Butler, Nussbaum, Paglia

[frances bolton]

Tavia writes:
----
>This is more or less describes Butler's activism. She is notorious for
>quibbling at conferences about being referred to as a woman or lesbian.
>Perhaps it is self-mockery, but I would not rule out the possibility that
>she actually sees this as politics. For example, at the Freud conference
>here at Yale last year someone referred to "the three women" on the panel
>and Butler grabbed the mike to report that, while the others may have
>identified themselves as women, she had not. People kind of giggled, and
>she succesfully flustered the questioner enough to evade his/her question.
>But I thought, what a drag! This is political speech?
>

A couple of years ago Barbara Epstein had a piece in the Socialist Review on
"Why Poststructuralism is a Dead End for Progressive Thought."  She began
the paper with an anecdote about Butler. Butler was giving a talk in
Berkeley in front of a few hundred academic women. Butler began her talk by
asking"Who among you thinks she's** a woman. Not a single woman answered the
question in the affirmative because they all knew that to do so was to leave
themselves open to (a) ridicule, and (b) charges of being theoretically
unsophisticated.

**I can't remember what pronoun Epstein quoted Butler as having used.

frances