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Re: WTF, Bill Andriette?

Posted by sinusoidal on 2020-June-2 02:28:58, Tuesday
In reply to Re: WTF, Bill Andriette? posted by kit on 2020-June-1 07:52:54, Monday

There's a lot of gaslighting here, Kit.

It should be possible to discuss these matters without adding fog to the confusion.

I attempted to lay down neutrally the different perspectives at odds here in this msg

https://www.boychat.org/messages/1544203.htm

A few points on your post:

-- Butler as a materialist? Obviously an approach to sexuality that looks at anthropology, biology, evolution is going to be FAR MORE MATERIALIST than one that assumes blank-slates where main differences (female, male, gay, straight) are laid down by discursive practices and performance. No, that does not mean that Butler doesn't look both ways when crossing streets because she thinks speeding cars lack mass and velocity.

-- Butler as controversial among feminists and LGBTQers? Sure, but look how useful she's been, which explains why the controversy has only served her brand. Like Janet Jackson's 2004 Superbowl "wardrobe malfunction".

https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/football/janet-pop-shocker-millions-view-peep-show-article-1.631297

How has she been useful? LGBTQ has a problem. Any way you slice the history of homosexuality, it centrally involves male adolescents. (Not just as objects of desire, but sexually rambunctious polymorphously perverse agents and actors, with each other, with males older and younger, and barnyard donkeys). LGBTQ has to deny that. So folks like Butler and David Halperin ("100 Years of Homosexuality") provided in the 1990s the deep theory justifying the whitewashing of LGBTQ in claiming that sexual identities are discursively constructed, products of community will, based on nothing but their assertions about themselves. This sleight of hand was vital in making LGBTQ the greatest thing since sliced bread to neoliberals like Clinton and Blair ... because it lets LGBTQ professionals explain away the vast bulk of the known history and anthropology of male same-sex erotics, and the animal behavior on top of it. (Halperin has lately, to his credit, shown real backbone in fighting sex hysteria in his co-edited volume, "The War On Sex")

-- All politics is identity politics? Butler as concerned with economic inequality? Look at the difference between FDR's Social Security or the UK's National Health Service -- beloved by the vast majority, across the political spectrum -- in contrast to welfare for just the poor. Broad-beamed policies of fairness and justice win support, bind people to the common good. Butler is far more in league with the approach of a Ta-Nehisi Coates, who picks at the scab race fetishism for the sake of picking at the scab. See the compelling critique by the U of Penna's Adolph Reed, who argues that racial tensions are eased by policies that lift everyone at the bottom, even deplorables.

https://johnhalle.com/adolph-reed-on-sanders-coates-and-reparations/

-- Is Butler a terrible enemy? I think the Nation comment you're calling out indeed has an edge of nastiness to it that's unfair. The writer seems to forget that Butler went out on a limb and supported NAMBLA's right to march in the Stonewall 25 events in NYC in 1994, and publicly supported the splinter march led by Harry Hay. She's said wise things in defense of freedom of speech, and, recently, on nonviolence.

But she's sort of like Obama -- there's an extra twist of disappointment when a figure like her falls short of the promise. She's a celebrity academic exponent on sexual politics, a public employee of the State of California. She's paid by the state that runs the world's largest SO registry short of America's as a whole, and its largest lifetime internment facility. She's paid by a state that says that "pedophiles" and "sex offenders" lack all rights, including a right not to be locked up preventatively until death, or to be banished from living in most communities, or to be set up by the state for vigilante attacks and murder. She's a leading public intellectual on sex and identity and doesn't indicate feeling any twinge of contradiction. She nowhere connects this demonized category of sexual identity with the identities she so lovingly and pridefully explains and defends -- in fact, her work is extremely useful in keeping the two safely distinct. And she doesn't even parse "pedophilia" correctly, using it as a throwaway term to designate a class her readers will understand as throwaway subhumans.

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