![]() I worry that many people focus on injurious language, on racist or homophobic speech, thinking that the language is the source of the injury when the source of the injury is actually in racism or homophobia-which is much more profound and much more complicated. Nor does she simply focus on the linguistic quirks of academia. She’s also a long way from the smug apologists for neo-liberalism who conveniently believe political action is inherently futile. She certainly isn’t a ‘postfeminist’, which mainly seems to be certain hacks’ justification for why, now they’re earning serious money, they aren’t interested in equality for the rest of us. ![]() She has often said she is a feminist, not a postmodernist. Judith Butler is not a Marxist, but many of her concerns are ours too. Like the late Pierre Bourdieu, she has consistently used her academic privilege to debate political issues that the rich and powerful would like hushed up. Citing Primo Levi’s condemnation of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, she says, ‘Precisely from within the moral framework derived from the Holocaust, an opposition to the Israeli state is not only possible, but necessary’.3 Last year, as the US and Britain invaded Iraq, she wrote a front-page article in Il Manifesto entitled ‘We, the Anti-Patriots’, where she insisted, ‘It’s important to know that millions of Americans are against this war, without “ifs” or “buts”’.4 She upsets the conservative establishment by speaking out for peace and against racism in public lectures. In a recent article she defends the right of Jews and non-Jews to criticise Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism.2 She wants to preserve and build on Jewish critiques of the Israeli state, against those Zionists for whom this tradition is illegitimate and impossible. Butler, who is Jewish, has long defended Palestinian rights. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.īut in the wake of the second Gulf War, the ‘hip defeatist’ is a key intellectual spokesperson for another America. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. Feminist writer Martha Nussbaum damned Butler’s ‘hip defeatism’ in the right wing magazine New Republic.1 Nussbaum interpreted Butler’s work as a sexualised spin on Baudrillard’s celebration of stupidity as the only possible postmodern revolt:įor Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. ![]() ![]() Butler’s work also produced massive controversy. Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, first published in 1990, made her the star of a new feminism linked to poststructuralism and queer theory. ![]()
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