Talk:Judith Butler/Archive 4

This is an archive of past discussions about Judith Butler. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Ad miseracordiam

There's a throw-away line inserted in a recent revision: Butler had relatives who died during the Holocaust. This is in the early-life biography, right after mentioning she's Jewish, with relatives from Hungary and Russia. This statement sort of trivially follows from the general ethnicity one, but seems to be inserted to try to insinuate some additional philosophical or political point. Sort of like saying in a breathless voice that Butler is featherless and walks on two legs. Readers know the basic details of the (horrible) history of the 20th C, and this digression into them feels awkward. LotLE×talk 08:04, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Maintaining Wikipedia:Assume good faith, the information added to her background was a summary of statements made by Butler herself in an interview. All Wikipedia articles need biographical background information and inclusion of information about parents and family is common if not expected as this is a biography, not just a list of a scholar's important works. As for the line about the Holocaust, I am not particularly attached to it and added it as part of a general summary of Butler's own statements about her childhood simply because she mentioned it herself. However, that point is not as important as information about her parents or how she became interested in philosophy so I will remove it. The other material, however, is helpful to improving the biographical nature of the article and reflects the kind of information that usually appears in biographies here.

I appreciated your edits, they are good ones. I'd like to see this article improve, which includes a clean up of the unsourced information in the book summaries. The article could potentially be raised to at least a "GA" level. Thanks for your feedback, -Classicfilms (talk) 16:12, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Your recent additions have been very good, and I thank you. I'm just concerned to avoid a too informal tone in biographical information. I still think there's a bit of that in the comments about how Butler felt about her Hebrew school studies. Sure, it's based on an interview, but a newspaper "human interest" piece is a bit less formal than an encyclopedia. However, I've left that bit, and don't feel that strongly. The Holocaust sentence is also supported by the interview, although there Butler's comment was much more specific and the newspaper added the more generic parenthetical. I considered narrowing it to "Butler's maternal great-uncles and great-aunts", but that felt weirdly over-specific for this article. The generic "relatives in the Holocaust" is also true of every Jew who had ancestors migrate to the USA in the 20th C (and many non-Jews also, etc), but like I wrote, adding the almost-tautology insinuates some further meaning that is not supported (maybe better than my featherless biped thing would be the fact that Butler also had relatives who died of cancer or of heart disease... it could conceivably be relevant if she was a medical research into those thing or otherwise wrote about them, but is not automatically relevant because true). LotLE×talk 19:31, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Sure, I appreciate your point about tone but I think that what appears now is fine. I've worked on a number of biographies on the WP including the Al Gore article which I was involved in elevating to a "Good Article," so I have a pretty good sense of what is expected in a WP biography. To be sure, the important part of this article lies in an overview of Butler's work. However, as I've noted above and with tags, these sections contain too many unsourced statements. I also agree with your point above about a paragraph which falls under WP:SYNTH. Butler is not just a BLP but a very important scholar and thus her WP page should be raised, as you suggest, to the highest standards. I cleaned up the awards and reading list sections as well as the EL. The readings I've left alone for a few weeks to give other editors time to find sources before I begin to clean them up. However, the omission of a background section in a biography is problematic, particularly if you want to run an article through GAC. Thus, the information about her experiences in Hebrew school are critically important to the structure of the article. The introduction ends with the comment that "Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring "pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence" and yet in the article's previous version, there wasn't much to develop this statement. I am fine with changing "Jewish American" scholar to "American" scholar - it was added for clarification but is not critical. However, it is important for readers who don't know much about Butler to understand the connection with her early training in Hebrew school. I'm not sure how this is informal - most WP biographies discuss childhood experiences particularly if they relate to current writings or research. I would agree that if Butler's current work were not in this area, it might not be as critical but since it is, the article is strengthened by its inclusion. I would really like more biographical information if sources could be found. But the real priority, as I said above, is to clean up the summaries of her books. Thanks for your response, -Classicfilms (talk) 20:23, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree that the book summaries need to be better--both better written and better cited. And the addition of the background section is definitely helpful. I guess the informality thing I was getting at is the difference between stating that Butler was "not angry, but thrilled" to study Buber/Hegel/etc in Hebrew school versus just stating that she did study them there. This childhood exposure to those sources is definitely a useful framing for her professional work. It's hard to know how accurate her characterization of her childhood emotions is; it's not that important, but what if we dug up her rabbi saying she actually was angry about having to take the courses, for example? I know we see similar "human interest" angles in many biographies, but I tend to prefer the drier factual statements. LotLE×talk 20:42, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Re: book sections - yes I agree on both counts. Also, I know that if a section is a summary of a main article but doesn't really act like a summary (ie is too long or detailed), it will not get past GAC. So some of the book sections that have main article links should probably be shortened or more reflective of the article as a whole in the form of summary. As for Butler's recollection of her childhood, I do think this is important to include but we can tweak it. We could say that Butler stated in an interview she was thrilled etc. I think this statement gives a great deal of insight into Butler as a 14 year old kid who saw philosophy not as a punishment but as something to read with delight. If you want to rephrase, it is fine but biographies, WP or not typically do include childhood experiences if they shed light towards the current work of an important individual. To just say that she studied these texts rather than that she at 14 did not see this as punishment would deprive the article of insight to her character. If you can think of a better way to phrase it, by all means go ahead but I think her reflections are important to include. Interviews are useful for this reason and are fair game in biographies. -Classicfilms (talk) 20:56, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm fine with the current phrasing. I get your point about her mood at 14 yo being relevant, not only the dry fact of studying. As to the book summaries, what length do you think is appropriate, especially for those that have independent articles. I think it would be reasonable to devote 2 paragraphs to each book, possibly stretching that to 3 paras if there is no child article (but longer than that, there should be a child article). Is that consistent with your thinking? LotLE×talk 21:03, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Good question - it really depends as I've seen different editors respond in different ways. Review Wikipedia:Summary style to give you a sense of WP guidelines. Experience has shown me that if the summary paragraph covers all of the essential points of the main article, you are covered. If the summary is long and acts as an article in its own right, it is usually rejected. So I'd use common sense. What I usually do is a) tidy up the main article first and then b) take critical points from the main and turn it into a summary. It is ok to recycle some of the same language. Hope that helps, -Classicfilms (talk) 21:15, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Source/clean up tags

