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.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
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.
And now transgenderism is about making sadistic paedophilia ok.
Yup
You are forgetting being allowed to marry farm yard animals
Oh yes, thanks for supplying my omission.
Whereas THIS was a welcome addition? I’m gonna be a bit charitable and credit you with a lively sense of humour, in particular when you’re not banging out an insistent drumbeat. Your contributions have become much more varied and civil lately. Cheers.
Well, no one is doing this, but if it were happening, would it be the marriage that is offensive to you, rather than the sexual acts?
Or, was it perhaps the christian infested right who has continued to push trans issues into/onto the cultural & political spheres?
Nah, it’s the pedos, fetishists and their enablers pushing it 100%. Extra points for bring a slimeball, by the way.
There’s money to be made; Stonewall was never going to give up those lucrative jobs
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.
Maybe there should be a distinction between Activism and Performative Activism. Butler’s theory is something like “Life is performed until it is actualized. At that point is becomes the truth.”
I know you don’t like the Ism’s but the proliferation of performed activism in Socialist ideologies appears never ending. It’s like an Omnicause as the poster above states. One cause constantly bleeds into the next because no amount of change is transcendent enough.
It feels like they’re stuck in a sunk cost continuum where every failure just reinforces a need to double down.
Once it’s institutionalized or professionalized, I get that. I just want to separate sincere and meaningful activism from that toxic or performative kind.
Yes, that’s the distinction.
One the one hand, people who become activists because they see a cuase that deserves support.
On the other hand, people whose entire identity, worldview, and -crucially – livelihood depends on perpetuating some ‘injustice’.
For this second group, a problem: sooner or later the demand for ‘injustice’ exceeds the supply, and a new seam has to be found somewhere, somehow.
“sooner or later the demand for ‘injustice’ exceeds the supply, and a new seam has to be found somewhere, somehow.”
Thus Stonewall’s pivot to transgender activism once the supply of homosexual oppression had been exhausted.
All the ‘-isms’ are seen as road blocks on the march to Utopia. So when one road block is removed there is always another impeding the long march.
Of course Utopia can never be realised because people are not blank slates – so ‘the march’ becomes purpose enough, for some.
Great point. Somehow an insight into the hubris described in the tower of Babel story emerges from your comment.
“But you have exiled all the activists to the side you hate.”
No he hasn’t. It’s clear from the context that he’s talking about woke activists.
I don’t agree, not in the context of his many recent comments. And even if that’s the intended meaning, it’s still fair to fill in the implied—or missing—distinction.
I think people of all stripes tend to exempt zealots that lean in their direction from charges of ideological tunnel vision or extremism, as in: “We’re on a righteous mission/justice march, but They are braindead/soul-sick activists/bigots”. As a species we could do a way better job of correcting for our biases, yet still stop well short of postcolonialist self-flagellation and other overreach found under the woke umbrella. And not side with maniacs or extremesters simply because they appear to belong to Our Side. Fairly obvious to many I’m sure, but I don’t feel bad about saying it.
It’s a bit like answering the question “is there any beer left?” in the affirmative on the basis that beer still exists, when the questioner is obviously asking whether there is still some beer in the fridge.
Whereas your defense of a onesided presentation is a BIT like saying: “We all know that whiskey and water exist in abundance. I only want to hear about beer”.
Incidentally, I like beer, even if it doesn’t like me back as much. But it sure weighs you down when you don’t moderate your intake and vary your liquid diet.
The philosophy of activism is shoot first, think later. And the thinking is only there to justify the shooting.
It involves black and white thinking, an inability and unwillingness to see the other point of view. Opponents are portrayed as evil, ill or both. It shows a lack of awareness of where the activists own passions really come from – and these passions are supercharged with negative emotions: hate, spite, bitterness, resentment.
Few of them can hide their real motives and feelings from others because expressing them helps them to vent. Only they and their fellows are in the dark. They are constantly angry, often as much at those who disagree with them slightly as with their opponents. And their anger is always out of proportion.
