was naïve,” they told the British magazine Dazed. “When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the U.S. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become… . I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world.” (View Highlight)
Merleau-Ponty propounded the idea that the body, not consciousness, is our primary instrument for understanding the world. To be in a body is not to be contained but to be exposed to the world; from our first breath, we are in need of care from other people. Merleau-Ponty is a deep influence; one can feel him tumbling around in the back seat of much of Butler’s thinking. “I am open to a world that acts on me in ways that cannot be fully predicted or controlled in advance, and something about my openness is not, strictly speaking, under my control,” they have said. (View Highlight)
Butler draws a great deal from Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic, presented in a passage in “The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The self finds itself only in the eyes of another; the master must be recognized by the slave to fulfill his self-consciousness. Thus, the two recognize one another fully at the moment when they grasp their shared ability to annihilate each other. Butler writes, “It is at a moment of fundamental vulnerability that recognition becomes possible, and need becomes self-conscious. What recognition does at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold destruction in check. But what it also means is that the self is not its own, that it is given over to the Other.” (View Highlight)
Maybe ‘Gender Trouble’ is actually a theory that emerges from my effort to make sense of how my family embodied those Hollywood norms and how they also didn’t,” Butler said in a documentary. “Maybe my conclusion was that anyone who strives to embody them also perhaps fails in some ways that are more interesting than their successes.” (View Highlight)
In “Gender Trouble,” Butler wrote that the book’s aim was not to prescribe any particular way of life but “to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized.” (View Highlight)
At home, a sense of isolation grew. Butler was outed by the parents of a girlfriend. They began to scratch at their arms uncontrollably. Dermatologists proved to be of no use, and Butler’s parents eventually sought help from the head of psychiatry at a local hospital. He surprised Butler by asking if they were familiar with the concept of the hair shirt, from the Bible—the donning of a scratchy garment to expiate a sense of sin. “He was reading the Bible as literature,” Butler recalled. “I didn’t know you could do that. He was reading a symptom as a metaphor. He was telling me that my body was speaking in a symptom and saying something that I needed to understand and could reflect on.” By the end of the conversation, Butler told him, with wonder, “You’re not trying to change my object of desire.” And he responded, “Well, frankly, given where you come from, you are lucky to love anyone at all. So let’s affirm your capacity to love.” Butler has remained a “creature of psychoanalysis,” they said. “It’s where I learned how to read. I was given permission to live and to love, which is what I do in my work. It was a wise and generous gift, which allowed me to move forward with my life.” (View Highlight)
Brown still worries about the costs of Butler’s celebrity, the memes crowding out the meanings. “Neither the person nor the richness of the work can cohabit with celebrity—they just can’t,” she said. “I think that the ‘gender-troubled Judith’ and the ‘anti-Zionist Judith’ and the ‘activist Judith’ can miss that this is a person formed by philosophical questions and readings. Careful and close reading, which you generally do by yourself. ‘Gender Trouble’ came out of what we then called gay and lesbian emancipation. But it was not born in the lesbian bar. No, they took it home and wrote it, alone. It is a part of them that I think vanishes sometimes in the hullabaloo.” (View Highlight)
That book, inciter of hullabaloo and produced in private by a thirty-four-year-old junior professor, is itself now thirty-four years old. It drew on Derrida’s reading of the Oxford philosopher of language J. L. Austin and his speech-act theory. Austin had anatomized “performative utterances”: linguistic acts that don’t depict reality but enact it, as when you promise something by using the words “I promise.” Butler broadened the notion to behavior, arguing that gender was something people did performatively. The incorrect reading of “performativity,” which remains the popular one, posits gender as a kind of costume, chosen or discarded for some theatre-in-the-round. What Butler was describing was more obdurate, involving constraint as well as agency. For Butler, the question was “What is done to me, and what is it I do with what is done to me?” (View Highlight)
Joan Scott, as a historian, situates “Gender Trouble” historically: “The seventies and eighties are the start of the critical exploration of gender identity. Feminism starts out with consciousness-raising and asking, What are women? The whole enterprise of critical work is to refuse the singular identity of women, men, gender, race, whatever. All of that, the book is looking to complexify (View Highlight)
Butler went on, “My question to him was never ‘What have I made?’ or ‘How did I make you?’ The question was always ‘Who are you? Who the fuck are you?’ Here’s this independent creature. Yes, I helped bring him into the world, but what do I have to do with this? Sometimes I think, Well, I’m not the biological parent, but I think everybody feels that way. He’s not a reflection of me or on me. I’m constantly getting to know him. It’s really important to keep that question open: Who are you? Don’t fill it in too quickly.” (View Highlight)
That notion that queer identity is inherently subversive, which presupposes that there is a natural order, that the very identity of trans people is a provocation—it’s become the dominant narrative, and it has had a huge impact on legal advocacy,” Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told me. “It has convinced the public that gender identity is self-definition.” (View Highlight)
How do you escape the role of phantasm? It’s not enough to point out the incoherence of the arguments that frame gender as an indoctrination, Butler thinks. What’s required is to conceive of a “counter-imaginary,” a more compelling alternative. (View Highlight)
ideología crítica género argumento
Critical theory is not, for Butler, a matter of taking things apart, but it is a matter of taking time. It enables them to share with others what philosophy has allowed them to do and feel. “Philosophy for me has always been a way of ordering things,” they have said. It’s a way of “making things less dramatic so that I can see. (View Highlight)