman and her ilk? The proper response to her, if one is necessary, is oh, f*ck off.
Very well said Allison!..
That language is too clear for Ms. Butler. You’ll need to translate it for her.
Actually, a better one to her might be ‘calm down, dear’.
Outside of the circles of deconstruction that should be deconstructed to stage any critique that isn’t directly political or religious, JB’s problem is indeed one of the passing of time.
Her philosophy took on some of the reactionary forces of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, her best book on hate speech looks at the perverse use of ambiguous precedents on free expression by the Supreme Court.
But what caught up with her is the fact that a defence of queer liberation through gender could not account for the progressive embrace of deconstructionary notions of self and subjecthood by plastic surgeons, pharma envoys, misguided educational and clinical psychologists, and a hyper-narcissistic new fellowship of Internt militants.
In effect, her books from the 90s and early 00s have little to nothing to do with these groups of radicals. Yet hers was the status of high priestess of an academic culture which has indirectly fostered a defence of these malign forces. It’s through her own academic ego and unquestioning devotion to the Left that a veritable cultural war machine has been constructed and which she still helps navigate today.
Something like the relationship between Martin Luther and the Muenster Anabaptists, eh?
The Sokal Hoax in 1996 and the more recent “Grievance Studies Affair”, as outlined by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, illustrate the pseudo-intellectual basis of post-modernism.
Ask yourself why there are few, if any, post-modernists in Chemistry departments but an overwhelming majority in Gender and Grievance Studies? Also ask why their ‘discourse’ is often aggressive when asked to explain their case (e.g., Stonewall’s “No Debate” mantra, cancel culture, sack the TERF etc.).
The Gender Ideology and Queer Theory of Judith Butler is unscientific, non-rigorous and flawed. It has resulted in huge public policy mistakes, such as, the ‘gender affirmation’ policy at the Tavistock and the push for Gender Self-Recognition in Scotland (and soon to be in England once Starmer gets in)
Yes – but what we should not forget is that Sokal long predates the whole trans thing, as do the Grievance studies hoaxes. If the whole trans thing had not ignited in the way it has, Judith Butler would still be lauded as a major feminist thinker – and doubtless in some circles still is.
Its not enough to criticise her – we need to learn our lesson. If the furore over trans dies down, the kinds of drivel Sokal et al mocked and made ridiculous will be back. And some of those now criticising Judith Butler for backing the wrong horse will be spouting similarly egregious nonsense.
I think all the post-modernists are too busy doing pretend science on ‘climate change’.
“There is increasing awareness among parents, caregivers, clinicians and therapists that there is a clear link between gender identity issues and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Currently, 76% of referees to The Tavistock & Portman Gender Identity Service (GIDS) are adolescent girls, and from The Tavistock’s statistics that 48% either have a diagnosis of, or show traits of Autism. 1
Altogether, this is an astonishing number of young people sharing characteristics that are usually only present in 1% of the population. While there is clear evidence that there is a link between the number of children and young people with gender dysphoria or identifying under the transgender umbrella, there is no research that looks at why. Part of the reason for this is that the exponential rise in children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria or identifying as trans has taken place very quickly – too fast in fact, for research to keep up.”
Transgendertrend.com has much more to say about the issue
This is why Gender Ideology is so dangerous. It fails to understand biology, causation, probabilities, best medical practice, and evidence-based reasoning. Here are a few issues with the Ideology of Judith Butler:
1. If up to 90% of children with Gender Dysphoria grow out of it by going through puberty, surely the ‘gender affirmation’ approach that administers puberty blockers ‘to buy time’ is a bad strategy for the majority?
2. If 98% of children on puberty blockers graduate to cross sex hormones, puberty blockers do not ‘buy time’, they are the first part of the pathway?
3. If children who are gender confused also exhibit significantly higher tendencies towards ADHD, autism, and same sex attraction, surely ‘gender affirmation’ is not best practice? Dr Cass advised ‘gender exploratory’ therapy for this reason (but an incoming Labour government could rule this as ‘conversion therapy’).
4. Cass also pointed to the ‘gaps in the evidence’, including the nasty known and unknown side effects of off label drugs, such as, puberty blockers and cross sex hormones.
The Cass Review and the WPATH Files blow a huge hole in this demented ideology.
Accurate description of KQED show. Back in the early ’80s one of my close friends was a UCB grad student in philosophy. He attended Butler’s first conference on Queer Theory. I asked what it was, the only answer he gave, it is the newest thing in philosophy. Fifteen years later, I asked my massage client, Butler’s colleague deconstructionist Avital Ronell, to explain Queer Theory, same response.
Good face for radio?
Like most of the charlatans peddling the latest academic sociological “theory” she is prone to vomiting an incoherent stew of word salad which when exposed to the cleansing light of open public debate doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and she has to arrogate moral righteousness.Frankly if her and her ilk simply disappeared nobody would notice.
This is just a grift. If you are not that clever or have little original insight, say outrageous things to get attention and enrage a section of society. It’s a way to make money if you are an “intellectual” and are not that smart or original.
Judith Butler is impenetrable.
arf arf