Butler’s overarching argument is that “gender” – the overdetermined concept to which “anti-gender ideologists” object – is really a nightmarish bogeyman, a “phantasm with destructive powers"...
I loved Butler's work and the subsequent flowering of queer theory. As an academic, it was thrilling; personally, I felt vindicated in my lifelong contempt and dread of gender games. But transgender friends for whom gender feels real and is deadly serious made me worry a bit about whether this kind of theory works for everyone. I'm still kicking around thoughts about all that.
And despite years of reading-thinking-writing-teaching-discussing all this stuff, while I am very able to avoid the rookie error of mistaking performativity with performance, *I still don't know where or how to be confident about where the distinction falls*.
Meanwhile, the undergrads used to love this thing. Cats, my darlings, how can cats be wrong?
https://binarythis.com/2013/05/23/judith-butler-explained-with-cats/
I loved Butler's work and the subsequent flowering of queer theory. As an academic, it was thrilling; personally, I felt vindicated in my lifelong contempt and dread of gender games. But transgender friends for whom gender feels real and is deadly serious made me worry a bit about whether this kind of theory works for everyone. I'm still kicking around thoughts about all that.
And despite years of reading-thinking-writing-teaching-discussing all this stuff, while I am very able to avoid the rookie error of mistaking performativity with performance, *I still don't know where or how to be confident about where the distinction falls*.
Meanwhile, the undergrads used to love this thing. Cats, my darlings, how can cats be wrong?