"My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police."

"But I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language. And it seems like moral discourse comes in then: Call me this. Use this term. We agree to use this language. What I like most about what young people are doing — and it’s not just the young, but everybody’s young now, according to me — is the experimentation. I love the experimentation. Like, let’s come up with new language. Let’s play. Let’s see what language makes us feel better about our lives. But I think we need to have a little more compassion for the adjustment process."

Says Judith Butler, quoted in "Judith Butler Thinks You’re Overreacting/How did gender become a scary word? The theorist who got us talking about the subject has answers" (NYT).

Butler — author of the very influential book "Gender Trouble" — has a new book, "Who’s Afraid of Gender?"

I liked that line: "I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police." (And note that the word "afraid" is in the new book's title.) 

"To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender, and with what consequences for understanding bodies, lived experience, intimate association, and pleasure..."

"... 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."

 

From "Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over?/Increasingly, authoritarians are likening ‘genderism’ to ‘communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’" by the famous philosopher Judith Butler.

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.

"[I]n the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others."

Masha Gesson prompts Judith Butler, in "Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage" (The New Yorker). Butler answers:

That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.

Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.

"There’s a reason that after describing gender as fundamentally a performance, [Judith] Butler counsels people to revel in messing with its scripts..."

"... to treat gender as nothing more than an ironic parody. Gender categories need to be taken down a notch, she thinks, but not only because they harm people in all the ways feminism spends so much time criticizing. Butler charges that in their focus on spelling out the harms of gendered socialization, feminists unwittingly entrenched the very things they claimed to be criticizing. By demarcating feminism’s subject matter — by articulating a concrete category of harms that deserved feminist attention — feminists inadvertently defined womanhood in a manner that implies that there are right and wrong ways to be a woman.... The women who are accused of being impostors these days are often trans women.... Feminists who deny 'real woman' status to trans women seem to rely on a false assumption — that all trans women have lived in the world unproblematically as men at some point — and claim the importance of affirming the identity and experiences of those who’ve spent entire lives in women’s shoes.... TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] also sometimes complain that the performances of femininity enacted by trans women are chiefly retrograde stereotypes, caricatures of a femininity designed primarily for the pleasure of men. When Caitlyn Jenner says that she has always felt like a woman, for example, what she seems to mean by this is that she wants to be an airheaded piece of arm candy all dolled up for delights of the male gaze.... If cis women were honest... we’d admit that if some trans women occasionally camp up their femininity a little more than TERFs might like, they’re not doing anything we’re not just as guilty of. If we don’t like what we see when trans women turn the mirror of femininity toward us, we have only ourselves to blame."

From "Who Counts as a Woman?/The attempt to exclude trans women from the ranks of women reinforces the dangerous idea that there is a right way to be female" by philosophy professor Carol Hay (in the NYT).

ADDED: Despite Hay's stern lecture on the right way to be a feminist, this is the top-rated comment at the NYT:

Every time I read articles on this topic, it makes me feel like I’ve gone through the looking glass. I was born female in a male-dominated world and subject to discrimination, harassment, and the threat of sexual violence just because I was a girl and now a woman. I had no more choice being born female than My partner did being born African-American.

I have fought my whole life to be heard in the workplace and to be seen as more than a pretty face or female body. But now I have to once again sit down and shut up because some men now want to be women and need to explain to me via academic proxy that if I talk about topics such as my female anatomy or menstruation I am being non-inclusive. Sorry, this is nonsense and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I do not wish transgender people any ill will, live and let live. Just don’t tell me what it is really like to [b]e a woman, ok?