Archive for category: Hetero Patriarchy

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The latest Judith Butler story goes like this: Butler, a renowned philosopher and queer theory bigwig, did an interview with Jules Gleeson of The Guardian. The interview was published on September 7, 2021: social media instantly exploded over Butler’s assertion that so-called “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (otherwise known by their opponents as TERFs) “have allied with rightwing attacks on gender.” Thus, they “will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism.”

In typical social-media style, Lefties were elated; TERFs, vindictive.

In chapter two of the drama, however, The Guardian then released an edited version of the interview that omitted Gleeson’s original question and Butler’s controversial three-paragraph answer. The Guardian explained this stunning journalistic reversal by claiming that Gleeson’s question did not meet its journalistic standards—even though Gleeson offered to revise the question rather than cut the passage.

Cries of censorship exploded all over social media. Of course.

In the aftermath of this mess, I recommend that you read Butler and Gleeson’s original text (hat tip to the Internet Archive’s quick work in saving it). Where the social-media buzz was impassioned and Manichean, the interview itself is refreshingly nuanced, easy to understand, and intellectually rigorous. And let’s be clear: Butler did not, in fact, “call TERFs fascists.” They did something much more useful: they situated TERFs within the context of the larger conservative movement to confine gender to a binary, and described how fascism feeds on biological essentialism, whether it comes from the right or the left.

In other words, TERFs don’t have to be “fascists” to contribute to the political conditions on which fascism thrives.

In the wake of the Texas Fetal Heartbeat Law, Laura Briggs called the statute’s tight control of women’s bodies “creeping fascism.” Butler develops this argument further, challenging us to go beyond simplistic accounts of both conservative backlash and fascism. It’s too easy, and incorrect, to say that conservatives “hate,” and progressives are completely allied with, women and trans people. Analyzing conservatism through the lens of hatred reduces it to an overly simplified war of groups identity: straight people against gays, cis-gendered people against trans people, men against women.

It’s not how the world works, for one. But it also only adds fuel to the fire for conservatives, who are all too eager to claim that the progressive left is nothing more than an army of fragmented identities, each asking for a share of the proverbial pie.

By contrast, Butler rejects identity politics. As they explain in the original interview:

“If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realize ideals of radical justice, equality, and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions.”

What made TERFs so angry? That Butler is a feminist who refuses to reify the category of “woman” as a principle point of knowledge for dismantling patriarchy.

Why does Butler think this way? Because their feminism operates not from a place of fear, but from a place of creativity—a place of, to quote civil-rights icon John Lewis, “good trouble.”

If you’ve ever talked to a TERF, you know that fear is crucial to their feminism. They are afraid of cisgender men, of trans people, of non-binary people—they are even afraid of other cisgender women who refuse the logic of TERFdom. Like many conservatives, theirs is a politics of scarcity: there are not enough resources for “women” as it is, so newcomers to the party are seen as taking things—jobs, starting positions on varsity field hockey, locker room space—that properly belong to what they call “natal women.”

Among its other traits, fascism is an ideology that relies on fear. As a modern ideology, it was built on the principle that for society’s largesse to be equitably shared, the recipients of those benefits need to be pure agents of the ideal state—racially pure, sexually pure, and ideologically pure. For fascists, the role of the state is not to negotiate difference, but to eliminate it. For fascists, gender is not a category, but a fact: a clear, naturally-occurring binary whose opposing poles contribute to a healthy and balanced society that is free from fear.

According to the tenets of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, “women” deserve equality as women. Women have been oppressed by “men.” Men are violent, dangerous, and unrestrained. Trans women, according to TERFs, are “biologically male,” and therefore embody all of the above traits.

In fact, TERFs’ anti-trans agenda is built on the implication that trans women are not just men, but worse than men. Violent and dangerous because of the sex they were assigned at birth, TERFs accuse trans women of willfully invading “single-sex” spaces and—this has emerged most prominently in the debate over athletics—stealing opportunities from cisgender women.

