"... is to engage in a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions that seek to stop and reverse emancipatory change. And yet, 'gender studies' is opposed as 'dogma' by those who understand themselves on the side of 'critique.'... Stoked by fears of infrastructural collapse, anti-migrant anger and, in Europe, the fear of losing the sanctity of the heteronormative family, national identity and white supremacy, many insist that the destructive forces of gender, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory are to blame. When gender is thus figured as a foreign invasion, these groups clearly reveal that they are in the business of nation-building. The nation for which they are fighting is built upon white supremacy, the heteronormative family, and a resistance to all critical questioning of norms that have clearly restricted the freedoms and imperiled the lives of so many people.... Indeed, gender comes to stand for, or is linked with, all kinds of imagined 'infiltrations' of the national body – migrants, imports, the disruption of local economics through the effects of globalization. Thus 'gender' becomes a phantom, sometimes specified as the 'devil' itself, a pure force of destruction threatening God’s creation... Let’s all get truly critical now, for this is no time for any of the targets of this movement to be turning against one another. The time for anti-fascist solidarity is now."
She's using the metaphor of ideas as disease, a very common metaphor, and I wonder what is it that makes other people's ideas a disease and not your own? In any case, there's a problem with relying on metaphor! You can see that there's deep-seated unease — unease, not disease — about unfamiliar others and their strange ideas, but it's everywhere, and if you rally your own side by saying look at those awful people over there with their disgusting ideas, you're stoking the fears.
What does it mean to call on us to "get truly critical" when — in the same sentence — Butler tells us to coalesce into a single powerful movement with members who do not challenge each other's ideas? She started by calling it "a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions" but ended by saying don't you dare be open and inquiring — we need to close ranks.
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So Judith Butler is in favor of teenaged girls being anally raped? Does that extend to women her age?
What does it mean to call on us to "get truly critical" when — in the same sentence — Butler tells us to coalesce into a single powerful movement with members who do not challenge each other's ideas?
What it likely means is that she’s not a clear thinker. She is as lost in writing that mass of convoluted ideas as I am in reading it. Most of the time, I have no idea what she means by gender, I don’t know which side she’s encouraging to resist and which side she thinks needs resisting against. I’m not even sure what I mean when I refer to her “sides.”
"Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over?
I've GOT This one! Hold my beer... Maybe (Just MAYBE) The Dogs don't like the dogfood
I will rely on another intellectual’s thoughts here, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them“
in Europe, the fear of losing the sanctity of the heteronormative family, national identity and white supremacy
This nonsense gets lumped in with everything else because the writer, like so many of her ilk, has a fundamentally racist image of the other as a kind of inverse of her own White society. China's recent moves to suppress male effeminacy should make clear, though, that any supposed association between heteronormativity and the nuclear family and "white supremacy" is a Western fantasy, not something real.
Reading this reminds me of Alan Sokol's " "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
What happens to otherwise smart people when they spend too much time talking and writing in academese?
Women mostly don't understand philosophy and go in their own direction about what should be called philosophy. This direction resembles nagging.
The reason is that philosophy is based on skepticism - how do I know it's a ball of wax, etc. A man's concern. Women don't see the point. Man then goes on to explain how we know that it's a ball of wax and writes volumes.
Kant had volumes of moral philosophy but had the structure in place to back it up.
Early exposure: in phil 101 a smart girl leaned over and asked what in the world they were talking about. I explained it. "Is that all" she remarked. She didn't see how it could be a problem. Who knew how deep that goes. She couldn't see anybody being interested in that.
The problem wasn't complex enough to hold her interest. Women like ill defined situations with lots of factors. Social life, it's called.
The backlash is probably because we'd prefer to organize society around sex, and not gender.
That people want to conflate them is causing trouble. Most people can deal w/ gender not conforming to sex, but they're not being allowed to create spaces based on sex. Why not?
Is sex a dirty word again?
We are men and women. It almost always matters which we are. Men and women are aggressive. Their regard for each other is clouded by grudges, suspicions, fears, needs, desires, and narcissistic postures. There's no scrubbing them out. The best you can hope for is domestication, as in football, rock, humor, happy marriage, and a good prose style. Jokes trade on offensiveness; PC is not a funny dialect. The unconscious is a joker, a sexist and aggressive creature. Our sexuality has always been scandalous. - Wm. Kerrigan
There seems to be a desire to wipe out domestication. How does that work out.
We already know what happens to humor.
Judith Butler, the “famous philosopher” calls to mind the scene from “History of the World, Part I” where Mel Brooks is going on the dole in Ancient Rome, and the woman behind the counter (Bea Arthur) asks his occupation. “Stand-up Philosopher” he says. “Oh, a Bullshit Artist”.
