So, what is her best and clearest book? Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:15:02 -0800 (PST) Dennis R Redmond <dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
>
> > 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
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu