Critique of Judith Butler
The Professor of Parody — The hip defeatism of Judith Butler (1999) by Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler
This piece mostly addresses the performative nature of the subversiveness that Judith Butler seemed to promote (past tense, as it’s an old article). I found this interesting in view of the fact that today’s protests in the US also seem to avoid demands for real structural change (aside from reforms to the police).
From today’s perspective, the article underestimated what the long-term impact on discourse would be of the ideas criticised. But will there be a major change in economic reality in the coming years? It’s too early to answer that question.
Some quotes:
they were also right to demand the specialized research on women’s bodies that has fostered a better understanding of women’s training needs and women’s injuries.
Indeed, it is clear that Butler, like Foucault, is adamantly opposed to normative notions such as human dignity, or treating humanity as an end, on the grounds that they are inherently dictatorial.
For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.
In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change. Isn’t this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed — but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval.
The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others.