Judith Butler resurfaces to further destroy the concept of "woman"

Seriously just read the article, she has to be the most frustrating and infuriating person to deal with ever. Reposting it here for when OP inevitably gets lined out.

Here's some of her views rolled up into one, although again! Due to her ability to speak directly about herself and her opinions, she does not claim to hold any of these views, just that she "appreciates" that (current) queer and feminist movements hold these views:

"Today I appreciate especially queer and feminist movements that are dedicated to healthcare and education as public goods, that are anti-capitalist, committed to the struggle for racial justice, disability rights, Palestinian political freedoms, and which oppose the destruction of the Earth and indigenous lifeworlds – as evident in the work of Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis – the work of Ni Una Menos and abolition feminism. There is now a broader vision, even though this is a time of great despair as we see global economic inequalities intensify under the pandemic."

And if you're curious, here is Judith Butler's sentence that won her the "Worst Writing" award in 1998:

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

[quote]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.

Who employs this woman?

UC Berkeley, of course.

The Butler overdid it.

Good God, she makes me look like Little Mary Sunshine.

I'll save my outrage for your right wing buddies who are passing laws that actually seek to take away the reproductive rights of women. Sorry, no fucks to give about some imaginary outrage whose only goal is to gaslight us into not recognizing the real enemy. Go bray on Mumsnet or Breitbart.

Who cares?? I'm tired of hearing about this lesbian-trans drama!

Over at a thread about Condi Rice, I just came across the most disgusting comment I've ever seen on Datalounge:

[quote]Are you a woman, OP? If so, [the fact you're attracted to Condi Rice] could be because you know it’d feel good to have your clit running through the gap in her teeth.

This is peak lesbian stuff to me! Enough with the sapphic content on this gay male website!

I will not be redefined by some academic person. Fuck off, LADY.

Unless you’ve read Althusser I don’t think you’ve got much of a leg to stand on here. She is perfectly reasonable and lucid in the Guardian interview.

She's smart so of course the Republicans and TERFs hate her. They hate anyone with an IQ over 12.

Btw, the Guardian CENSORED her but the supposed free speech warriors aren't complaining. Huh. Weird

Sounds like she’s trying to work a new audience.

And it’s interesting to hear she has transitioned into “they” because basically, it wasn’t around in her time.

Anyone who uses they/them is a moron.

I have always noticed that lots of gender woo woo supporters are older women, like this fugly loon Butler

[quote] This is peak lesbian stuff to me! Enough with the sapphic content on this gay male website!

I’ve been here since 2004. This is a GAY website, and lesbians are GAY! Fuck off with that bullshit! They are us and we are then (well, not really, but close enough!). We have enough enemies as is, stop trying to make new ones.

I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with this bitch.

R15, one of the trolls we get on these anti trans threads is someone who screams 24/7 about how women and lesbians are ruining Datalounge, I think that's the guy you're talking to.

What he quoted isn't "peak lesbian," it was some jerk being insulting to lesbians on that thread, hoping to get a rise out of people.

I had to read lots of Butler as an undergrad, lit crit, it was exhausting. She’s very intelligent, but I do get a sense of Schadenfreude From seeing her get criticized!

SJWs have spent so much time listening to transwomen that they forgot to do all in their power to secure abortion rights. Their right to wear eyeliner and dresses matters less to me than the right to reproductive freedom. This isn't transphobia. I just find them irrelevant.

Go away radfem with your radcrap, Judith Butler is awesome.

Any singular person who refers to herself as a they is mentally ill.

whet that professor that preyed on her students, was it NYU? at first I thought this thread was about her. or they. or dey.

[quote]I'll save my outrage for your right wing buddies who are passing laws that actually seek to take away the reproductive rights of women. Sorry, no fucks to give about some imaginary outrage whose only goal is to gaslight us into not recognizing the real enemy. Go bray on Mumsnet or Breitbart.

TERF!! It's not just women who are having their reproductive rights removed by the Texas abortion laws, it's non binary people, men, ovarian havers and womb owners. But you don't think about them when you type your hateful words. You just talk about women. You're literally worse than a Nazi!!!

I wonder why she didn't think of nonbinary herself back in the day if it's her authentic lived experience.

Trans always try and turn us against lesbians - it's part of their 'divide and conquer' technique. If we hate women too then they are winning.

She's welcome to justify why women and girls should see dick in the changing room.

Does their pussy stink?

This is what happens when one has too much free time.

Heheh R25 you simply forgot that most lesbian AREN'T transphobic.

The transphobic ones are a minority, like the transphobic gays.

Yeah, cause lesbians love being told to suck a dick and like it.

Talk about a Poser

Aww, leave our lesbian friends alone! We need them as allies as we take on the trans lunacy and take back the LGB. It's ours, it belongs to us, and that includes our lesbian friends.

Or what R15 said.

Lesbians are an endangered species, and gay men aren't far behind.

The Transgender Agenda has pretty much alienated the majority of straight AND gay people. Only everyone is too scared to stand up to their nonsense for fear of getting canceled.

