Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Despite warnings.
It really is (morbidly, frustratingly, infuriatingly) fascinating how this movement reveals just how insignificant the concerns and welfare of women and girls are to those in power. And not just political power. It’s as though power itself, even if only that of an artist or book club chairman, makes it difficult to remember that female people exist and are as valuable as males.
The movement’s success also shows how fragile actual progress is and that liberty really does have an eternal price. After all, Genderism quite obviously depends on the exploitation of existing sexism, whether conscious and overt or nascent and hidden. The very idea of gender identity requires that there be nonphysical traits that are not merely predominantly associated with but actually unique to one sex. To be taken in by the ideology requires some degree of what used to be called sexism. (It’s a sort of ethical special pleading via persuasive definition. You get to engage in the very thing you decry, because the new definition doesn’t apply to you.) Genderism doesn’t create sexism; it liberates it. Genderism absolves people of moral failing, transmuting sin and shame into virtue and pride.
What an exultant rush that must be.
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2 responses to “Guest post: Transmuting sin and shame into virtue and pride”
That’s a pretty good one-sentence summation of Judith Butler’s idea, innit? She thinks we can’t eliminate the sex hierarchy, so let’s just queer it! That’ll show ’em. Or something.
Ya know, I hadn’t thought specifically of the Judith Butler angle, but you’re right, the Queer Theory premise is exactly that the destruction of meaning is liberatory. The funny thing is that they’re right, in a technically correct sort of way. (Which, as we all know, is the best kind of correct.) If the words have no meaning, then “sexism” is meaningless. It’s just the same old signifier/signified confusion.
Well, QT does still set up its “experts” as the arbiters of when words apply, so …
Ugh, Critical Theory’s language games make my head hurt.