According to TERFs, maleness is the source of women’s oppression and “authentic” femaleness, the source of women’s liberation, and thus something to be cherished and protected. TERFs believe that sexual categories are innate, binary, and unchangeable, and that a just society can only emerge from a balanced gender/sex binary in which maleness is no longer dominant.

Needless to say, queer theory’s central project is to explode not just the binary, but gender itself: thus, for TERFs, queer theory—and the activisms and new identities it has produced—are an aberration of feminism. As one TERF activist wrote in The Guardian in 2017, “Queer politics positions gender as an innately held identity. The radical feminist understanding is that gender exists as a political system, not an identity.”

This is, of course, not only hypocritical, but a gross misunderstanding of queer politics and queer theory. As Butler explains in their own recent interview, the word “queer” was conceived by early activists as a way of “affiliating with the fight against homophobia. It began as a movement opposed to the policing of identity—opposing the police, in fact.”

Like all prominent struggles led by marginalized groups, however, queer movements have been reduced by their detractors to “mere” identity politics (itself a term coined by Black feminists to express the possibility of creating new, broad-based social movements). And ironically, TERFs, like conservative critics of transgender people, discount the radical potential of queerness by claiming that identity is a flimsy basis for politics—while basing their own activism on the need to protect female identity as exclusive and unique.

TERFs share a penchant for vigilante justice with the drafters of Texas’s SB8 bill, which mobilizes private citizens to punish people seeking and providing abortions. For TERFs, any cisgender woman has a “right” to identify and examine anyone she perceives to be “biologically male,” expose them, expel them from the “single-sex” space they have supposedly invaded— whether it is a bathroom, a locker room, or a soccer field. And, like Texas abortion vigilantes, TERFs claim to be “protecting” women—and, increasingly, children, as we’ve seen with the new anti-trans obsession with sports.

But what is really being protected here? The purity of the female body: one that matches the sex it was assigned at birth and carries out the “natural” functions of that sex.

The antidote to fascism is not feminism, but queerness—a theory and a politics built on the notion that nothing is natural and no one owns the truth of gender. Because gender is, as historian Joan Scott puts it, a “primary way of signifying relationships of power,” queerness also teaches us that no one owns, or should own, the key to power. Queerness is not about the right to have an identity, but about the right to question its source and its meaning, and by doing that, question the society that determines those identities.

As Butler reminds us, gender is “a struggle, a way of dealing with historical constraints and making new realities.” A truly radical feminism is not one that depends on exclusion, but one that questions power—its sources, its language, and its effects—and welcomes anyone who is willing to take part in that questioning to join the fight.

Hannah Leffingwell is a PhD candidate at New York University in the departments of History and French Studies. Her work centers on the intersections of queer identity, feminism, and social justice. Her first chapbook, A Thirst For Salt, was published by Gazing Grain Press in 2018. @hanleffingwell

Authoritarians know how to play on the gender anxieties of insecure men, building up an army of bitter chumps

It’s not just abortions that are endangered by the new anti-abortion laws but women’s health care and those who provide it.

Most abortion clinics provide many other health services for women, Kathy Spillar, executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation, said. That includes birth control, screening for sexually transmitted diseases and even general health care. “In some communities, it’s the only place that women can access reproductive health care at an affordable price,” she added.

But the anti-abortionists are deliberately making it harder for those providers to perform any health care for women. As MSNBC host Ali Velshi put it, the new laws put a chill on clinics, making them financially unviable and forcing them to close.

Then there are the other attacks. “These are not just pickets along a sidewalk somewhere,” Spillar continued, but there have been murders and bombings. Anti-abortionists “go after doctors. they go after the staff. they go after the patients that are trying to access these clinics with harassment, with stalking, with interference with their access. and it is only increasing with every one of these laws that these states are passing, to interfere with access.”

Brittney Poolaw was “charged and convicted of a crime without basis in law or science,” her advocates said.