If you really think that a MAJORITY of gay people are fans of a lot of the nonsense espoused by the Transgender Agenda, then you're living in a fantasy world.

[quote]Trans always try and turn us against lesbians

Nah, that's TERFs like you. The troll who shows up on these threads and screams about lesbians ruining Datalounge is not some trans person.

You don't see him except when he's trolling an anti trans thread. I mean that very literally: he will show up on an anti trans thread, attack the anti trans trolls, they will dutifully scream "we're being silenced and oppressed by another evil gay Datalounger who doesn't care about the rights of women!" and often (but not always) he will then go start separate threads called things like "Why are lesbians always trying to take over men's spaces?"

Once he's done trolling on the anti trans thread, he'll also abandon the separate threads he's started.

No idea if he's one of you guys, trying to make you look like victims. It's possible, it's a well-worn right wing trolling technique, and you guys follow the GamerGater right wing trolling handbook to the letter. It could also be someone who knows that jumping into the fray the way he does is guaranteed to stir people up. We have several trolls like that.

R24 because all the "nonbinary" nonsense is a concept that was built upon the foundation she built. She's like Ayn Rand in that she put her poison out into the world and others have RUN with it.

You guys who descend upon these threads immediately crying "anti-trans! Terf! Radfem!" can stuff it. You don't ever argue FOR any of the ridiculous points of course (because they're indefensible by logical people), you just attack, name-call, and (attempt to) ridicule. You can fuck right off.

R10 please explain how she's perfectly reasonable, then.

I WILL NOT BE ERASED

People like Butler are more harmful to society than we realize. Their academic study is about their academic study. It's self justifying, self important and self referential theories distance their students from the real world and its study.

Why’s it always women that are being targeted? Why not men? Oh, because the moment straight men start to feel their liberties are being infringed upon, this whole nonsense will be OVER.

One would hope, at least.

In addition, this whole thing reeks of narcissism.

Oh and for the TRA insisting that the Guardian "censored" Mx. Butler, they actually edited the part where she mentions Wi Spa, because it has been shown to be a true incident by a sex offender who used self identification as a shield to enter a womens' only changing room and expose himself to the women and girls there.

They also cut where she talked about an ongoing case in the UK, for legal reasons

Although it's hilarious to see them turn on each other for DARING to cut some of Butler's rambling. The Guardian isn't Pink News as far as it comes to pushing trans nonsense in the UK, but it's close.

What's additionally hilarious is in the screengrab of her remarks that is being passed around on trans Twitter ALSO cuts out the part where she mentions Wi Spa. They clearly know it doesn't make them look good to support a trans sex offender.

In the cut part she talks about how "TERFs and "so-called gender critical writers" are contributing to the rise of fascism

It's totally opposite day for her. I've never seen the amount of bullying authoritarianism I have in the trans rights movement, yet she has the balls to say the gender critical movement "doesn't seem to mind contradicting themselves".

She is beyond parody.

Although, maybe a little parody:

Judith Butler: all the terfs are far right with far right funding

Guardian: cool let's print that

Guardian readers: citations needed, yo

Guardian: you have sources right

Judith Butler: sources are discursively constructed

Guardian: (backs away slowly)

Unless you've read Althusser...you can't criticize.

Fuck off. Every academic discipline must now submit to the rantings of an unreadable Marxist and Judith Butler. Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, History, Biology. Talk about a hegemonic ideology.

And her citations of feminist studies of science do not prove the extreme claims she makes. It's handwaving. She's a gigantic fraud.

Does Judith have recipes in her book? Any beauty tips for the mature nonbinary person?

I read all of them. At Brown no less and again in French at Sorbonne. The original work is fun and all the people who then built careers on it are miserable, unfuckable hacks.

I thought the pic was of Frankie Grande prior to his daily $7 skin routine.

Why should anyone care what this individual thinks?

Furthermore, why is the focus almost exclusively on biological females, the term "woman," and "trans-genders"?

Why is it not time to re-think the term "man"?

Jesus will these self-absorbed cosplayers fuck off already?

R48 much like Judith Butler herself.

R51 it's super telling when you see all these men (some medical doctors, no less) telling others to use inclusive language and use terms like "womb-havers" or "people who menstruate" instead of, you know, "women".

If challenged on it, they'll pay lip service to "of course trans men exist too!" but when you see proclamations for womens' events and mens' events, oddly you never see men referred to as "penis-havers" or "those who ejaculate". It's men! Men, men, men.

R46 she seems to purposely go out of her way to make her writing as dense as possible so it's inaccessible to all but the most rabid academics.

What's hilarious - in the cut part of her Guardian interview when she says "yes, some work on gender is difficult and not everyone can read it, so we have to do a better job of reaching the general public".

Yes, "we" have to do a better job at making "complex concepts availablr to a popular audience". Her condescension and lack of self-awareness is off the charts.

I had to read her in grad school. Her writing sought to exclude, not include, the reader. In other words, I gave up, threw the book against the wall, and went to class where everyone raved about how brilliant it was. Me, I told them I threw it against the wall and that she was a poor writer.

