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GOOOD MORNING!
'The Rainbow Pens of Doom Meet Judith Butler' https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times
'The Rainbow Pens of Doom Meet Judith Butler' https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times
i) 'It is very important never to exclude and marginalise people, apart from when you are excluding and marginalising female people who centre female people in the movement for the liberation of female people from male dominance.'
ii) 'Its very important not to reproduce patriarchal gendered stereotypes apart from when you need to completely dismiss women's fears of male violence by repeatedly calling them hysterical 'fantasists.''
Bonus - 'who give a shit about cocks, I mean, it's not like we live in
Bonus - 'who give a shit about cocks, I mean, it's not like we live in
in a world where men have invested their dicks with omnipotent power and used them as a weapon against women or anything is it?'
Phallocentrism you say? What's that? Derrida who? You think I know anything a French philosophy??? LOL.
Phallocentrism you say? What's that? Derrida who? You think I know anything a French philosophy??? LOL.
iii) 'I'm very concerned about gender and violence but I have totally failed to notice the tsunami of misogynist sexualised abuse and intimidation being unleashed on non-compliant women but I am TOTALLY the authority on this.
They're probably just fantasising.
Oh, and prudes.'
They're probably just fantasising.
Oh, and prudes.'
iv) 'It's very important to wilfully misconstrue the entire basis of second wave feminism as based on a biological determinist notion of gender, because we have to trouble gender, mostly by asserting that it exists in a real sense. They are the bad essentialists. HONEST.'
v) 'Blah blah gender freedom blah blah gender equality blah liberal individualist bullshit blah IT'S VERY BAD WHEN YOU MAKE 'TACIT ASSUMPTIONS' THAT REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH FEMALE PEOPLE.'
I mean, who the fuck cares why women are oppressed anyway, amirite??
I mean, who the fuck cares why women are oppressed anyway, amirite??
vi) 'I will now go on about how terrible it is to make 'demeaning' and 'phobic' misogynist 'caricatures' like I didn't just spend an entire paragraph calling women concerned about male violence hysterical fantasists.'
vii) 'It's probably bad to tell JK to choke on dick but I don't know anything about that and am puzzled why you bring it up when I need to talk at length about the abuse that really matters in the rest of the world that has nothing to do with those non-compliant British bitches.'
viii) 'I do kind of think we should have a free exchange of ideas and now I'm going to pretend I don't understand that the Harper's letter was about censorious authoritarianism on the left and not about trying to shut down demands for justice.'
ix) 'Now I'm going to say a bunch of ostensibly decent stuff about recognising dependency but I'm just going to completely ignore that that patriarchal structure is fundamentally based on the denial of dependence on women's bodies because NO ONE TALK ABOUT WOMEN'S BODIES.'
x) 'Sex is a medical construct, gender is a historical reality. This is what good feminists believe. Anyone who talks about the relation of women's bodies to the power structure or mentions male dominance is a bigot in league with the Pope.
QED.'
QED.'
To add here: Judith Butler has a real fucking problem with male violence. And by that, I mean she has a real fucking problem recognising male violence, and recognising what it has to do with power, and what it has to do with female bodies.
I wrote about this, in some detail, here, after the last time she said a bunch of incoherent, handwaving, wilfully obtuse things to the New Statesman. https://janeclarejones.com/2019/01/24/judith-butler-how-to-disappear-patriarchy-in-three-easy-steps/
I also wrote about here, and about the legacy of Foucauldian analysis on feminism, and how it has led to an erasure of the recognition of rape. https://janeclarejones.com/2018/08/30/queer-theory-foucauldian-feminism-and-the-erasure-of-rape/
We might be able to make a stab at some speculative theories on why she has such a massive frickin blind-spot, but what is clear, from her work, is that she cannot look at male violence, and she cannot deal, in the slightest, with women's experiences of violation and trauma.
And I'm going to say, *any* analysis which cannot deal with male violence, and cannot deal with the impact of male violence on women, and which has to constantly evade, handwave, pathologise and near victim-blame, IS NOT ANY KIND OF FEMINISM I RECOGNISE.