Photograph Source: david__jones – CC BY 2.0

By Eve Ottenberg
Counterpunch
October, 8th, 2021

Genius that he was, Marx still was only human. His theories have lots of shortcomings that reflect his era. For instance, despite his disquisition on soil depletion due to capitalist agriculture, he did not emphasize enough the myriad ways capital poisons the earth. He believed that socialism would benefit from the “progress” of capitalism, a view overturned by the eco-disasters of the twentieth-century Soviet Union. He did not denounce colonialism sufficiently. He did not exhibit a profound, implication-grasping consciousness of racism, although of course he opposed and denounced it. He failed to appreciate the commons embraced by indigenous people around the world and how it could hem in capital’s global encroachments. And he was cool to feminism, not only taking domestic work for granted, but devoting little writing to the actual care and reproduction of the working class and the people, women, largely responsible for that reproduction.

What does Marx have to say to feminists? More to the point, what do feminists have to say to Marx? Well, quite a lot, as any reader of Sylvia Federici’s new book, The Patriarchy of the Wage, can tell you. Granted, a main reason Marx ignored domestic work was that in his time he saw women in factories toiling such long hours that they, in fact, did no domestic work. That changed later in the nineteenth century, as the ruling class became alarmed about the proles’ ability to reproduce themselves, something emaciated people, worked to death before age 30, with no time for childcare, no less breast-feeding, whose offspring starved on their pathetic diet of commercial elixirs, could not do. With the shift from light textile to heavy, iron and coal, industry, the bourgeoisie instituted the patriarchy of the wage, namely, booting women out of factories, shortening hours but intensifying the work and paying men enough to support a family. Thus the upper class reproduced its nuclear family model in the working class. In so doing, it lengthened some working-class lifespans and decreased infant mortality. So some might say that, oppressive as all this was, it became, objectively, an improvement. But not Federici.

In this new scheme, the thrifty housewife tended home, children and her husband’s sexual needs. This labor, done by half of humanity, escaped Marx’s notice – again, partly because, for a while, he had observed women workers not doing it. But domestic work and care-giving occupy billions of people. It is unwaged work, as was the plantation toil of slaves and much of the moil of campesinos in Latin America. As Federici argues, the white male working class, whose cause Marx championed, forms but a sliver of a much larger agglomeration of laborers who produce the goods and people our world depends on. And many of those laborers work for no pay.

“Our rejection of leftist ideology is one and the same as our rejection of capitalist development as a road to liberation,” Federici wrote in a 1970s article, included here, and thus disposing of old-school socialist and communist fetishization of capitalist technocracy. One need only survey the catastrophic ecology of the Soviet Union to realize that insofar as it mimicked capitalism, communism contributed to the destruction of a habitable planet. True, China recently combined capitalist structures with communism to lift 850 million people out of poverty in a short period of time, a world record, with which no one can compete. Also, the USSR arguably would not have crushed Nazism, had it not industrialized at a breakneck pace in the 1920s and ‘30s. So using aspects of capitalism for communist ends has its obvious pluses. But the minuses are also huge.

Take the nuclear family. “Far from being a precapitalist structure, the family, as we know it in the West, is a creation of capital for capital,” Federici writes. And what does this family, based on women’s work, do for capital? It “produces the most precious product on the capitalist market: labor power.” So ignoring unwaged women’s work, as the old left did and as the new left did also, before it yielded to a feminist hullaballoo, created a huge blind-spot in left analyses. It also seamlessly continued and extended the pernicious neglect of the feminine contribution to the world of work. “It’s no accident that we get the lowest paid jobs, and that whenever women enter a male sector, wages go down. Employers know that we are used to working for nothing.”

That work includes what Federici calls sex work, about which she has much to say that appears counterintuitive. In her convincing opinion, psychoanalysis “was born as the science of sexual control.” Federici has sharp words for Freud and other male theoreticians of female sexuality. Her generalizations are sharpest of all. “For the women of today,” she writes, “no less than for our mothers and grandmothers, sexual liberation can only mean liberation from ‘sex,’ rather than the intensification of sexual work.” Take that, Sigmund Freud! If that doesn’t throw cold water on male theories of female sexuality, I don’t know what will.