Nobody liked me, of course. That was fine, because she was a shitty writer and it was worth hearing the collective gasp when I said she was.

Reading this woman's writing is like listening to a garbage disposal.

[QUOTE] it's non binary people, men, ovarian havers and womb owners.

this has to be DL satire

She was the primary author of the letter saying Avital Ronnel should be excused for sexually harassing her gay graduate student Nimrod Reitman at NYU. On the grounds that Ronnel was a great scholar (of Butler's ilk.) She has no ethical sense. She's a monster.

If she has you right wing bags like OP in meltdown then she’s doing something right. Go back to sucking on your ivermectin, OP.

Here's the section of the interview where she compares gender critical feminists to fascists, but translated!

The heterosexual Avital Ronnel who identifies as "queer", r59.

Butler really is full of shit. She's enabling so much damage in particular to unhappy young lesbians whose mutilation of their bodies she describes in that interview as "joyous".

Unfortunately, even those sentences that win the academic razzies usually make sense. You just have to have read the same books. It's obfuscation, yes, but it is more internally consistent and meaningful than Tucker Carlson for example.

It's a well known fact that women hate other women and are their own worst enemies.

Here's a good description of Butler's philosophy:

"It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler’s own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with “Consider…” or “One could suggest…”--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims."

Clearly the OP has never read Eve Sedgwick.

Why is the prospect of wrestling with dense prose and difficult ideas so off-putting to everyone here? You sound like Fox News devotees. If you want to critique the substance of Butler's ideas then do so; I for one don't think she is the first person to identify the notion of gender performativity, nor do I find her readings of Arendt especially revelatory. However, it's not her fault that generations of "activists," like the author of the interview, profess love and devotion to her.

And she is not doing the "people who disagree with me are religious zealots / right-wing people" thing; the interviewer asked her what she thought of wacko Brazilian Christians burning her in effigy and right-wing French people protesting gay marriage by way of attacking Butler's thinking about gender. How would *you* respond if people were burning you in effigy or protesting equal rights for gays based on wildly misinterpreting your writing? These people *are* fascists and she is within her right to condemn their behavior.

What is so risible about this statement, for example? "If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realise ideals of radical justice, equality and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions." She's saying there can't be coalition building if everybody is so fixated on a single aspect of their identity, but at the same time many feel that recognition/respect for a single aspect of their identity is crucial. This lack of coalition building is precisely what got Trump elected and what allowed police brutality to continue unchecked for so long.

And R65 if you're just going to re-post Martha Nussbaum, whose intentions in writing that bizarre hit piece were questionable at best, at least have the cojones to cite her and explain why Nussbaum's work isn't marred by the same problems as Butler's.

R54 "Womb-havers" sounds like something in a David Cronenberg film.

Julia Kristeva made me want to gouge out my eyes.

R67 you clearly haven't read the whole thread or even the whole of r65 which was posted while you were penning your screed in support of Butler. A chunk of what Butler said was cut from the interview, wherein she specifically equates all of the things you're questioning.

Everything Nussbaum in the quoted paragraphs is true. Do you have anything besides ad hominem attacks?

R63 it doesn't have to -not- make sense to be bad writing. It's bad writing. Bizarre that you would try to defend that.

[quote]this has to be DL satire

Yes, but this isn't.

Or this!

that creature @R72 can NOT be fur reel

Here's Nussbaum's full article, if anyone's curious. I didn't want to link to TNR but r67's quick Googling and snotty response warrants that the full piece be appreciated.

Does she have “an” OnlyFans?

She’s a very handsome woman.

Thank you for the nussbaum article. My fave line in her take down of Butler:

[Quote]Well, no.

The sick joke of Butler and others is that the continental philosophers providing the basis for this American critical theory gobbledygook are NOT difficult. Althusser isn't difficult. Foucault, Gramsci, Baudrillard, good old Freaud, Lacan - most are average thinkers in the tradition - and fun to read. The American academics, well, as the quote in R67 implies, they were not even up to it, because they had personal axes to grind, and politic points to score, and may not have been that brilliant, and they didn't have fun, and certainly many of their students were NOT encouraged to play - they were coached to engage in screeds, navel gazing and identity politics. Sad Just not bright enough. 2nd and 3rd generation took off on internecine language wars, become middling professors themselves, Lord Help Us. Meanwhile French academy moved on decades ago, and scratch their heads.

AOC was on Anderson Cooper the other night and went on and on very careful (having to correct herself once or twice) to discuss "persons who have irregular periods" and how "persons who have periods don't know they are pregnant within 6 weeks."

Persons isn't the plural. People is. And she couldn't say WOMEN. It's sad.

Meanwhile the basic marxist concept of interpellation can be understood by anyone, and certainly a "thinking" college student in any of, say, 1000 legitimate colleges, in 10 minutes. And its an interesting tool to apply.

American critical theorists created elaborate and campy texts and claimed theory is so "difficult" because they are hiding average IQs and also also career building,

Its really not rocket science.

Meanwhile in some countries, such as France, average school kids are taught to understand and apply basic philosophical structures as a requirement for participating in French culture.

