I was gone for the weekend when Catherine asked me 1) why I find Butler's writings on literature weak, 2) why I feel her version of politics is quietist, and 3) what Butler said at the Freud conference.
1) I'll beg off and simply recommend Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's introduction to Novel_Gazing (1997) as a successful critique of the version of paranoid reading practice Butler's literary readings exemplify. Even if one doesn't find (as I find) Sedgwick a more perceptive, generous, and politically pungent reader of literature than Butler, you would probably find her argument thought provoking.
2) I think Butler herself defines her politics as quietist. In Feminist Contentions, and again in the Merely Cultural exchange, she both reduces her politics to a refusal of all norms _and_ adamantly refuses under questioning to allow her politics to be reduced to any such refusal of all norms. In my view, this makes her an obscurantist, or, as Nussbaum calls her, a sophist.
3) Her remarks at the Freud conference were brilliant. She discussed the incest taboo and made compelling observations about its connection to the stigmatization of homosexuality. She really stirred things up amongst the latter day puritans, left and otherwise, camped up her in New Haven. Her comments have stayed with me long after the other the other speakers have blurred into the general fog of memory.
Tavia