I suspect that most people find it what it is: gobbledook. I read the entirety of *Gender Trouble* (Butler's first book) and didn't understand much; or rather, I thought I understood it until I tried to explain to somebody who saw me reading it on the bus one day (very embarrassing). But people take the ideas, in a simplified form, quite seriously: "All gender is performance." "We imitate femininity and masculinity rather than express them." In a way, it's not untrue, but it becomes a dogma that justifies contempt for biology and the conviction that gender can be remade according to our (usually feminist) preferences.
Cool. I think with a lot of this stuff, there are grains of truth in it (as you say), but they are nothing more than semi-obvious observations about life, and then these 'intellectuals' try to turn these basic ideas into something profound. Its seems like its all kind of a make-work project, in academia, for intelligent people who are otherwise unemployable.
As with all good horseshit, there have to be grains of truth in the mix for it to stick; bona fide, 100% made up nonsense is usually harder to sell.
Then again, one could look at the Sokal affair (and the Lindsay one more recently) and conclude that the whole edifice of capital-t Theory has now come completely unmoored from reality and is sailing away to rainbow unicorn land. We can only hope that there are still some Kraken in those waters.
I suspect that most people find it what it is: gobbledook. I read the entirety of *Gender Trouble* (Butler's first book) and didn't understand much; or rather, I thought I understood it until I tried to explain to somebody who saw me reading it on the bus one day (very embarrassing). But people take the ideas, in a simplified form, quite seriously: "All gender is performance." "We imitate femininity and masculinity rather than express them." In a way, it's not untrue, but it becomes a dogma that justifies contempt for biology and the conviction that gender can be remade according to our (usually feminist) preferences.
Cool. I think with a lot of this stuff, there are grains of truth in it (as you say), but they are nothing more than semi-obvious observations about life, and then these 'intellectuals' try to turn these basic ideas into something profound. Its seems like its all kind of a make-work project, in academia, for intelligent people who are otherwise unemployable.
As with all good horseshit, there have to be grains of truth in the mix for it to stick; bona fide, 100% made up nonsense is usually harder to sell.
Then again, one could look at the Sokal affair (and the Lindsay one more recently) and conclude that the whole edifice of capital-t Theory has now come completely unmoored from reality and is sailing away to rainbow unicorn land. We can only hope that there are still some Kraken in those waters.
Amen to that!