You can learn it here. 10 minutes.

It's embarrassing enough when thirteen-year-olds identify as non-binary, but a woman that age? Jesus. Grow the fuck up.

Barthes had interesting tools for thinking about photography. An average student can learn them in one lecture, and then have intellectual fun applying them. I don't know what idiots decided all this needs to be obfuscated through DENSE, American English texts written by also-rans. Pick any of the structuralists and post-structuralists (with the exception of Levi-Strauss - who I contend was full of shit) - one or two of their big structures can be taught to any thinking person and those people can apply it to think about, well, anything. It is a GAME for chrissakes.

Americans traditionally produce brilliant pop culture and also terrible cultural and political criticism.

Sounds like she puts the more in moron…

Butler is just a shitty writer. Everything she says is nonsensical fluff. I have no clue how she's the premier lesbian academic, especially when people like Sarah Schulman exist.

I laughed at that careerist bitch before it was popular.

[quote]AOC was on Anderson Cooper the other night and went on and on very careful (having to correct herself once or twice) to discuss "persons who have irregular periods" and how "persons who have periods don't know they are pregnant within 6 weeks." Persons isn't the plural. People is. And she couldn't say WOMEN. It's sad.

I saw a clip of it here. If you can't describe what is happening you can't make it stop.

MEN are making laws that harm WOMEN. MEN are impregnating WOMEN and MEN are stopping WOMEN from terminating their pregnancy in a safe and timely manner.

So the woke Marxists are trying interpellate us.

Can we have tampon dispensers in the Mar-a-lago men's rooms, please?

She mixes and matches conflicting philosophies with vague hand-waveyness and obfuscation in the form of dense, inaccessible writing. The reason for that appears to be so she can let others interpret what they want out of what she said, without actually saying it. Her arguments are intentionally vague because they are, at their core, unsound, and her oeuvre is essentially a giant opinion column when you get right down to it.

Don't let me forget the armchair philosophers like a few in this thread who love to put their noses up when people say that her philosophy is trash. It's just because you clearly didn't study Althusser, they sniff! However her arguments aren't backed by the mishmash of philosophies she quotes. They don't seem to understand it, either.

R87 I can't stand you either, Camille! You're a writer who has made a career being a contrarian.

I kind of love Camille. She's incredibly hit or miss but just so fun to read.

J'adore Martha Nussbaumm. I've interacted with her in various UN fora in Geneva over the years (I'm male).

So when I found myself in London for a conference and I learned she was giving a guest lecture at the London School of Economics I dropped in to say hello.

The ladies in the audience at her lecture were on the attack which surprised me. Hard core - yelling "you're a universalist! A universalist! !"

Well, yes, she was speaking about Nation-states' efforts (or non-efforts) to meet international human rights standards and what this means for women. universally agreed minimum standards enshrined in international law. Minimum standards which set out obligations for signatories to various Human Rights Conventions For this she was being condemned ??

It was wild. Such rancor. I think this was my first exposure to the poorly informed 'woke. '

J'adore Nussbaum's critique of Butler's work. Especially the narcissism and Butler's disconnect from the rest of the wkrld.

Suzanne Moore just released a piece on this a half hour ago:

WHET Nimrod?

She a bitch!

I wonder if what Butler and company do started out as interesting graduate student work for them, novel, with the added bonus that it became career advancing. Then you ride the wave for most of your life. But now it's wheels are coming off, the trivialities of its assertions are evident, and the bad social and logical consequences appear.

At this point what Butler does (her performance as everything is performance) became indistinguishable from an elaborate trolling, as she doesn't believe any of it herself, an assertion of power over the audience to beguile or infuriated. She's as happy with the negative attention of Nussbaum as she is with the adulation of graduate students and lesser scholars. It ultimately becomes a con. Hence the smile. She's conned you yet again.

r94 I love Nussbaum too. A friend of mine sent her an email around fifteen years ago when we were undergrads, and Nussbaum wrote a lovely response. I've always thought of her an exemplary scholar and person.

r34 Unfortunatly those that are in favor of it are very loud especially on social media and it gives a misleading impression about how much support there is for it.

You get social credit from a lot of people for the performance, and you get a WHOLE LOT of negative attention from saying otherwise. Twitter loves a pile-on because 1) people are reasonably comfortable, but movies and TV and influencers show these impossibly exotic lives that they wish they had, so they are bored with just being average, 2) they get social clout for following the crowd, and 3) There's a lot more narcissists now, and 4) Thanks to the Buzzfeed-ification of headlines, statements, and the extreme hyperbole that has to be used now to break through the clutter, you get these over-the-top dramatic comments where they're trying to outdo one another by who can be offended or outraged the most.

So they swoop, they kill, and they are still hungry for more. The most foolish of the prey issue obsequious, groveling apologies, but that's never enough for them, and whoever was the target will now forever be associated with whatever the accusation with. People will avoid them even if it's totally untrue. And even after that also have the keyboard warriors who vow to block any people following them if they're following the banished person, which is another way that the warriors flex their power after the initial pile-on, etc.