To return to Marx. Federici argues that he failed to see what she calls “the strategic importance” of reproductive work. This does not invalidate the truth of his analysis, insights and arguments, as far as they went. Federici simply argues they did not go far enough. And he made mistakes. “Today the miscalculation that Marx and generations of Marxist socialists have made with regard to the liberating effects of industrialization are all too obvious.” Their “Promethean view of technological development” leads to catastrophic climate change.

But that is not to ignore what’s valuable: “The Marx who most matters to us is the theorist of class struggle.” He may have missed that “domestic work, especially the care of children, constitutes most of the work on this planet,” but had he lived today, I find it hard to believe that Marx would have failed to connect feminism and historical materialism, or that he would have done anything besides champion the revolutionary insights of anti-colonialists like Franz Fanon. Though a man of his time, Marx, to use a term he would not have liked, transcended it far more than most. His theories and prescience still inform any left critique of society and economy that’s worth its salt, today, as they probably will tomorrow.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.

Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972 she was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective that launched the Wages for Housework campaign. Her books include Caliban and the Witch; Re-enchanting the World; and Witches, Witch Hunting, and Women. She is a professor emerita at Hofstra University, where she taught in the social sciences. She worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years and was also the cofounder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa.

Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism

The post Marx and Feminism appeared first on PM Press.

On Saturday, October 2, tens of thousands of people mobilized in over 600 marches across the country as part of the “Bans Off Our Bodies” National Day of Action organized by the Women’s March. The numbers and enthusiasm highlight a real desire to fight back against attacks on abortion rights.

While the Trump years were characterized by countless large protests, this was the biggest nationwide day of action during the Biden administration so far. But it paled in comparison to the 2017 Women’s March protests that took place soon after Donald Trump’s inauguration and brought out over four million people to the streets.

In New York City, several thousand people took to the streets on Saturday to demand the protection of abortion rights across the United States. There were smaller marches planned in Brooklyn and Queens earlier in the day, but they eventually converged with the action in Manhattan, making it the largest action in the city. People held signs that read “Abortion is healthcare and healthcare is a right”,and “We are not going back.”

These mobilizations were in response to the recent passage of S.B.8 in Texas, a draconian anti-abortion legislation which bans abortion after six weeks of gestation, effectively outlawing around 85 percent of abortions performed in the state. In addition, anyone can bring a lawsuit against someone who has an abortion or helps someone access one, effectively placing a bounty on anyone seeking or performing an abortion.

The protests were held days before the start of the Supreme Court’s new session, where the Court will hear a case that will revisit Roe v. Wade. One only needs to look at the precedent set by Texas to see that abortion rights are in danger across the country.

It is in response to these dire circumstances that tens of thousands took to the streets on Saturday.

In New York City, like around the country, many of the speakers represented various non-profits and electoral offices. Representatives from organizations such as the Progressive Voters’ Guide and the New York Civil Liberties Union took to the stage. Democratic party politicians like Rana Abdelhamid who is running for New York’s Twelfth District in Congress spoke as well, along with Carolyn Maloney who has been an elected Democrat in Congress since 1993. Almost all of the speakers highlighted the need to vote Democrat in the midterms—which is over a year away—as if the Democrats didn’t already control both houses of Congress and the Presidency.

An Anachronistic Message

There was a sense of complete disorientation in the speeches and the protest signs. After all, in the last four years, many had not only voted blue and gotten Trump out of the White House, but had also flipped the House and the Senate. The “villain” of the 2017 Women’s March was (at least temporarily) defeated. And yet, attacks on abortion have only increased.

In that sense, speeches and signs were deeply anachronistic — they called out Donald Trump, who is no longer in office, memorialized Ruth Bader Ginsburg with chants like “Ruth sent us,” and called on people to vote as if they hadn’t just done that exact thing.

Yet, the strategy to take their “power to the polls” as championed by Women’s March hasn’t stopped the attacks on abortion rights. In fact, according to the Guttmacher Institute, in the first six months of Biden’s Presidency, more abortion restrictions were enacted by state legislatures than in any previous year.

