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December 18, 2024 - 2:30pm
Next March marks 35 years since the publication of Gender Trouble, a book which, in the words of its author Judith Butler, “was important for many people because it allowed them to see that they were born into a world where there were very strong expectations about what it means to be a man or a woman”.
To be fair, it was hardly the first work to do this. One might look to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, or to countless feminist books, speeches and essays which critique sex-role stereotyping. If Gender Trouble is original, it is not for what it adds to the debate, but for the insight it strips out. It is feminist analysis with all of the feminism removed.
Butler reminds us of this un-feminist feminism in an interview with El País’s Iker Seisdedos published on Sunday. Here, she describes Gender Trouble as having told those who fail to meet gendered expectations to regard “that failure” as “actually very promising if considered through the lens of an autonomous spirit that deviates from the path, not agreeing to abide by norms, finding another way”.
In case you are wondering, there are no precise details regarding this “other way”. It’s hard not to think Martha Nussbaum nailed it in her 1999 essay “Professor of Parody”, in which she suggested Butler preferred “sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change”. Certainly, whatever is meant by “another way”, it is not any serious challenge to gender norms, or the oppressive structures they serve to bolster. Try engaging in that, and you’ll find yourself accused by Butler of “operating within a fascist logic”, perhaps even of allying with the far-Right to instigate a “phantasm about gender”. Butler might claim to dislike “strong expectations” of what it means to be a woman, but she sure as hell doesn’t like women who fail to be soft, compliant, and always prepared to “open the category and invite some more people in”.
The El País interview is disappointing — though, really, it shouldn’t be. As far as sex and gender are concerned, it rehashes the same tired, anti-feminist non-gotchas which appear in the fifth chapter of Butler’s most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? If Butler didn’t change between the publication of Gender Trouble and that book, why should she be any different a few months down the line? It’s disappointing, all the same. There is something bewildering, not to mention enraging, about the utter lack of growth in Butler’s vision. If anything, it has become increasingly narrow. As more and more evidence piles up of the practical cost of denying the immutability and political salience of biological sex, Butler becomes more and more obtuse.
She dodges questions, feigns misunderstanding, or drifts into whataboutery. When Seisdedos attempts to pin down what is meant by “finding another way”, wondering where Butler would “draw the line for considering a minor ready to break these rules”, she waffles. When she is asked about “parents who are worried about their children making mistakes”, she recounts having “a man say to me in Chile that he didn’t want a gay or lesbian family living next door to him” — which is bad, but hardly related to whether or not an autistic 14-year-old should have her breasts cut off.
Asked to comment on the role of the pharmaceutical industry in “gender-affirming” treatments, Butler notes that “hormone replacement therapy for women who are postmenopausal is a much bigger industry”. She then suggests that puberty blockers sit on a continuum with kids “questioning gender norms, including the version of masculinity that Trump represents”. On the topic of women’s objections to trans activism, she attempts to conflate “trans struggles” with women knowing “how difficult and necessary it is to struggle for autonomy”. Clearly not too much autonomy, though, lest one becomes Hitler-adjacent.
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SubscribeActivism never grows up. The enterprise is uniquely incapable of claiming victory because doing so would necessarily mean the end of the enterprise. This is true of the race hustlers, whatever ‘feminism’ means today, gay rights, and so forth. Each of these groups is dedicated to perpetuating whatever issue they’re tied to, even if it means bending reality beyond all credulity.
Yes Alex. Gay marriage was the cutting edge of activism ten years ago. As soon as it was granted, the next day it was all about transgenderism. The Omnicause never ends because leftists are never satisfied for a minute.
No isolated “ism” does. But you have exiled all the activists to the side you hate. According to Merriam Webster, activism is: A doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue. By that measure, activism refers to J6ers and Women’s Marchers alike, the Canadian Truckers and Antifa. Not all of those involved in ANY of those causes are professional complainers, angry dreamers, or people stuck in Peter Pan mode.
And some activism was needed to get women the vote and end segregation in the South, both pretty uncontroversial changes now, except on the fringe. The fact that they were followed by a smaller contingent of trans radicals or Black Panthers is not the fault of every marcher or campaigner.
That picture… and a total flight of fancy… for some completely inexplicable reason our protagonist Judith Butler looks like the spitting image of Spike Milligan. ‘Western Civilization, and my part in its downfall’.
It’s interesting seeing the response to the comments under Unherd feminist articles. You get lots of downticks, but not a single reasoned reply. Just like the article itself.
You’ve noticed! You also find the most interesting comments at the bottom – even if I say so myself.
Doltish beast
Most people who agree with Judith Butler are feminists, the majority are women, the majority of feminists certainly agrees with Butler, and the majority of women from Victoria Smith’s own demographic probably does. In fact, those last are the people most likely to agree with Butler. While I am as gender critical as anyone, there is no basis for the use of “women” and “feminists” to mean only people of Smith’s (and my) view.
