Butler, Judith

philosopher, author of Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender

(Documentaire) Judith Butler - Philosophe en tout genre

Artesquieu · May 4, 2021 · partial coverage

• Judith Butler
• gender
• Gender Trouble
• Undoing Gender
• Beauvoir
• performativity
• grief
• precariousness
• Jewish identity
• Israel
• marriage

Coverage note: full (about twenty-two minutes; YouTube auto-generated captions without punctuation, with a few recognition errors)

Core ideas

A "problem child" and a rabbi. Butler recalls growing up in a politically engaged Jewish family in Cleveland, a "disciplinary problem" at school who found her own way. At eleven she was warned she might become a criminal and was barred from the Hebrew school unless she studied privately with the rabbi (Daniel Silver), which delighted her: at fourteen she asked him why Spinoza was excommunicated, whether German idealism was linked to the rise of Nazism, and what existential theology was. She insists that identities are plural (lesbian, Jew, American, philosopher) and that she does not subscribe to everything a community says.

Gender as doing, failing and becoming. Her family, who owned movie theatres, embodied Hollywood gender norms as part of Jewish assimilation, and she suggests Gender Trouble grew from trying to make sense of how they embodied those norms and also failed at them. A talk on feminist theory led her to Beauvoir's "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman": does one ever finish becoming? Gender is "always a failure", and a good thing, because norms are the accumulated effect of naturalised social relations. Sexuality and gender are not tied together; transsexuality is shaped by medical, legal and cultural possibilities. What worries her is the coercive exercise of gender norms: she tells of a young man killed for his feminine walk, asking what kind of panic can lead to eradicating a walk, and what links compliance with gender and coercion.

Words, grief and precariousness. She recounts how the word "lesbian" first felt like a medical, stigmatising word she had to fight, at fourteen, to keep her feelings. Her work returns to the same problems in different contexts (desire and recognition in Hegel, gender, grief and melancholia in relation to AIDS and the Iraq war: "who can we grieve?"). Public mourning, she argues, makes visible the shared precariousness of lives that cannot be overcome and should be a basis for politics; censorship hides whose lives are valued. She describes being "always slightly disidentified from any given position", uninterested in "happy transcendence", gender being "a field of ambivalence". In Undoing Gender she says we are made and unmade by norms and by others, and openness to being undone is part of being a self.

Israel, occupation, marriage. Asked about a gay-rights initiative in Tel Aviv, she answers that struggles for the rights of sexual minorities in Israel cannot ignore the occupation and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians; she says Jews who criticise Israel fear being called self-hating. On marriage, she thinks it is only one way of organising kinship, should open to any partners who want it ("why only two?"), and hopes that gay marriages will change its narrow norms rather than revive a traditional model.

Excerpts