Gender as "foreign invasion"--huh?
"if you rally your own side by saying look at those awful people over there with their disgusting ideas, you're stoking the fears"
Right. Which is the actual point.
"What does it mean to call on us to "get truly critical" when — in the same sentence — Butler tells us to coalesce into a single powerful movement with members who do not challenge each other's ideas?"
It means that she wants people, her people, to coalesce into a single powerful movement with members who do not challenge each other's ideas. Same as any other leftist since 1789.
"She started by calling it "a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions" but ended by saying don't you dare be open and inquiring — we need to close ranks."
"But"? Open inquiry is the tool to enforce the new dogma. Once that's in place, discard the tool. Like free speech, progressive commitments are entirely situational.
"It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence." Boo!
"If it matters (and let’s hope it still does), there is no one concept of gender, and gender studies is a complex and internally diverse field that includes a wide range of scholars." Hooray!
Tim McGuire @ 6:36: “… She is as lost in writing that mass of convoluted ideas as I am in reading it….”
Perfect summary. Thank you. It spares me from having to dip into my day’s allotment of “moron” and similar descriptors.
The complication here is the identification of Judith Butler as a "philosopher." She's not -- she's a classical sophist, an anti-philosopher, as the numerous unsupported assertions and ad hominem attacks even in her small sample show.
Which dressing would you like on your word salad?
What does it mean to call on us to "get truly critical"
Critical legal theory
Critical race theory
Critical (cis)gender theory (original leftist feminism)
Critical economic theory
Critical environmental theory
Critical healthcare theory
Critical (trans)gender theory (ideology of self-creation)
and on and on and on.
The proponents of "emancipatory change" are often more dogmatic than their opponents. Friends of liberty allow different opinions to be expressed. Supporters of liberationist ideologies demand that their ideas be imposed on society, because only then can we be truly free. Our wave of gender speculation started with the idea of promoting greater liberty, but now it's come to mean greater authoritarian impositions on people.
P.S. Anal sex is like Hitler. If you bring that up, you've already lost the argument. Remember the gay marriage debate?
"The complication here is the identification of Judith Butler as a "philosopher." She's not -- she's a classical sophist, an anti-philosopher, as the numerous unsupported assertions and ad hominem attacks even in her small sample show."
Professors in philosophy departments call themselves "philosophers." When I first heard that I thought it was inaccurate and embarrassingly boastful. Are they studying philosophy or actually doing it?
If it's a matter of defining the word, OED says " A lover of wisdom; an expert in or student of philosophy (in various senses); a person skilled or engaged in philosophical inquiry. "
Literally, it would seem to apply to anyone who is exercising a love of wisdom.
If you bring that up, you've already lost the argument.
And thus "never again" happens again and again and again and again. How much misery and death have happened since 1945 because of some neo if lesser Hitlers have come along and others following this inane point have refused to see things for what they are?
Besides, they don't care about "winning" your f*cking argument. Power isn't about damn debates.
Twenty-five years ago, I worked as an editor at Stanford University Press. Judith Butler was one of my authors. With page proofs in hand, I saw that we could either go to the expense of adding another signature (16 pages, most of which would have been blank) or trim Butler's prolix text by something like half a dozen words. I knew that every word of a Judith Butler text is crucial, and that none must be omitted. But I called the author and negotiated those minuscule edits over the phone. Her book suffered no discernible loss of what some still regard as its meaning.
"The time for anti-fascist solidarity is now."
This is pretty funny. Butler's call for solidarity is itself a call for fascism.
Fascism is an appeal for solidarity, i.e., the notion that a group is stronger together. The word "fascism" comes from the word "fasces" which is a group of sticks bound together to be stronger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#/media/File:Fascist_symbol.svg
But of course, Butler's narrative isn't a serious argument. Its just a flow of buzzword sludge with some pretentious wording to suggest logical connections. The best she's got are strained metaphors.
Its useless to point out logical weaknesses and inconsistencies here. She doesn't care about those things, and she is barely even pretending to care. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, UniTe tO sUPoRt eM!
I don't see where uses "the metaphor of ideas as disease." She says 'the anti-gender ideology movement' is not coherent or consistent. Perhaps you disagree with that (or even the very existence of an 'anti-gender ideology'), but your criticism of Butler loses seems somewhat contrived. I suppose you could make the same kind of critique: Butler has not considered that her ideas are incoherent or inconsistent, e.g., but when you say "...there's a problem with relying on metaphor! You can see that there's deep-seated unease — unease, not disease ..." you've built a strawman. She never mentions "disease" or "sickness" or anything like that.