Even Butler would be cancelled by the same crowd, if people read some of her earlier works, so I guess it's good for her that they're so dense that they're inaccessible to the majority, or that she says a lot but couches everything in weasel words so one never really knows her actual opinion on what she's talking about, because she never takes a stand on it.

And for good reason, possibly? The times where she's most direct is when she's claiming that those who stand against her are right-wing religious zealots. But even those statements (like the ones removed from the Guardian piece) are flexible enough her defenders can claim "oh, no she didn't ACTUALLY say that (terrible thing)".

These ideas are pushed not only by Twitter crowds but by elites, namely parts of the press and by lesser academics, who are intimidated by the Butlers and buy the con. They want to be "in" although they don't understand any of it really. They influence then others.

I would treat this woman like the dog she is

It’s just crazy and masturbatory now isn’t it? Some ugly old lesbian going to somehow destroy the meaning of anything?

Very true, R106.

It's a type: the pointy-headed, self-important 'intellectual' who is so wrapped around the axle of their own theories of social construction that they see the entire world as composed only of concepts. No; there is a material reality independent of our concepts of it. Gravity is one example; biological sex is another.

Judith Butler is at the root of all the problems caused by extreme trans activism. Her thought is ripe for a thorough dismantling. Time to put Judith Butler in the dustbin of history. Hope someone emerges to do that.

Judith Butler adopts she/they pronouns because OF COURSE SHE DOES.

Never fuck theys. Theys is/are craycray.

Great post 101

A little rouge and maybe some light lipgloss would give Miss Butler a softer, more feminine look. Her appearance is too plain for the menfolk to notice.

113 replies, with several people purporting to be experts in butlerian pilpul, yet no mention whatsoever of hers being a hegelian and basing her performative nonsense in Hegel's system (same for Beauvoir or Shulamith Firestone). Most of these nonsense structuralist, post-structuralist, constructivist pseudophilosophies come from the Spinozian-Hegelian systems, so if you want to make the world a better place, simply burn every book of theirs you come about, or push it down the throat of whatever idiot owns it, and flush.

Hegel was shitty but is it really Hegelian? Cites? There's a Nietzschian element, right.

I'm more of a right existentialist myself. Kierkegaard, Doestoyevsky, smattering of non-Nazi Heiddeiger.

Ops, I see the citation now.

R112 they didn't "bow to anti-trans pressure". Someone on Twitter was saying that as soon as they edited that article, but with no proof. It SOUNDS more like they removed the section based on a question about Wi Spa that was incorrect, because Wi Spa wasn't fake like the trans activists were claiming, and the person involved was an actual sex offender who was sex offending.

The choice was either to leave the whole question in - which they should have - or cut that section that was based on the bad question, because it would have made them ALL look bad, both The Guardian and Mx. Butler.

Butler also sounds positively deranged in the part that was deleted. Sure, if you don't believe that lesbians have penises or that men give birth then you're a right-wing fascist stain on society. And she said all this while defending the right of a convicted sex criminal, who is on the sex offenders register, to present himself naked with a semi-erection on the women's floor of a family friendly spa.

Both Nietzsche, Kierkegaard (we can forgive him, since his family life was so blighted, he was the produce of rape!) and Heidegger have contributed to the philosophical saturnalia we live in (in relation to Butler or the post-cum-nigologists). Seneca once quoted a famous anecdote about a German gladiator chocking on a shit-stick to end his misery, Germanic philosophical sects are already chocking on all their shit, but they are not dying fast enough, Voltaire long warned us about how dim Germanic philosophy was, the throat cutters that canonized him could have dedicated some of their energies to the stiff-necked abortions at the other side of the Rhin, and swiftly spared us from all the misery that was to come.

Even the question that Butler answered was awful. This isn't journalism.

[quote]It seems that some within feminist movements are becoming sympathetic to these far-right campaigns. This year’s furore around Wi Spa in Los Angeles saw an online outrage by transphobes followed by bloody protests organised by the Proud Boys. Can we expect this alliance to continue?’

Just wrong on every count.

R119, tell us what you really think. But Doestoyevsky is ok? Kierkegaard isn't really German and he sees himself as anti-Hegelian. Those two are the big ones for me.

If I had to pick one, it would be D.

You're an Enlightenment guy or gal, or they, I assume.

It is true that Dworkin and MacKinnon made common cause with Focus on the Family in constructing anti-pornography ordinances, but it’s ludicrous to say that criticism of trans ideology comes only from the Right.

R122, that was around 40 years ago. If Butler is citing that she's living in the past.

Reading this thread has made the left side of my brain burst into excruciating agony.

R124 thanks for letting us know!

I truly hope Butler and her ilk are relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history.

R122 I used the term Germanic in contrast to German to include Nordics, even if his reception of Hegel was mainly critical, we can still say he was influenced by him. I do see both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky (whom Hegel influenced superficially) in a more positive light. I'm quite the eclectic thinker, and indeed Early Modern thinkers are among those who influenced me. At least it can amuse you, for example when you see one of these "free-thinkers" babbling about Voltaire, when he wholly rejected evolution, mocked those who thought we came from fish, and called atheists "abominations". I've even seen academics commit quite serious blunders, since everything is mediated by post-19th Century Philosophy and Historiography, and lack actual deep study of their subject and their context.