Voting Blue is not an effective strategy to stop attacks on abortion. It just isn’t.

And although nearly all attacks have been passed by Republicans, the Democrats don’t have their hands clean either. Democrats insist on continuing to “vote blue”, using current examples of attacks on abortion rights by Republicans to boost their campaigns. Yet, historically, the Democrats have also passed attacks on abortion rights, including the Hyde Amendment which bans federal funds for abortions. Passed by Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, the Hyde Amendment ensured that abortion was no longer easily accessible to working class people. Carter, when supporting the Hyde amendment said,

“Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t. But I don’t believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there is a moral factor involved.”

In fact, until recently, current president Joe Biden was a vocal supporter of the Hyde Amendment. And now, there are two anti-abortion Democrats in the Senate who would bar any abortion legislation from passing, even without the filibuster. These aren’t anomalies: even now, while capitalizing on public anger, the Democratic Party, including its progressive wing, has looked the other way on abortion when trying to build their ranks, with Bernie Sanders campaigning for anti-abortion Democrats.

Protests Shouldn’t Be Electoral Campaigns

The New York Times framed the Women’s March as “an early test of Democratic enthusiasm in the post-Trump era.” And indeed, that is what it was, with the protest largely serving as an electoral rally to rev up support for the Democratic Party.

This is what we mean when we say that the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements: it turns legitimate anger and street protests into electoral campaigns. It convinces demonstrators that protests are nothing more than pressure campaigns for politicians or a way to galvanize an electoral base. That’s the story of the Women’s March which went from mobilizing four million people in the streets to marching under the slogan “Power to the Polls” a year later. And that’s the lesson Women’s March organizers, tied to the Democratic Party, want people to believe — that our power is at the polls.

But that’s not what the most effective protests are. The most effective protests are a huge show of our power in the streets, of people, united.. Protests are a step in the direction of the self organization of the masses, towards fighting for and winning our demands— goals they can achieve if the movement isn’t co-opted into the dead-end electoralism of the Democratic Party. Above all, protests can spread energy and enthusiasm to the ranks of the working class where we can use our most powerful weapon, the strike, to impose our strength and win our demands.

Indeed, nothing but struggle has ever won major concessions from the capitalist state.

Building a Mass Movement

In New York City, much of the left brought contingents to the Women’s March, mobilizing their ranks and periphery to rightfully fight against the attacks on abortion rights. However, the largest socialist organization in the country with a paper membership of over 85,000, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were conspicuously absent. The DSA refused to mobilize for the march, instead calling on it’s members to donate to abortion funds instead. In the days leading up to the day of action, the Socialist Feminist Working Group released a statement saying that “the Working Group cannot say in good faith that socialist feminism will be fought for at the march.”

Indeed, the Women’s March has a lot of problems — many that are in fact, now shared by the DSA: bringing a movement into the fold of the imperialist, sexist, party of capital, the Democratic Party. But the attacks against abortion rights are a reality and the only way to fight back is to be in the streets. To win, we have to take to the streets alongside with the tens of thousands who came out on Saturday — many of whom we likely don’t share a program with — and push for stronger mobilizations and labor actions that aren’t subservient to the Democratic Party, but rather use our strength in the streets and workplaces to not only defend abortion, but win more.

Saturday’s mobilization was a start and showed a will to fight. But it’s not enough. To fight for the right to an abortion, we will need to have more protests with more people — a real mass movement. We will need our unions and community organizations to mobilize their ranks in defense of this basic right. And this means combatting the notion that the Supreme Court or Democratic party politicians can save us or protect our bodies and our lives.

This isn’t political dogma but proven historical fact. They will not, the cannot, and they are not defending abortion rights. In order to defend all those who need abortions and all health care workers who perform them, we must reject the beckoning hand of the Democratic Party and build a mass movement in the streets and in our workplaces, harnessing our power as workers to demand that there be no bans or restrictions on our bodies or our bodily autonomy.

