/lit/ - Literature

Isn't Butler the Karl Marx of SJW feminazis?

>>6103660
the one everybody cares about is gender trouble
you could have googled this

>>6103660
Start with Gender Trouble. But personally I would watch some lectures on her first or become familiar with Lacan and Foucault. In fact she wrote a really good article on Foucault:

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/butler/en

>>6103672
Unrelated to the OP but did you read the article of her and Yancy about #BlackLivesMatter? It was fantastic.

>>6103680
I haven't, to be completely honest I'm not super familiar with her work I just have friends in gender studies. I'll check out though, thanks anon

>>6103666
I call them "Butlerian Jihadists"

>>6103689

top kek

>>6103689
kkekekekek

>>6103689
>>6103691
Butler is actually pretty cool. I'm not defending the SJWs but is it really a stretch to say that gender is performative and oppressive?

>>6103660
Her book Undoing Gender is written as an introduction and summary of her work, and is really easy to read, perhaps too easy if you already have some background knowledge of Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan.

>>6103736
>Not defending the SJWs
>gender is oppressive

>>6103747
recommending this. I'm reading right now and I have little to no background on continental philosophy and it's been pretty easy to get.
I like how she admits that gender may have a biological part, pretty honest of her

>>6103736
>I'm not defending the SJWs
Why not?

>>6103787
Gender is oppressive as a social technology. It's like making combine quotas with a scythe.

>>6103787
"SJWs" are idiots. In our last man liberal society they are to gender theory almost what Nazis were to Nietzsche. Identity politics is the opposite of what theory is saying.

>>6103838
I wish I could have been in that class, could you direct me to some reading on that?

>>6103843
I would start with Foucault's History of Sexuality, volume 1. It will change your perspective a lot. It will also make you a bit depressed when you will see how stupid the back-and-forth between pop-feminism and conservatism is.

>>6103914
Are you referring to the last chapter on biopower/juridical power specifically? Thanks a lot by the way

>>6103660
why is she so fucking ugly?

>>6103937
Because pretty girls don't have to care about books.

>>6103942
hello there

>>6103937
she's pretty old, what are you expecting?

>>6103937
I'd say she was a handsome woman.

>>6103918
I think the most radical part is the conclusion at the end, yet after the rest of the book it makes so much fucking sense. He basically says sexuality isn't universal. No, not this or that sexuality, but sexuality as such. It is based on the notion of "truth about oneself", which first clearly appeared in the Christian practice of confession. The point is that we are thinking of ourselves as personalities, or identities, and this is a kind of productive power that became much more intense in our contemporary society. Productive in the sense that it produces us as a specific kind of subjects, or even as subjects as such.
To replace that, he uses the notion of "bodily pleasures", he tries to view our practices as practices and not as being a source of some further truth about this or that individual. This is also how punishment worked before sexuality appeared as a dominant power mechanism: sodomy was an act analogous to stealing; what was punished was the act itself, and not the person(ality) behind it.
This has some similarity to Nietzsche's genealogy of the "I" and "subject", where N says that it comes from the notion of the soul. So you again have this origin in Christianity. When you think of human bodies as persons, you're really are assuming they are souls in a way, thinking there is some fixed truth about them, and some inner agency that produces thoughts and acts creatio ex nihilo. Foucault, like Nietzsche, wants to criticize this, but he does it much more like a historian than philosopher.
So this all is pretty opposite of what identity politics is trying to do. In fact, identity politics is just that same old mechanism of power. Foucault doesn't think it is possible to step outside of power though, and he doesn't think of power as primarily repressive; this again comes more or less from the Christian idea of souls being attacked from external and evil passions. Like Nietzsche, he wants to change power relations instead, to something more affirmative towards life, differences, and becoming.

"SJW's" is literally the worst term I have ever heard and I'm ready to die

I have the weirdest hetero crush on Judy butler

>>6103689
bur

>>6103736
yeah, I find his influences interesting

>>6103660
Read gender troubles, then stop there...

>>6104029
Go ahead

>>6104014

So basically human nature doesn't exist, we are tabula rasas that are written upon by society, and all the while we think we have essences and can never break the cycle of illusion

>>6104425
Yes, that is a nice display of someone paraphrasing a position that he doesn't understand.

undoing gender. if it's for a class why don't you ask your prof instead of shitting up /lit/

>>6104425
>So basically human nature doesn't exist
yes
>we are tabula rasas that are written upon by society
no, there is no tabula rasa, we are not substratums, that is part of the point
>we think we have essences and can never break the cycle of illusion
But we can break the cycle of "illusion". Essence is an Aristotelian notion, it is historical; presocratics didn't have this notion; furthermore, something more is at work here, we think about essence of *oneself*, which is a way Greeks didn't think; for them knowledge was to be found in the world, not in ourselves.
It's not really about illusion though, I think it's legitimate to bring up Heidegger's influence here even though Foucault somewhat opposed him. Heidegger though of truth as aletheia, or disclosedness: there is no beyond or outside, we are always already in reality. In this sense sexuality isn't an illusion, it is instead a historical truth, the way things are, or the being of things (or perhaps of power for Foucault).

>>6104392
Gender Trouble should be read alongside Bodies that Matter where she clarifies a lot of the positions in GT.

I also think one shouldn't stop there since Antigone's Claim and Precarious Life are well worth reading too.

I think it's funny that people pretend being a mannish looking dyke or a fat ogre like Dwarkin doesn't automatically discredit this bitching
>BUT YOU'RE SUCH AN IGNORANT SHITLORD AND....

Yeah okay well "it doesn't work", commie, and enjoy your countless wasted hours on theory that always fails terrifically.

>>6104438

what is there to understand?

>>6104486
well i hate to be cliche anon but being a fat dyke doesn't automatically discredit your complaints. do you have anything substantive to say about butler?

>>6105455
>bumping an irrelevant dead thread to respond to a retard troll
y

>>6104486
I wonder if she'd ever have become such a pathetic whiny dyke - with a completely toxic influence on contemporary scholarship - if God had just blessed her with real breasts and stopped her from wanting to dress like a boy.

>>6103736
>that gender is performative and oppressive
It is the whole interest of the concept, yes. Ofc it clashes with the liberal views...

>>6105510
wat