And it isn't strange people like Butler reign supreme nowadays, nobody even thinks about challenging what they see as the epitome of human progress, and this certainly doesn't stop here. It's funny to see people accepting myths as that of Stonewall, and even nagging about who threw the first turd, it matters not. If you think you have this or that right because of whatever queer or gay liberation whatever think again; moral decline coupled with back-room politicking (read, blackmailing, bribing, such kind of schemes) is what decriminalized, normalized, etc. whatever you have in your mind. People like Butler love to use these empty concepts, they are empty for them (see for example Deleuze's critique of human rights), as a way to manipulate the ignorant, there's nothing subversive or radical about getting aids, tearing off your penis, prostituting yourself, it's pure detritus moneybags love to push into the minds of the sheep they are about to shag. This isn't the beginning, and certainly isn't its end, this will continue to new heights mollities. And if anyone feels this isn't true, then you only need to search about how the CIA used (and uses) Foucault or feminism, or how a military general publicly stated he "studied" CRT to apply it.

R127 please explain what you think Critical Race Theory is and how it is applied.

R128 A time ago I posted this comment in another thread:

[quote] CRT's aim isn't to make a more harmonious society through the re-evaluation of the USA's past, but rather aims to propose a Black nationalist, ethnopluralistic, re-segregation agenda, meanwhile generalizing concrete acts into supposed general attitudes: "[Derrick A. Bell Jr., one of the first African Americans to become tenured at Harvard Law School, is considered by many the founding father of CRT] criticised Brown because the focus was on integration and desegregation, and not the need for quality education. According to him, the first goal – integration and de-segregation – represented the ideals of elite, liberal public interest lawyers and only established formal equality. The second goal – quality education – was in fact pursued by the plaintiffs, African American parents, who wanted a better education for their children, irrespective of the school’s system of segregation or desegregation. Bell therefore criticised how many civil rights lawyers directed their client’s interests without, in fact, listening to them and their specific needs and wishes." (Moschel, M. (2016). Law, Lawyers and Race - Critical Race Theory from the US to Europe. Taylor & Francis)

[quote] It isn't even strange that many indolent and ignorant White Americans buy into it because it's "radical chic" to do so, not merely because they don't care enough to research it, but because if they researched it they would find an incoherent stream of first-person narratives, it isn't the aim of CRT either coherence or a proper methodology: "Hence, it can be said that the main aim of CRT is not to develop a coherent, methodologically flawless theoretical framework but it is rather an academic political enterprise. [...] Methodologically, one of the main tools to achieve these goals is the use of legal narrative, which allows personal experiences to enter academic writing and legal analysis. The main idea is that academic legal writing and jargon tend to silence minorities’ visions and experience. Through legal narrative and storytelling those voices can finally be heard and provide a sort of counter hegemonic account of law and its effects. For this reason, one will find that many CRT writings start with a personal narrative or else are completely written in a narrative-style." (Moschel, 2016). I have read through some such post-structuralist narratives, they are almost laughable if they wouldn't be so degrading to the academical medium.

[quote] And they are in collusion with movements like the Nouvelle Droite, which inspired the Alt-Right, they share at their core the same relativistic ethnopluralism that postulates segregation as the best way to solve inter-ethnic problems, this isn't new, Black nationalists colluded with the American Nazi Party, and in France, Guy Hocquenghem (most probably people at DL know him for his pro-pederasty film Race d'Ep), key source for Queer Theory, found much in common with the Nouvelle Droite, it was scandalous at the time, but is nowadays forgotten.

[quote] Only when we are talking about how ethnicity and the laws meant to protect minorities do we get that. No one goes around describing women as victims when we talk about the inadequacy of gender-discrimination law.

[quote] They likewise oppose this, they think such laws are mere make-believe and pure pretension, and they are only the collusion of Black interests with White interest, a concrete (limited) and generally seen as a negative collusion. They clearly aim at something quite different to uncle-tom inter-ethnic relations, which the common Whitey want to present them as. "The Black nationalist critical position was fundamental to informing CRT’s scepticism towards the anti-discrimination approach and CRT’s advocacy for a race-conscious legal analysis." (Moschel, 2016)

And I before I get asked who this Möschel is, as it happened in that thread I couldn't respond to, I quote him again: "In the summer of 1989, when a small group of mostly young American law professors gathered outside Madison, Wisconsin for a workshop on the relevance of critical legal theory to studies of race, the conventional view was that the worst of the nation’s racism was in the past. The movement born at that summer workshop – which its leaders named Critical Race Theory – was intended to challenge that view. The participants, myself included, took the position that racism was central, not peripheral, to American society. Indeed, we aimed at demonstrating that anti-discrimination jurisprudence itself, and all the legal actors and institutions charged with implementing guarantees of legal equality, would bend when necessary to accommodate White supremacy. Critical Race Theory was founded to investigate the peculiar fact that racism can pervade legal structures officially committed to anti-racism."

