Judith Butler has been voted one of the world’s most influential thinkers (oh, by El País, haha)! Yay! Non-binary victory B) Then why the heck is everyone in the UK and US so gender-fashy???

Not just gender; censorship, non-violence, insurgency in Antigona (the play), securalism, the erosion of the nation-state. Okay, not just queer theory.

They like working with other thinkers.

Inspired by some very old, weird people: Freud, Hegel, Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir. Idk, I expected more modern names.

Gender works: gender trouble, undoing gender, <20 year pause>, who’s afraid of gender.

Intellectuals become public when the work they were already doing happens to resonate with some public concern.

Spoke about how gender troubles emerged from many different cultures/scenes/traditions, and then they sign their name on the work.

The emphasis on performativity was originally written to be within “scenes of constraint and histories of subject formation”, so not radical free choice. IE (my words), you’re forced to perform a (the correct) gender, rather than having the free choice to be(/perform as yourself) your own gender.

Then they discussed a bit whether Hamas is a terrorist group or not. Idk, it seemed a bit like liberal-word-wanging.

“Grievability” the capacity for a population to be grieved. Once losses cannot be grieved, there is nothing in the way. Within Israel, Israeli deaths are grieved, Palestinian deaths are not.

Lol, does the interviewer not think it is a genocide? I think theres’s some language-barrier-ing going on. Then he asked a question about when its appropriate for youth to be queer, maybe he is a bit reactionary…

Butler says any point, it’s a normal part of growing up, and that the trans rights movement is about normalising genderqueerness.

It strikes me (mags) that the whole problem is we don’t let children make important decisions until they’re 18 — we expect them to keep to the religion, schooling, permissable hobbies decided by their parents. But the onset of puberty preceeds that, and forces the problem of gender to be present much much earlier than we allow children the autonomy to handle/discuss/address it. Even in as little as choosing a pronoun.

Lol lol lol, the interviewer says “big pharma has interests in gender ideology”.

Butler is correct about gender stuff yay. They don’t say any silly things and arguing back well :)

They dismiss the claim that Trump won because Harris wasn’t reactionary enough, instead arguing that The Left is much worse at appealing to peoples’ emotions/passions (in a positive direction). “Where’s the radical imaginary by which people will be passionately absorbed?”

Rehash the usual how the democrats lost the working class stuff by not being left-wing enoguh. blah blah blah. “By the way, I have great discussions on gender with taxi drivers. I find that many of them are excellent theorists of the everyday.”

People voted for trump if they were willing to tolerate his racism and sexual violence, in him and wider society. They descrribe a “nostalgic fury for an impossible past”. That the complexities of now will destroy their lives and as a such become reactionary.

Intersectionaly based on identity >> identity politics

my takeaways