They see changing your mind in the face of evidence or argument as a weakness, and they seek to control and recruit others in ways that are frankly cult like.
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.
Agreed.
When one starts a pseudo-job at an NGO as a starry-eyed political activist – just out of college with a Social Sciences degree and professors’ encouragement that they are going to “change the world” – one doesn’t comprehend that evolutionary life and ‘growing up’ will still happen to them, whether they like it or not.
The job turns into a career for the one-trick pony. And, soon, there’s a mortgage to pay, hungry kids’ mouths to feed, hobbies to enjoy, vacations to plan and so forth.
So when gays and lesbians won equal rights and the issue went away, many of these activists required – nay, demanded – the creation of other causes so they could pay the bills, no matter how worthy or unworthy those other causes were.
The world needs to understand that undereducated Social Science activists are opportunistic mercenaries above all else. Otherwise, they’re out of a job. Fomenting grievance and anger in society is what pays the bills. As a society, we allowed activism to be “professionalized.”
And the universities haven’t done anyone any favors by creating academic inflation of irrelevant and worthless Social Science college degrees that relegate these kids with a large school debt to either working at a university’s administration offices, in HR, as a social justice activist for a non-profit entity, or as a barista.
The older generations have failed the younger generations by not pushing them (and holding their universities accountable) to obtain a real education, thereby qualifying those ‘activist’ students for real – as in, accretive to society – jobs in the real world.
This is spot on. I think this is why Socialists claim “Real Socialism has never been tried.” Anti-Capitalist advocates frequently become grievance market opportunists. One might call it a form of Champagne Socialism. The more dysfunctional society becomes the more they can profit off their vision. Total Cobra Effect.
Mostly true but I don’t believe they are hitting the milestones of family formation and children
So they compensate by gimcracking purposivity into their pointless lives.
100% accurate.
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.
I had a professor in a graduate History of Rhetoric class who said “I could argue that she wrote some of the clearest prose in English”. I thought that was absurd, though I respected him overall. I can see he’s not alone in that assessment.
Then again philosophy and rhetoric both tend to lean pretty heavily on abstraction and speculation. As more of a literature and history guy, I’ll read Aristotle or Hume with real interest (not discipline or expertise) but appreciate that Plato at least contains versions of real people talking about things that are real, in addition to the realm of Ideas.
Her early articles are easier going – are more revealing of her influences.
I see. I’ll look into in when I get through more of the tall stack of books I’ve recently assigned myself, including Democracy in America by Tocqueville (maybe 50 pages into a 900-page paperback).
The better read to be honest. And surprisingly relevant today.
After hearing it praised so much, and enjoying (much of) the parts I’ve read so far, I decided it’s time to learn more about the country I live in—according to a smart Frenchman in 1840.
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.
Your first paragraph is a perfect description of the heart of the liberal project as a whole. It inevitably leads to progressivism.
The last sentence, which sums this up, is, of course, Marx in the Communist Manifesto who saw this effect of capitalism even in his own time.
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.
I’m wondering what you learned gentlemen think of the notion of ‘difference’ propounded by Luce Irigaray? To my mind, one of the most intelligent and profound of thinkers around this and many other issues.
Butler’s agenda and that of her acolytes who are warping so-called feminism – it was, and is, not the agenda of those feminist women who never questioned the reality of biological sex and for whom feminism was about achieving equality of opportunity and freedom from the oppression of a male dominated society that denied women basic rights, confined and controlled them, refused them the vote and so on.
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.
This is an interesting post, that deserves an UnHerd article of its own.
PS. Though I don’t agree that re-Christianisation is impossible without immigration!
‘…pull in social conservatives’?
