The One About Judith Butler

This post is about loving Judith Butler even though I don’t understand anything she says.

I love Judith Butler – though I rarely understand what she’s saying. I have yet to actually attempt a full piece of her writing, but I look forward to reading Gender Trouble with equal parts excitement and dread. I read an excerpt from “Subversive Bodily Acts” for a course titled Sex and Gender I took a while ago and have reread it multiple times since, and I am only now beginning to piece out concepts from the three-page excerpt that I actually understand. In the case of Sandy Stone this same dense academic language felt unnecessarily pretentious, but for some reason with Butler it feels like an exciting challenge. It may be Butler’s background in philosophy that makes it feel somehow justified, or just my mild obsession with her that allows me to forgive what I fail to understand.

There is something about the hyper intense grounding in academia that simultaneously goes way over my head and draws me in. Butler’s references to Sartre and Beauvoir and use of phrases like “social temporality” and “appearance of substance” give a sense of history and depth in the concepts she introduces. Butler shows the receipts of gender’s social construction, and perhaps that is what makes my own strange feelings around gender feel justified. Even when I don’t understand most of what I’m reading, there are always bits and pieces of her work that I read and understand deeply, and I find that comforting. Many dispute the dense academic jumble that is Butler’s work, an article that appeared in NY Mag quotes philosopher Marth Nussbaum as taking issue with “Butler’s version of feminism” stating that Butler was ignoring the “material suffering of women.” To me, this reads as ignoring the sexist and homophobic experiences of the queer community and is a misunderstanding of academia. The academy is not a space where great social changes get made in an instant. Academia is a place for theory, and institutionalizing the idea that gender is a construct is vitally important for both feminist and queer theory. I see how Butler’s work can by isolating, but I also know from my own experiences how the kind of radical thought she has introduced to the academy has been hugely important and eye opening to me.

As I mentioned, my first introduction to Butler was a gender theory course which opened my eyes to so many new ways of seeing gender and introduced me to the concept that perhaps gender was an idea that has been whispered into our ears all of our lives by people insisting it was real but is actually not inherent to our experience in any way. Learning this, especially in an academic setting, was thrilling to me and set in motion the series of thoughts that led to this very project. Butler’s theories on gender and sexuality, the way she presents, and her grounding in theory of all kinds are all very inspiring to me. For instance, in discussing the use of gendered language Butler states both that “I have not been in the struggle for this long to be called a ‘lady’” and “sometimes I’m with folks, born to various genders, who want to be a lady. For them it’s fabulous to be a lady. . .I’m glad we live in a world in which there are ladies.” It is this kind of dichotomy that I love. She acknowledges that ladies exist, and they are great, and that she is not one. Affirming that gender isn’t real, but we still have to live with it, regardless of how we identify. In “Subversive Bodily Acts” Butler explains that “discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture . . .we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right” (96). This is reminiscent of Susan Stryker saying that “a lot of the violence and discrimination trans people face derives from a fundamental inability. . .to see [trans people] as fully human” (Transgender Studies Today Interview). This really shows the fundamental truth that while we can see that gender is a construct, it is still something that we have to contend with, in a very serious manner, every day. One flaw Butler herself sees in her work is that she “didn’t take on trans very well” in Gender Trouble. This is definitely true in that it seems to be largely focused on binary gender identities, but in my opinion, it also covers so much of what the basis of trans studies is and the ideas of gender performance and performativity align well with a trans identity (I say having yet to read it). Butler says that she “would like to remain ‘permanently troubled by identity categories’” which I would argue is a central belief to queer, trans, and feminist studies. It is when we become comfortable in the categories in which we have been placed that radical thought and the political fight end. I see how Butler can be a polarizing character, but I also see someone who has been “in the struggle” for years and is still keeping the fight alive.