[quote] I'll save my outrage for your right wing buddies who are passing laws that actually seek to take away the reproductive rights of women.

You're not getting it. The extremism of people like Butler enables the extreme backlash that continues to undermine women.

Extremism begets extremism.

R129 how would you respond to this?

[quote]To understand why CRT has become such a flash point in the culture, it is important to understand what it is and what it is not. Opponents fear that CRT admonishes all white people for being oppressors while classifying all Black people as hopelessly oppressed victims. These fears have spurred school boards and state legislatures from Tennessee to Idaho to ban teachings about racism in classrooms. However, there is a fundamental problem: these narratives about CRT are gross exaggerations of the theoretical framework. The broad brush that is being applied to CRT is puzzling to academics, including some of the scholars who coined and advanced the framework.

[quote]CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race. Sociologists and other scholars have long noted that racism can exist without racists. However, many Americans are not able to separate their individual identity as an American from the social institutions that govern us—these people perceive themselves as the system. Consequently, they interpret calling social institutions racist as calling them racist personally. It speaks to how normative racial ideology is to American identity that some people just cannot separate the two. There are also people who may recognize America’s racist past but have bought into the false narrative that the U.S. is now an equitable democracy. They are simply unwilling to remove the blind spot obscuring the fact that America is still not great for everyone.

[quote]Scholars and activists who discuss CRT are not arguing that white people living now are to blame for what people did in the past. They are saying that white people living now have a moral responsibility to do something about how racism still impacts all of our lives today. Policies attempting to suffocate this much-needed national conversation are an obstacle to the pursuit of an equitable democracy. Supporters of CRT bans often quote Martin Luther King Jr’s proclamation that individuals should be viewed by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, ignoring the context of the quote and the true meaning behind it.

R132 The difference between that article and my comment is that I do provide a source, quoting what's being said there, rather than making unsourced affirmations about what this or that is; still, if you read that part about their lack of coherence in their methodology, plus their relativism (there's no absolute truth, just relative, subjective, all equally valid), what comes out of that is that there can be several competing views about what CRT is, all equally valid, but what matters here is, what do legal academics, particularly those who integrated the movement early on, think it is? Well, there's my quotations illustrating that. But here's another quotation from the same source: "For Freeman, the victim’s perspective of discrimination is influenced by a number factors grounded in history and the social fabric. These include objective conditions of life such as job, housing, and financial difficulties as well as the victim’s consciousness about these conditions. In contrast, according to Freeman, the perpetrator’s perspective has prevailed in anti-discrimination law. This perspective is premised on a worldview, which considers only individual actions, or a series of actions, inflicted by the perpetrator as relevant. Racial discrimination is therefore not the result of broader social phenomena but only the wrongful conduct of one particular actor, the perpetrator. Legal concepts such as ‘fault’ or ‘causation’ further manage to successfully separate the innocent mass of society from the handful of guilty racists. On the one hand, the concept of fault establishes the idea that only intentional discrimination is legally relevant under anti-discrimination law. This in turn leads to complacency amongst the members of society, who need not feel any responsibility for broader structural and societal discrimination. On the other hand, causation limits conditions, which law deems to be necessary to establish if discrimination took place."

There to be either multiple meanings of CRT (racism is still present in institutions v racism is so pervasive that claims to rule of law and fairness are themselves racist). Either it is too diverse a theory or what we are seeing is a motte and bailey tactic.

It really does get down to how do you eliminate, as much as possible, racism. And whether structure is determinative or some sort of innate psychology is at work (i.e. are all humans innately violent, aggressive etc. -- a fact which social reforms must take into account. ) Do we go for the extremes of revolution (cultural revolution) or segregation on one hand or do we stick with a type of amelioration/slow reform on the other.

Since I think the human heart is a dark place I will opt for some continuity of culture and steady reform in all areas, gender, racial inequalities, etc.

The outcomes of CTR have been bad. Defund the police have energized the right without effecting any real reform is only one example.

I think most of those view CRT as affirming that racism permeates all society, including the judiciary and the legislative, to the point of making them incapable of addressing most problems in a meaningful way. Defunding the police definitely is a disaster (that seems unstoppable, and Black people will be the ones to get hit the hardest), but CRT did not invent it, criticism to the prison-industrial complex predates CRT.

R131, screaming "right wing!", "fascist!" and "terf!" is all they have. They can't put forward a comprehensive argument as to why transwomen - especially those who still have a penis (which seems to be most of them, these days) - should be able to use women's changing rooms or why elementary school children should be classified as boys or girls according to which gender their behaviour "conforms" to and not their anatomy.

The TRAs can only scream and throw out hysterical accusations in order to smear and cancel all those who dare raise any questions.

But it's Judith Butler, R136!

R133 they provide several linked sources in the Brookings article as well (it's not a sourced article with specific page numbers and so forth) but they do reference several works that they are apparently pulling from.

