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Butler& #39;s NS interview reminds us that writers/scholars evolve. Their earlier work in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter--despite being revolutionary--also did harm to trans & nonbinary communities. This new interview offers a changed and thoughtful perspective.
This doesn& #39;t undo any of the criticisms that scholars like Prosser and Stryker have leveled at Butler& #39;s past work, or Butler& #39;s own problematic siding with predatory academics. It does, though, reveal that someone& #39;s own gender ideas/experiences change over time.
Butler& #39;s past re-evaluations of their own work have often been cagey--saying the audience "misunderstood," or becoming abstract in ways that elided particular communities. There are still harmful elements in that work, but research can also be a life-long, changing endeavor.
Work by Butler & other queer scholars--who were forming ideas around the same time--is still taught far more often in queer/gender studies classes than work by trans & nonbinary scholars & creators. Butler& #39;s evolutions don& #39;t fix a field still dominated by mostly cis POVs.
We can spend a lot of time re-appraising the significance of that work, but this still freezes us in a 80s/90s timeline where queer/gender studies fixates on trans experiences as something to be "read," studied, often violently. We need more space for trans & nonbinary POVs.
My worry is that, in our rush to valorize Butler for evolving--and for aptly defending trans lives--we risk returning to their earlier work as safe, already canonized, now further validated somehow. But Butler is still speaking from a position of enormous privilege and power.