Not sure that’s quite right, David. My chagrined gut says that social conservatism and traditional patriarchal masculinity has played a much more influential role in the rise of gender twaddle than most of us boring old cis blokes will ever admit. In the early days at least, and the more reactionary and misogynist manifestations of those worldviews, anyway. Butler’s Ur-work, as Smith deftly pings, reads like the kind of flibberty-jibber musing a fifteen year old fizzing with hormones emotes into her journal…which she bemusedly burns the day after her first decent shag (with whichever gender her bit-more-evolved sexual identify has nudged her towards). I suspect it really only got the wider traction it did because it handed the more toxic of we masculine boofheads a bit of usefully fresh ammo for, and a new angle on, keeping all them newly-uppity chicks in their proper place.
After all: the overwhelming legacy of Judith Butler’s life’s work, and all the outward tsunami-ripples of the whacky gender-mutilation cult it has generated, has turned out to be the regressive re-objectification of the same-old binary-reactionary gender stereotypes, at a cunningly-penetrative civic scale and with a brutally-imprisoning compartmentalisation that puts even the most overtly sexist of straightforwardly toxic males to shame. Gay male culture, and gay drag culture in particular, has always provided incubating refuge for nasty smartwomen-haters, beguilingly disguised as feminism’s d*ck-wielding household cavalry. Among the many bitterly bemusing ironies of the ‘Gender Wars’ of our times has been the pathetic spectacle of self-identifying ‘progressive’ and ‘inclusive’ male ‘feminists’ – grrrl-crowd-pleasingly needy creeps as diverse as Louis Theroux, Gary Lineker and any old DEI politician you might pluck from the populist-weatherc*cking breeze of the moment – witlessly reducing, all over again, society’s idea of what a ‘woman’ can (only) properly be to the banal public superficialities of Barbi doll dress-uppery, the permanently ghettoising politics of passive-aggressive victimhood, and erotic subservience in the bedroom. Jolly well played, FauxManFeminism! Penises, vaginas, menstruation, babies, lustful orgasmic imperative, all the gloriously indecent animal helplessnesses of biology? Oh, away, away, bienpensant Villagers, hide them from contemplation again, strap down your willies, banish your menses to the Big Pharma bleeding hut…objectify, distance, sanitise your bodily self.
That silent applauding cacophony you can hear is coming from assembled generations of priests, princes and prohibitionists, always terrified of the flesh, and lately marvelling at how it was finally defeated by – of all its would-be oppressors – those masquerading as its great arriving liberationists.
Not so much ‘pulled in’, I would suggest then, as standing wisely back in awe, and letting the truly and more effectively regressive misogynists of nominally ‘progressive’ political activism do the catastrophically Village-trashing heavy lifting on their behalves!
Any chance you can cut the word count!
Butlers popularity predates the trans blow up and was founded on feminism and gender (formerly women’s) studies.
I could. Not getting paid, though, so not sure I have the time. Point however taken, David, a little abashedly. One is an enthusiast. (And all this space…!)
Yes, Butler predates Mermaids, et omnia quae sequuntur (thank you Google translate). But my point is really the same as many (including you) have made here: that in eroding the notion of binary gender boundaries she was exposing feminism to exactly the risks of…well, emasculation (forgive) that are long now realised.You and I do differ fundamentally on whether Butler’s work is ‘feminist’; I think it and she are no such thing. And that that’s why many reactionary ‘social conservatives’ – misogynists (straight, gay, male or female) can’t be true social conservatives – have been content to see her (and similar fellow travellers) undermining the broader feminist project. That feminists of the calibre of Professor Stock and Julie Bindel have to waste so much time and energy on this bullsh*t, rather than focussing on the many lingering gender issues feminism more properly ought to be concerned with, must be exasperating for them.
I doubt ‘gender critical’ feminists of their kind are especially thrilled to have become accidental intellectual pin-up girls for many of us socially conservative men, as a collateral consequence of their (tiresomely necessary) turf war, either. We all applaud ‘TERFs’ when they go after the mutilation cult cranks; our enthusiastic adulation fades somewhat when they return to their bread and butter work, on issues like male violence, inequality and toxic masculinity in general, huh!
Entertaining, sir, with insights interspersed. Please consider that adverbs are not helping your posts, at least when they are used so truly abundantly.