I get that there is some confusion over it, but "Critical Race Theory" as it's branded by the right covers a lot of things that are not, in fact, CRT. I don't think that Defund the Police came from CRT, I think it came from specific problems with the way money is dumped on police departments and instead of spending it on, for example, training on de-escalation, they instead buy military surplus equipment with the full intent on using it someday. The foundation of the local police departments, as I've understood it, was originally to suppress black slaves, so it's no wonder that they are seen, along with many other government structures, as racist. And shifting the funding to non-enforcement actions such as psychology and community outreach etc. is the actual goal.

Obviously the slogan is idiotic, it's one of those "born on Twitter" inane things.

I do get that the main issue is that people treat theories like that as gospel and not merely a lens through which to view something, to gain a greater understanding of it. That's also the issue with gender theory. It became a religion, God's own truth, rather than what it actually was.

R136 the funny bit is that from what they say, it's all about making trans women feel "safe" but it's at the expense of letting women feel safe. Of course women aren't all threatening to kill themselves if they don't get what they want, so there's that.

Saw this good bit on Twitter about Judith Butldr":

"I wonder how long it takes her to order breakfast".

Would her writing be considered "purple prose"?

Here's a DataLounge-ready tale that shows Butler in a different light. It concerns a rogue academic squatting in the house of a Berkeley professor who rented it to him, and refusing to leave until Butler and others mobilized against him.

[quote]…please accept the fact that you have painted yourself into a corner, and that you have to leave promptly, and with an apology and a payment plan, in order to avoid any further destruction to your professional and personal world. Your itinerary of self-destruction is a stellar one.

So Butler is "eviscerating" r141, that's about all she knows how to be.

Oh, I am sure she's a tough cookie on a personal level.

For sure, there's risk of dying of boredom before she gets to her point.

I'm curious what the WHOLE email said to him. I'm assuming they cut out the lengthy preamble.

Judith does not like having someone refuse her orders!

[quote] J'adore Martha Nussbaumm.

And yet you cannot even spell her name correctly.

He's using the original Austro-Hungarian spelling.

Love means never having to spell correctly.

[quote]He's using the original Austro-Hungarian spelling.

It's Nußbaum!

And while we're on the subject, it's Habsburg, not Hapsburg.

[quote]She's doing the "people who disagree with me are religious zealots / right-wing people" thing that every trans activist does.

DL does that, too.

It's mostly the trannies on DL do that, r151. They're all over the tranny threads doing that.

Yeah any time one of them starts in complaining or name-calling the "Boris right wing Nazi incel" stuff they always throw in "anti-trans". Of course they also claim anyone holding gender critical views is all one person, but also many bots. Just more ad hominem attacks rather than engaging with discussion. It's like arguing with particularly bratty 12 year olds.

Notice the switch when Butler was spouting her esoteric nonsense to when she was talking about people who she disagrees with politically. You can almost see the froth from her mouth.

I think it's unreal that the trans activist who wrote this interview and sold it to the Guardian didn't have any qualms about offering to "rewrite the question" in the section they removed, to make it look less bad for Butler and The Guardian. How is that not incredibly dishonest? Why would anyone buy any non-fiction writing from that person again?

Correct spelling represents a tool of hegemonic oppression situated between subdeconstructive dialectic theory and Lacanist obscurity which, if postsemanticist materialism holds, forces us to choose between socialist realism and neoconstructive narrative.

Now you're just pulling our leg, R155.

Never r156!

R140, purple prose involves excessive adjectives designed to heighten emotion in the reader. The word for Butler is “prolix.” She reminds me of McKinnon (who is a better writer) in the way she mounts an impressive argument on an unconvincing (and unproven) premise.

Cheers r158.

'Tortured prose' is a good description of her writing.

Sophistry is a good description of her writing.

r161 Sophistry often is good disguise for hollow vessels.

How about miserable pretentious shambolic griftesse?

Grifting con certainly works.

Nothing can ever match Nussbaum's take down of Butler.

My favorite portion of Nussbaum's piece:

[quote]Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others' manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student's dissertation on Hume's views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn't she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader's intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty.

Stupid old Hume.

I do think her sobriquet needs a frenchism. What bout Grifting Connasse?

R23 Lighten up, Francis.

I hope r23 is satire

R23 is Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, who had to take time out from fighting the abortion ban to explain that it isn't just women who can get pregnant.

Of course it's only men who can get people pregnant because trans women don't have big fat cocks that spurt out semen with lots of little spunkfish swimming around in those sticky globules.

R171 I expect if they had big fat cocks they wouldn't be in such a hurry to trans themselves

The funny thing, r171, is that there are many, many transwomen who do have children - as fathers. Caitlyn Jenner, dad of 6, being the most prominent example.

R172, oh there are many who claim to be transwomen but still keep their cocks. They can become parents too - fathers, that is.

R173 the majority of them now do. I was implying they had small penises.

Rhett Butler left saying he wanted a place of peace, charm and grace.

Judith Butler now seemingly wants to destroy everything,

I wonder if Judith Butler is a fan of Brett Butler.

Only ironically, r176