The post An Anachronistic Women’s March appeared first on Left Voice.

In her new book “The Trouble with White Women: A Counter-History of Feminism,” Kyla Schuller argues that white women have exploited more marginalized groups to gain power.

If I were Judith Butler, I would desist from giving interviews to journalists. She has done a few lately (with Owen Jones on YouTube, with Slate magazine last year, with the Guardian a few days ago, etc.) and in each and every one of those interviews, she repeats the same thing. And in this repetition, she affirms she still lives in the 1990s. It may not be altogether her fault. She is repeatedly interviewed about her book Gender Trouble that was published in the ‘90s, the occasion being the contemporary dominance of the trans movement. And so she opines on what she said in the book. The trouble, though, is that she opines as if what she says is “subversive,” a radical parole in a langue of traditionalism. “We need to rethink the category of woman,” she repeats in her latest interview with the Guardian (September 7th) as if we had not already done far more than that.

Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’

The author of the ground-breaking book Gender Trouble says we should not be surprised when the category of women expands to include trans women

The GuardianJules Gleeson

We have legislated gender in which her main claim in Gender Trouble that sex is “socially constructed” is the heart of the legislation. Not only have we legislated it, but the cultural institutions of this country have adopted it as the new normative order and used their institutional power to enforce it.

Transgender fighter Alana McLaughlin wins MMA debut https://t.co/S4RLM3JEa6 pic.twitter.com/yeBo9YF1xM

— New York Post (@nypost) September 11, 2021

From the legacy media, to social media, to tech companies, to educational institutions from schools to universities are all now repeating in unison: “sex is socially constructed.” Butler speaks as if what she says is not already endorsed by the state. Perhaps it is terrifying for the subversive professor of the ‘90s to realize she is now in power? She would have to confront the rebellion from the margins, a place that Butler has endowed with virtue and has positioned herself in. If power was everywhere, as Butler, per Foucault, had theorized, and Butler was now in power, then surely rebellion against it is not just what the theory foretold, but the same virtue would have to be attached to it.

In the same interview, we read the same tired talking points: the bad TERFS are allied with the religious Right obstructing trans rights, shame on them. This is an assertion that goes even further back to the ‘80s. The one hint she reveals in that interview that we lived in a different era, is her assertion that we must fight the forces of “fascism.” This is clearly a reference to the right-wing populism that brought Trump to power. She has sought to update the evil forces I suppose: it is now right-wing populism, the religious Right, and radical feminists (TERFS) who are standing in the way of her subversive claims. This is all nonsense, of course. None of these forces holds power over cultural institutions, especially the elite ones and those which indoctrinate youth to her theories of gender. Perhaps recognizing that her theories are in power will force Butler to look at their impact in the world.

Butler, like many celebrity academics of her generation, was an academic of “theory” with no interest in “sociology.” Theory is elite, it is what smart professors do. They deconstruct the reigning order through their theories. Whether ordinary people are interested in deconstructing the gender order or what the impact of enforcing these theories on them via powerful cultural institutions is of no interest. It is demeaning for the theory professor to look at the social lives of others. Considering the plight of lesbian teenagers who went further than “enjoying the world of they”—as Butler refers to herself in the Guardian interview—by moving from taking hormones to undergoing a double mastectomy within a year, is just too messy. To know that these girls lived to regret it and wondered where all the adults were is even messier. To wonder as to the impact of the disappearance of the “dyke” in the lesbian community many of whom have decided they are now transmen, erasing the erotic place of the “dyke” in the lesbian community, is too “sociological.” Goodness: What is the fancy theory for that?