Yes, it sets up a false opposition. This is basically a fight within feminism, with one side trying to pull in social conservatives as cannon fodder. As for these last, they don’t have enough cultural memory to know they are being had.
Social conservatives have a thoroughly Boomer or (my lot) Generation X idea of what they want to conserve. Their attitude to Islam, for example, is purely post-War Western. They have no interest in answering it with a return to structured daily prayer, to the setting aside one day in seven, to fasting, to almsgiving, to pilgrimage, to the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, to the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, to the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, to the coherence between faith and reason, and to a consequently integrated view of art and science. Their blanket opposition to immigration would prevent the re-Christianisation of the West, including Britain, and that is exactly why they hold that view.
In other words she advocates an extreme form of individualism in which social norms are stripped away, and any sense of what is natural is just seen as oppression in disguise.
I’m not sure how different this is from feminism. It strikes me as its continuation. And it’s certainly in line with the direction capitalism has taken since the 60s. All that is solid melts into air.
One of the most fascinating things about Butler is that she does not identify as a woman. Read Gender Trouble and you will find out why.
It is such an epochal work. Yet I have never seen a summary of her ideas in the mainstream media.
There is a reason of course. If her ideas were set down in black and white they could be discussed, evaluated and rejected.
And doing that you expose to the light of day the arguments Academic Feminists adopted in 1990 and which became the dominant strand of Feminism right up until the gender confused days of 2024. How many feminist writers are prepared to pay that price? Expose Feminism itself to such criticism that it would be damaged beyond recognition?
You’re too on the ball to get many upvotes I’m afraid.
Of course when the book came out it was possible for feminists to see themselves as the heroes of the story – rejecting patriarchal gender norms and ideals of female beauty etc. being unfeminine (read loud, obnoxious and bullying) and in general rejecting gender norms and smashing stereotypes.
Nobody thought then that in a few short decades they might be out done by, of all things, men in frocks.
It’s to Butlers credit that she has pursued her ideas – the ideas of feminism itself – to their logical conclusion. Even if these conclusions don’t much suit other feminists of her generation.
Watching social constructivists and other erstwhile biology deniers start to snuggle up to biology for support against the implications of their own ideas is far more embarrassing.
Perhaps you can admire her as some sort of weird, austere, priestess who ages before your eyes. But I don’t.
She adopted Trans to further the aims set out in Gender Trouble, even though she knew it was a lie that there were gender identities which you could move between.
At that moment she sold her soul to the devil and young people are paying the price, their bodies ripped up and their minds twisted.
To be honest, I think her ideas are just warmed over French existentialism, which is obvious from one of her early papers. It’s just existence precedes essence for gender, and the performativity idea (gender is constituted by its enactment) is pure Sartre.
My own view is that the distinction sex/gender is untenable as a description of reality. The two are completely interlocked and differences in personality, behaviour and (to a lesser degree) roles are grounded in biological sex to a significant degree. People just are not blank slates on which society writes gender.
This is a low level hit piece, and it fails to engage with the fact that Butler really is pursuing the feminist agenda to its goal – the complete separation of gender from sex. So that gender becomes something lightly worn, a role which is played or not as the player desires – rather that a set of behaviours rooted, at least to a significant degree in biological sex.
Yes. You’ve hit a nerve there! Look at all the red downticks.
It’s me and thee in a race to the bottom!
Be sure, they will break the bottom.
Lots of red but no one has bothered to counter your comments
Try mine.
What is feminism? It’s panties in a bunch. Discuss.
Another empty article from an Unherd feminist writer.
Butler’s Gender Trouble, published in 1990, is one of the most influential books ever written. She set out a manifesto to cause gender trouble, and looking at England today, you can see she has achieved it. Boy says to his teacher. “Teacher! I think I am a girl.” Teacher replies “Of course you are dear.” A primary school near you.
Yet another article in Unherd which will not engage with the substance or argument of a classic book of Feminism, leaving readers none the wiser, what Gender is, what Gender Trouble means, why she wrote it, and why it has been so influential to this day.
I agree that the article lacks substance—and balance. But you seem to be making“influential” interchangeable with “good”. Mao and Adolf wrote highly influential little books too (I know these are nth-degree examples). Have you read much of Butler’s tortured prose, which is like some troll’s send up of the English language itself? You seem to be more familiar with her work, but I’ve suffered through enough of it to find great justice in Nussbaum’s influential article, which Victoria Smith did bother to name in this hasty takedown piece.
I said the book is influential. I didn’t say it was good.
Yes I read a lot of philosophy. I find her writing very clear. She does repeat herself endlessly, saying the same thing in ten different word orders.