Capitalizing on sexual trauma
Feminist “icon” Judith Butler is shitting on women from a great height. Very iconic.
It is. It’s stunningly disgusting.
Tip Jar
Feminist “icon” Judith Butler is shitting on women from a great height. Very iconic.
It is. It’s stunningly disgusting.
I fail to see where Rowling has gained anything from her history of sexual trauma, other than a lot of grief from TAs. Like most of us, the world doesn’t care when a woman is abused. If we’re lucky, our friends and family might care, but a lot of us find that isn’t even true. They usually don’t even believe us. So anyone who accuses Rowling of “weaponizing” or “capitalizing” on her history of sexual trauma can go fuck themselves (a biological impossibility, but since most of these people believe men can be women, they are clearly believers in biological impossibilities).
I have just found on the internet the essay by Martha Nussbaum, whose books I admire enormously, in which she takes apart Judith Butler. I recommend it: it can be found by Googling ‘Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler, The New Republic’. A few excerpts:
‘ Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.’
(Butler’s) ‘implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.’
(Butler’s) ‘obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. ‘
‘In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.’
‘Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler’s focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.’
‘Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.’
Christina Hoff Sommers must be furious that she’s been replaced as the go-to feminist icon for misogynistic wankers.
I read Nussbaum’s essay. Her lucid prose really shows up Butler’s word-tangles.
That Nussbaum essay is something I shared very early (and, probably, often) on B&W. The core ideas are what inspired B&W (the whole site, not just the blog). I did an In Focus on Bad Writing in October 2003. Denis Dutton of Arts & Letters Daily ran an annual Bad Writing contest.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2003/bad-writing/
I’ve done a lot of peer review of scientific papers in computer science and a few other fields. It’s obvious, but in my experience the best writing comes from authors that have something to say, something they’re excited about.
It’s not just that authors with nothing significant to say waffle to inflate their results, although they often do. It’s not always that they don’t really understand the literature or how the results relate to it, although that’s often the case.
It’s just that the best writing is by people who feel they have something really cool to say.
Almost every time I’ve had to struggle to understand what the author is actually saying (which is separate from understanding the technical content), I’ve found that they’re not really saying anything.
What I learned from doing peer reviews reduced the number of papers I wrote but (I think) dramatically increased their quality.
It’s daunting to write a comment on a thread (partly) about bad writing. It reminds me of a time I had to give a talk to a pretty big audience directly after someone had given a talk about the unconscious gestures people make when they’re giving talks. I owe whoever scheduled that a slap.
@5 I remember there being a discussion about Prof. Nussbaum’s article on the TPM forum way back when. It was most certainly before ’03. I remember some good book recommendations (by her) from you as well. :)
Definitely before ’03, because it had closed down before then.