Everyone’s a critic – some are even instructive and acute, AJ. Thank you, I will take your gracious pointer on board.
I had the same thing pointed out to me years ago but now I talk and write pretty goodly 😉
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’.
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.
More or less. But she was ground breaking in her own right. Female roles are socially constructed (De Beauvoir). She went further claiming ‘biologically female’ is also a social construction created by one group (some sort of proto-male) to oppress another group (some sort of proto-woman). As you can see she is walking on very thin ground.
Then rewrite language. Create a new use of the word ‘gender’. Assert it has no link to biology (which she has ‘proved’ doesn’t even exist), it is roleplay, performative. Let anyone be male or female gender, as they like, when they like. Teach that to children, using Drag as an example. “Teacher. Is that a man or a woman? Both dear.” Blur the binary of male/female, and if this can be done, the oppressor group fractures, as does the oppressed group. There is no group of women as there was before. Can men join the group? Sure. Let’s break the binary even more.
It’s all perfectly logical IF you start from the premise men oppress women as some sort of overarching truth.
There were never any transexual children. ‘Transexual’ gets renamed ‘transgender’. Since Butler, children have been taught, and continue to be taught, to be transgender. This is queer theory, It is everywhere, in the media, schools, sport, hospitals. Blur the binary. Why? To break free from oppression.
Great post, though the idea that binaries (generally) are epistemic constructs and never grounded in nature predates her. I always feel she is applying French ideas by rote.
American intellectuals of her generation saw French thinking as cutting edge, and a weapon to use against a more scientific culture which they saw as both outmoded and oppressive. It was seen as simply supporting the status quo.
A complete misinterpretation. It was French intellectual culture which was outmoded and pre Darwinian. Chomsky is very good on this. Even now you can see this in conversations with French people. They are still remarkably Cartesian in their thinking.
You can also add Rorty into the mix with his fake-hybrid Pragmatism, an extreme relativism, in which truth is reduced to nothing more than agreement within one group.
Philosophers took Rorty seriously! Then add to that an abstracted Marxism, whereby various groups are continually fighting for power and Butler is armed and ready to fight for women.
Second wave Feminism had prepared the ground for her by taking as their starting point (and end point) De Beauviur’s thesis that men hate women and therefore oppress them, and have done from the beginning of history.
Butler combined all of this and pushed further. There is no truth, only what the dominant group, men, proclaim it to be.
That is Butler. That is radical.
What did she want? To break and shatter that dominant group. Break their ‘truth’ that there are men, and there are women. Blur this boundary. If you find yourself as a woman, say no, refuse to be a woman. Wittig, another French philosopher, had proposed this in the 1980s. She said ‘Lesbians are not women.’ Butler agreed. You will not once hear or read Butler say she herself is a woman. She has their own pronoun.
Her/their project is being realised in UK.
It is frightening that no one is even aware of what is happening around them.
And it is British young people who suffer for it.
The media is partly responsible.
The same clique of Feminist writers, a Feminist herd, have a stranglehold on the newspapers, the magazines, television, radio, hiding the truth about what is going on, presumably out of shame, because the Gender Chaos in UK is a Feminist creation.
An informative, insightful exchange for someone less knowledgeable of these matters than either of you. It’s good to come across this kind of (increasingly rare) robust and civil discussion here. Thanks.
Julie Bindel vs Judith Butler is in essence a battle of two lesbian-isms, simply two strains of politicised sexual activism. Bindel wants a last-gen leftist lesbianism; Butler seeks a fluid non-binary homosexual identity with the potential for future transgressions to be accepted by the mainstream.
Obviously, Butler is far more dangerous and damaging, but Bindel hardly makes any more friends outside her immediate political circles by failing to recognise the increasing role of fetish in Western sexual identity while insisting on hoary old radical feminist truths (on porn, prostitution etc).
Like most postmodernist philosophers, Butler is fairly unreadable. But it is important that her – sorry, their – ideas are more widely discussed as they have insinuated themselves into almost every HR department without challenge.