What Butler 'means' is 'Do as the Party tells you', and 'Believe in Magick'.
The essence of transgenderism is right there on the page in 1984. Smith, being psychologically crushed in his cell, writes that if he believes O'Brien is levitating, and O'Brien believes he is levitating, it's as if it really happened. Smith is punished for this heresy. As O'Brien tells him, if they both believe he levitated, it did really happen.
What Atwood is saying is that if everybody believes that the physical reality of male and female bodies doesn't matter, it really doesn't. She is saying that when a man says 'I am a woman', he is literally an adult human female, with an adult human female penis and testicles. What she is saying is that Human will determines reality, directly, that we have godlike supernatural powers in our beliefs.
Of course she doesn't believe that all the time. See Orwell on "doublethink". But she believes it when discussing society and how we should live.
A belief in Magick is not exactly insanity. But it has a close resemblance, it's part of the same family.
ceasing burning witches at the stake was a serious mistake
There is a difference between gender and gender roles. The former denotes the sex of a person and is not (at this time) fluid or changeable. The latter is about what role a person of that sex has in the society they inhabit. In most Western cultures, there isn't any real limit to how flexible it can be. I believe the author is confusing the two concepts.
What does it mean to call on us to "get truly critical" when — in the same sentence — Butler tells us to coalesce into a single powerful movement with members who do not challenge each other's ideas? She started by calling it "a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions" but ended by saying don't you dare be open and inquiring — we need to close ranks.
What you point out above is a major problem with any sort of post-modernist ethics -- is there any Archimedean point where one can stand & say that "this moral discourse is preferable to another because of X"? Are ALL moral discourses not simply competing power relations? If so, why choose one over another, except that one discourse advantages me & mine?
Foucault, in his later years, saw that there can be strong fascist tendencies among those who claim to be anti-fascist:
The strategic adversary is fascism … the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.
—Michael Foucault, Preface to the English edition, Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
“Professors in philosophy departments call themselves "philosophers." When I first heard that I thought it was inaccurate and embarrassingly boastful. Are they studying philosophy or actually doing it?”
Back when you and I were in college, I would suggest that they were studying it, and not doing it. Now, I would suggest that they are more pretending to study it, but mostly just engaging in sophistry.
I arrived at a small liberal arts college in 1968 bright eyed, from stories about the delights of a liberal arts education. Then reality struck, when I took my first (and last) philosophy class. We studied Plato, and the prof asked us on exams what he (Plato) meant. I told him what I thought. The prof told me I was wrong. I asked why? His response essentially was that what he was looking for was what philosophers (meaning liberal, even back then, philosophy profs, like him), believed Plato to have meant. I challenged him to prove his point, other than through consensus. And got one of my lowest grades of my college career. It seems that I was too well indoctrinated by the Scientific Method, where challenging orthodoxy used to be celebrated. Over in the math and sciences, when faced with this sort of challenge, the profs would happily oblige and would applaud my endeavors if I pushed them enough. I expected this sort of abject subjectivity from English profs, from my negative experiences in HS. But had somehow idealized philosophy. Big mistake.
I wish there was a better term than dogmatic to describe Judith Butler. Dogs are not dogmatic. I can only picture her stroking a sullen cat.
In almost all cases, argument from analogy is either stupid, or mendacious.
How about people who think 'white supremacy' is the root of all evil actively reject all things that are 'white'?
No cars, internet (Al Gore...whitest man ever!), TV, radio, most modern medicine, air travel...the list is endless.
Then I'll take them seriously.
Until then...Butler and her ilk are nothing but credentialed morons.
"I don't see where uses "the metaphor of ideas as disease.""
My position is based on this language:
“It is against this background of anxiety and fear that “gender” is portrayed as a destructive force, a foreign influence infiltrating the body politic and destabilizing the traditional family. Indeed, gender comes to stand for, or is linked with, all kinds of imagined “infiltrations” of the national body… Migrants, too, are figured as “infiltrating”… In the imaginary of the anti-gender ideology advocates, “gender” is like an unwanted migrant, an incoming stain, but also, at the same time, a colonizer or totalitarian who must be thrown off….”
She doesn't use the word disease, but she's talking about a toxic outside force that is getting into "the body" — "infiltrating."
This force that is "infiltrating" is an idea — "gender."
How could an idea work within the body if not operating like a disease or infection?
She's saying that her opponents think the idea her side is offering works like a disease. Their rejection of her idea is disparaged as resting on despicable impulses, but isn't her rejection of their ideas resting on despicable impulses, seeing them as disgusting people who hate outsiders?
Poisonous gibberish.
Suck my Twix.
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