The whole point, of course, is that those theories are a discourse and pedagogy directed at people: a continuous finger wagging at their very common ideas and the very ordinary gendered lives they live. If they were the source of theorizing, theory one suspects would look very different. To claim that “sex is socially constructed,” is not just to utter gibberish, it is to attack the very common sense of people. It is to make people feel “mad!” It denies the material foundation of the reproduction of the species (male/female) and the linguistic recognition of the fact. It is idealist to the core. Not that her interviewer—a self-described “Queer Historian who edits Transgender Marxism”—would point that out, mind you! Speaking of which, if you were in doubt that this was elite discourse directed at ordinary people, check the credentials of Butler’s interviewer. (The more legacy media fills its ranks with the hyper-educated and their rarefied ideas manufactured in elite universities, the more those journalists long for the graduate seminar.)

Butler asserts that “queer for me was never an identity, but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia.” If this were a critique of the identity-obsessed trans movement, it was so subtle I doubt that her object of critique even noticed it. The trans movement has indeed taken “identity” from its usual liberal legalist articulation and inflated it beyond recognition, and Butler is right to notice that and to distance herself from it. It is identity on steroids in which one’s identity changes by the day if not by the hour. A buffet of identities that one serves oneself with daily and screams for the world to recognize it on TikTok. From group identity as liberal entitlement to individualist identity as neoliberal consumerism.

But, then again, perhaps daily or hourly identity is the only possible cultural embodiment of academic “anti-identity!” Not only was her critique of the trans movement barely noticeable, indeed, a paragraph later, she withdrew it and endowed the trans movement with the best of intentions, “The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as identity politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom as concerned only with ‘identity.’ In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should be.” A hint of critique that is immediately withdrawn through the usual trick of re-centering the evil Right as the problem.

This allows Butler to do two things: on the one hand, deny the state power her ideas have acquired (the new hegemon), a power that has produced horrible distributive consequences across the board: revival of heterosexual norms (dykes becoming trans men who sleep with women); medicalization of children’s bodies; the slippery slope of endowing children with capacity to consent to “gender identity”; thought and language control that attacks the very common sense of people; and the list goes on. On the other hand, it allows Butler to imagine that ‘90s politics go on; a discursive trope familiar among the militant progressives who have become mainstreamed by the post-Trump Democratic Party.

Maybe Butler is an anti-identitarian when it comes to gender, but she sure defends her political identity most rigidly, indeed, in an obscurantist way. Academics who pedaled “critique” 30 years ago are having a hard time. Not only are they unable to see how their very ideas predict their own demise, but that those ideas are no harbinger to a deepened democracy as they had heretofore claimed. It turns out that anti-identity translates into daily identities of the therapeutic subject; a menu of consumer selection sought for self-soothing; “social construction” as a commodified business plan for the post-humanist future; and radical progressivism which amounts to nothing but a constant denunciation of the people those academics claim to want to liberate. Far from being apostles of revolution, those academics provide the most articulate apologetics for the contemporary war of the elites on the working class.

Joy Reid introduced a segment last night on the origins of the religious right’s abortion activism.

“The religious right is a powerful voting block in this country, shaping elections, legislation and Supreme Court nominees. But what the religious right says about its most famous rallying cry, abortion, it often isn’t true. That the Bible forbids abortion, that’s a lie. That abortion is murder, it’s dangerous. None of that is true. This movement in fact is so full of misinformation that its very origin is a lie. Back in the 1970s, evangelical Christians were largely apolitical and religious political activists like Paul Weyrich wanted to change that.

“Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer in his oft-cited piece wrote the hypothetical Moral Majority needed a catalyst and a standard around which to rally. The galvanizing issue was not abortion. It was an organized fight to protect Christian schools from racial integration. Religious leaders blamed President Jimmy Carter for the IRS removing tax breaks for schools that failed to integrate. But defending school integration wasn’t the best look. They searched for a more palatable rallying cry, which would become abortion. Joining me is Frank Schaeffer, author of the book ‘Why I’m An Atheist Who Believes In God.’ ”

“For people who don’t know who Paul is, let me play him quick. Let’s let him be heard.”

SCOTUS has figured out how to evade GOP-harming headlines by using the shadow docket and other shady strategies

Archive for category: Hetero Patriarchy

An Anachronistic Message

Protests Shouldn’t Be Electoral Campaigns

Building a Mass Movement

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