> 3) On another list Doug H. took me to task for
> telling "wee-wee jokes" about Judith Butler. Actually I
> think Dennis Redmond is on the money: she is the Foucault
> of lesbianism. I buy that, but what has she said that he
> didn't?
Foucault never got beyond the problem of pleasure as a political category, i.e. the direct rebellion against an extremely repressive set of gender ideologies. The ideologies have gotten more subtle and polyvalent, and therefore the rebellion can't take the form it once did, at least here in the high-tech, media-saturated, microsoftized First World. Butler is asking, how *do* the newer gender ideologies work, and what's at stake in their construction. In plain English (a nonexistent beast, but bear with me) Foucault is writing about The Power, or a power still tied to the national security state, and Butler about the sort of power Bill Gates exercises.
> one. Otherwise, about all I see in Butler is the adoption
> of a lot of peculiarly ingrown academic rhetoric to such
> discussions. That is why the more substantive part of my
> mock was not about the performativity of the phallus, but
> about her incessant invocation of "citations." How
> ludicrously and introvertedly academic can one get?
Politics nowadays is all about citations: where you get your information from, who processes it, who it gets distributed too. And whence this penchant, which I've seen over and over and over in these conversations about Butler, that the world's sins are the fault of introverted geek academics who Fail To Be Objective Enough? That may be true for the neoclassical goons who legitimate late capitalism's continuing predations, but Butler is someone *questioning* this. But maybe it's precisely this resistance to thinking anything new, this virulent attack on even the faintest, most tenuous notion of postmodern solidarity, which explains why we don't have a Left in this benighted country...
-- Dennis