She probably stands alongside Marshall Applewhite as a great 20th century thinker on gender issues.
Butler is NOT ‘a great 20th century thinker on gender issues’ although she has unfortunately been extremely influential… she is also not a ‘feminist’ for all her performative posturing as one with a radical intellect. She (and let’s stick with biological reality here and ignore her self-conscious preferred pronouns as she does not deserve that courtesy) has created an ‘industry’ that has caused untold damage to many vulnerable young people.
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
It seems only male people are sufficiently interested in Judith Butler to be bothered commenting on this article.
Ditto feminist thought generally and feminist history in particular. In general I am struck by how little people on here who take feminist positions actually know about their own movement. Even people who write on here!
Unfortunately, those who would follow her, and feminists generally, don’t feel a need to be self-critical.
“It has been a good run — 35 years — but the gig is well and truly up.”
No. She’s a tenured professor. Gig is going to keep going till she retires or pops her clogs.
Agreed. If the “gig is up” then what’s a professional activist to do? Become an uber or pizza delivery driver? Professional activists – with no career fallback – require relevance in society to collect meaningful paychecks.
Helen Lewis’s response to Jordan Peterson’s questioning of her “unhelpful” grievance profession in their debate about ‘The Patriarchy’ (TM) was telling.
Her reply after Jordan cornered her was:
“It’s a living.”
After all else is peeled back, this statement is the pure essence of truth concerning grievance professions.
Inreresting article, but I am still trying to figure out what this means: “she (Butler) sure as hell doesn’t like women who fail to be soft, compliant”. So she likes women who are soft/compliant? In what sense? As lovers? Am I missing some hidden reference here?
You are – in short she means: soft on trans.
I would have said Butler’s “gig was well and truly up” when she said of the 7 October 2023 atrocities that:
“We can have a debate about whether we think it’s right. It was an act of armed resistance. It is not a terrorist attack …”
But this was quite mainstream for academic feminism, which can overlook, excuse or even celebrate gang rape and simultaneous mutilation, followed by burning alive or bullets in sexual organs – so long as the rapists and murderers are high on the sacred victimhood hierarchy of intersectionality.
Yas. Gender and Race depend on each other.
You won’t read about that in Unherd (stupid title) though.
Excellent and sadly accurate comment.
Well she presents herself like a prepubescent boy, so the immaturity fits. All she needs is a cap and she could be an extra in Newsies.
BS. Butler is the end point of feminism – which started with the atheist denial of natural law, Rousseau’s state of nature, Locke’s tabula rasa and the Jacobin insistence that they could create heaven on earth. Transhumanism and gender revolutionism were always baked in. Feminism was a rotten, wrong and debilitating creed from the outset.
Nope. Butler’s views are not transhumanist.
Of COURSE Judith Butler is still a feminist. The fact she is (and always was) a five-star Loony Tune only confirms it. Anyone who doubts this should read some of the Substack pieces by the peerless Professor Janice Fiamengo, including:
Meet the New Feminist Hate, Same as the Old Feminist Hate
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-feminist-hate-same-as?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Single-Sex Spaces for Me, But Not for Thee
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Anti-trans Feminists Are Now Reaping the Whirlwind
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/anti-trans-feminists-are-now-reaping?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Lia Thomas is the Child of Feminism
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/lia-thomas-is-the-child-of-feminism?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com
She split off the new identitarian Left from older feminist concerns by prioritising her sexual identity group and its overlap with outsider (male) gay sexual identities. Hence, she left mainstream women behind and reconfigured the Anglo Left as a complex of marginal, transgressive identities.
It’s no coincidence that the other school of feminism is being popularised by billionaire centrist celebrity JK Rowling. Neither speak exactly for ordinary people but Rowling has the time, money and certain level of courage to get closer to addressing contemporary concerns about aggressive transhumanism.
Transhumanism? What does Rowling have to do with transhumanism. Surely you mean transgenderism. I know a thing or two about transhumanism and what you wrote is very puzzling to me.
