an interview with Judith Butler

Judith Butler is not my favourite feminists. There are some problems with her approach towards performance that masks Austin's biases, the whole performativity theory is uncritically built on this exclussion of performers as not-enough egosintonic subjects. But on the other hand, she is one of the most popular feminist&queer thinkers, well cited in academia and elsewhere, already a popular culture figure. And her thinking is still a mind-blowing for me on various topics. In a recent interview published in Monthly Review she explains her understanding of feminism:

In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women. . . , it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure -- restrictive for me and for others -- and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled 'monsters'. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.

I can completly identify with this particular vision of feminism and her own implication. She oferred the radical language indeed. Following another question, she explains her commitment to gender as a social construction and the need for "body talk":

My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender. There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing. Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish. And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing. I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying "this kind of gender is good and this one is bad". To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive? What is a flourishing body? What does it need to flourish in the world? And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.

In what way is gender relevant today and what happens when gender roles are not questioned? Butler explains:

Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable -- the sexual or gender minorities -- and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence. These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned. I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish. For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.

The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable. One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life? And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us? What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?

But more on Levinas, Agamben, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, life, humanism and so on here. After reading this interview, I admit that I see things a bit different. Mindblowing is the right word.

And one last quote on Butler's postition on sexual difference. Here she is again:

We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to find other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine. We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference.