I have a new essay in Tablet on Judith Butler’s journey from TERFy Hegelian to tragic themlet, tracing her formative years with Gadamer and (the unjustly forgotten) Maurice Natanson, early engagement with Beauvoir and the ‘Sex Wars’ of the 80s, and some salacious bits of family/sexual history, in order, I hope, to get some new perspectives on what ‘gender’ is even about, and to re-articulate what’s philosophically and politically at stake in debates over how we interpret ourselves and each other.
It could be read alongside other ‘gender’/Theory-related essays of mine in Tablet on Eve Sedgwick, Eric Marty, Andrea Long Chu, etc.—although I tried, in the interests of this one speaking efficaciously to a wider readership (which I have to say those other essays clearly didn’t), not to be quite so mean as I was in those. I can be civil when it’s important!
That was so good.
I have been so puzzled by what happened to the gay movement/community—how gender seems to have swallowed everything. And so quickly too.
The authoritarianism which seems baked into gender stuff these days also puzzles me. Where my sexuality is an important part of my life if someone mistakes me for straight I don’t feel it violates me. I don’t feel like my being or personhood depends on being recognized as gay—correctly, always.
Yet so often that is exactly what I hear from gender activists. That to deny someone’s gender identity is to deny their very being. And even mistakes can be viewed as suspect and as potential attacks or abuse.
I struggle to understand this authoritarian shift? If that’s what it is?
And too the bizarre conflation of gender volunteerism, and essentialism, which you point out, makes my head spin.
I can’t wait to read this. I’m trapped at my yacht club without reading material so this is perfect.