Just because both include “trans” doesn’t make them the same or even related. The only way you could connect them is because trans advocates are pushing for the ability to choose their sexual form. This might be said to reflect the idea of “morphological freedom” in transhumanism. However, trans advocates do not advocate their goals from a transhumanist perspective. They do not support any other forms of morphological freedom.
Whereas transhumanists understand that becoming something distinct from human requires fundamental alterations at biological, genetic, and neurological levels, transgender activists believe you can switch from male to female or vice versa simply by slicing off bits of the body and giving some hormones. A transhumanist would say that eventually a true sex change will likely be possible, but it is not now. Also, the idea that children can truly consent to life-altering treatments reflects nothing in transhumanism.
Jennifer Bilek’s claim is that transgenderism is a trojan horse on the way to transhumanism.
“that brief stage of feminist awareness many of us experience, during which we believe that liberation comes through being allowed to be our true, special selves, unlike the boring drudges and mummies who went before us”
And yet the author takes it for granted that this is different from the gay rights revolution. But all the identitarian activist regimes rest on the same conceit: that mankind’s task is the search for authenticity, validated through the never-ending quest for a perfect fulfillment of inner desires. Identifying those desires, and satisfying them, becomes an all-consuming challenge and burden. (It is an essentially religious task, albeit one devoid of the historical or communitarian continuities of supernatural revelation.) But our inner desires are too transient, too ephemeral, to bear the weight of identity formation.
These whinny feminist indulgences are the worst thing about UnHerd. Either we read about Oppression, or we listen to one kind of feminist attempt to scratch the eyes out of another kind of feminist. These bitchez are tiresome in their self-pitying misery.
Butler is a self-declared lesbian, which is one of the few comprehensible things she has ever said. She elects to interpret this deviation to mean she is not a ‘Normie’ and finds the whole idea of normal ‘problematic’, as the Pomos say. But they find everything they refuse to admit ‘problematic’. Feminists are Normies but with a political gripe which is only nominally sexual and mostly resentment. Since the feminine is only socially constructed anyway, as Butler would ( mistakenly ) aver, why would she logically give fiddler’s whatever about feminism?
Of course there is nothing logical or sensible about any of this, but it is a living for some people.
Yes feminism always meant equal rights for both sexes. Unfortunately Butler thought she could revolutionise this by stating that there weren’t two sexes, it’s a myth, we are all one therefore we all have equal rights.
Flaws sprang up everywhere to be crushed as reactionary and not getting it. It took some very self confident women to raise their heads above this phony parapet to be shot at with all the force that the newly liberated patriarchy could muster.
The dust is settling many are creeping out if their dugouts saying how could we have believed that? Well I don’t know. But the fight for equality still goes on and feminism will always be the good fight.
The force and power of patriarchy, the insistent bullying of men to force women to comply to their demands has shifted geographically but the patriarchal abrahamic religions are hardly shifting, Islam the least. We will always have to fight for women’s protection and their freedom to attain their full agency and autonomy. It’s basically, morally, right. To object to feminism paints you as a bully taking advantage of eons of subjection.
You’ve got it backwards. “Protecting women” – particularly sexually – is deeply embedded in the moral codes of most traditional societies. It’s feminism that claims women don’t need men (“like a fish needs a bicycle”) for protection or anything else. And the result is less family formation, less satisfying sexual lives, less childbirth, less long-term romance, less of the things that bring the most people the most satisfaction. Feminism has been a disaster for women (except those rich enough to buy their way out of its problems, whether by nannies, egg-donors, private security, etc.).
What’s wrong with feminism is simply the denial of reality – men and women are not the same, and we must have laws, ethics, norms that reflect reality rather than ideologically-driven dream worlds.
An absolutely pristine example of the Left’s insistence that it alone has the right to define literally everything. Any disagreement is Nazism, they say, and can legitimately be destroyed, preferably with long knives. “Submission” is required. Now why does that sound familiar?