Sarah Ditum at the Sunday Times drew the short straw and had to plough through Judith Butler's new book:
Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative” — that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.)
The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion”. The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity”.
You might complain that Butler reduced sexual politics to wordplay: not long after I first read her I got pregnant, which is the female body equivalent of Samuel Johnson kicking the stone (his way of refuting the claim that matter did not exist). But her airy abstraction is her appeal. Most humanities academics deal principally in language, and the more power language is supposed to have, the more powerful they get to feel.
In other words, (as with Heidegger), the obscurity is the point. Only very clever humanities academics can fully appreciate the supposed power of her arguments. If set out clearly it'd be much easier to see how ridiculous they are.
She does not differentiate between the authoritarian bigotry of a Viktor Orban and the rights-balancing concerns of a left-wing feminist. All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”.
That is a very windy way of saying that if you disagree with Butler you must be racist. Butler might be all about troubling the gender binary, but morally hers is a simple world of goodies and baddies.
There is no effort to persuade the sceptical reader, because Butler’s presumption is that her opponents don’t read. “It is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments, because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil.”
Her critics are racist and stupid.
In any case she’s true to her word about not bothering to make good arguments. Instead, Butler is out to pathologise those who disagree with her. Either they’re under the influence of a vaguely sketched conspiracy beginning with the Catholic Church (we are treated to two chapters establishing that the Pope is a touch on the socially conservative side) or in the case of feminists who perversely “insist on the biological differences between two sexes”, they are gulled by their own trauma.
In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much.
There’s another interpretation of the pushback against gender identity. Trans campaigners overreached: they imposed a medical pathway of “affirmation” that has harmed probably thousands of young people. It is not damning of feminists that they are on the same page as Vladimir Putin about there being two sexes. That is just how many sexes there are.
Butler condemns feminists for being fellow travellers with the politically unspeakable, but never questions who she might be aligned with. In her world there are no homophobic parents turning their effeminate sons into acceptable little girls; there are no men declaring themselves women simply to commit violence. (Or if there are, Butler will only concede to a “few instances”, and what’s a rape or two?)
It is insulting to have to treat a book like this seriously, when it treats its own subject as a game. Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work. The only terror is that anyone would find it impressive.
Mick Hartley 