Hi.
Did anyone else spend their Sunday night doing dishes listening to Judith Butler on Chris Hayes’ Why is This Happening podcast? (Thanks for the tip, Brendan.)
Butler is doing the media circuit in support of their latest book—and first from a mainstream publisher—Who’s Afraid of Gender? The publisher might be mainstream, but the writing is not. Here’s an excerpt from the blurb:
The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.
This reminds me, I should buy my copy for my decidedly not-mass market transmasc library. (Update: done; of course, my Brooklyn bubble bookstore has in stock.)
Quick, before you read too much further, where are you on the Judith Butler spectrum?
Now, here are two public intellectuals planting their flags:
“Judith Butler’s big brain and big heart have consistently made other people’s lives more possible…”—Sarah Schulman
“If there is one living figure who can be credited with popularizing the worldview according to which Hamas and Hezbollah are ‘social movements that are progressive,’ while J. K. Rowling is ‘in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,’ it’s Judith Butler.”— James Kirchick
OK, then. That both of the above authors identify themselves lesbian or gay is SOMETHING.
Now let’s hear from actual self-identified trans person:
“For a start, nobody really understands what gender is. (At least, Judith Butler apparently understands what gender is, but since nobody understands Judith Butler, that’s not much help.")—Oliver Radclyffe
When I read that sentence from Oliver last fall it struck me funny and provocative. To poke at the “foremost gender theorist” in one’s first book, a book entirely centered on defending one’s trans body, in this political climate. Go ahead, Oliver!!
Keeping it short tonight because I’m only halfway through Chris Hayes’ Gender 101 class and I can’t compete with Andrea Long Chu’s phenomenal NY Mag piece centered around Butler: Freedom of Sex.
Instead, I offer you a scene from my college years:
Chris opens his show with an anecdote that he first read Butler to impress his college girlfriend, Kate, a gender studies major at Brown. Chris and I are contemporaries, it is entirely possible we were reading Gender Trouble within months of each other. Except this Kate was a soft butch living in Charlottesville who convinced the college IT dept to give me the email address dyke@virginia.edu.
For a couple semesters, I lived in a small house right off campus with my friend, and fellow progressive queer activist, Jenny Johnson. I was a bit more of the “establishment” gay, running the LGBT student group on campus. Jenny was always pushing me farther to the left, writing for our radical alt campus magazine Critical Mass, and getting arrested at demonstrations.
Jenny lived in The Cottage for almost all of her collegiate years—I have many, many fond memories of reading, writing, cooking, and loving there.
But the BEST memory was our infamous Gender Trouble party. It was probably the year 2000 or 2001. We printed Butler quotes out on bright pink paper and affixed them all over the house—like the earnest, young, horny nerds that we were—and then invited everyone we knew to dress on theme. The party was silly and raucous, like a good college party should be, and deviantly queer at a University that was still wearing it’s Good Ole Boy legacy proudly.
It was one of those legendary nights people still talk about. At least two people came out queer at (or for?) the party. There were people rolling around in the grass outside. Someone stopped by hours after the party shut down in tears because they realized they were gay. Another friend brought their very Southern brother who was visiting from out of town, and he got his first site of two girls kissing.
Of course all of this could have happened on any night, with any theme, but as queer gender non-confirming students living in a conservative state, we worshipped Judith Butler and the opportunity they were offering us to be ourselves. To paraphrase Sarah Schulman, after Butler, our lives became more possible.
Much has evolved these last two decades, including Butler’s thinking. I can’t believe I’m listening to them late on a Sunday night 20+ years later, but this fact from page 3 of Gender Trouble remains true:
“It becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.”
See you next week.
xx Kyle
will have to forward this one along to that southern brother
Just received her book but haven’t started it. I have always been an admirer of her work and saw her speak many years ago at a CUNY CLAGS event.
However, she is also a vocal anti-Zionist and has a truly distorted view on Hamas. I’ve lost a great deal of respect for her.
https://forward.com/opinion/590612/judith-butler-hamas-terror/?amp=1