This is a Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons and of a particularly important scholar. It contains far too many unsourced statements and is in need of a complete clean up. I'll wait a week or two. After that point, I will begin to remove any statement which is unsourced, as stated by Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. -Classicfilms (talk) 23:24, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

I have cleaned up the article so that it comforms to WP:BLP. Please only restore deleted material if you can provide a source re: WP:Verifiability. -Classicfilms (talk) 02:43, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

Wholesale blanking

The mass deletion of all the existing book summaries because of some insufficiencies that may exist in some of them is hugely destructive. While I entirely endorse the intention of cleaning up and trimming those summaries, the way to do it isn't by hiding the exiting work from editors who may contribute to the cleanup. The Wikipedia way is to cleanup as one finds time and citations, in place, on the article. Simply to mass delete in the hope that someone may someday write something better about the same material is... well, I know the intention is not vandalism, but the edits themselves come close. LotLE×talk 17:47, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Again, maintaining Wikipedia:Assume good faith, moving to the talk page is not the same as deletion. It is a standard proceedure in the Wikipedia to move problematic sections to talk in order to fix and upgrade. There are some some serious WP:BLP issues with the content as well as WP:UNDUE for a biography. Placing on the talk page with suggestions for improvement including a way to create a viable subarticle are constructive ways to improve the article, not hide or damage information. I won't revert the edit, but I do feel that the section is in need of enormous clean up and should either be better integrated into the structure of the article (ie not a list) or turned into its own subarticle. -Classicfilms (talk) 19:10, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Moving to the talk page is little better than saying "well, it's in the history". I do not believe there are any BLP issues in the existing text, but if there actually are, mention them or address those issues narrowly. Deleting 3/4 of the whole article because one sentence may be a BLP violation is... not good. (I have no idea what sentence may be so, but I'll stipulate there could be one). The WP:UNDUE concern is more plausible, but that is addressed by targeted trimming and rewriting of the over-long parts. LotLE×talk 19:31, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

WP:BLP "We must get the article right" meaning everything must be WP:Verifiable. Moving to the talk page is a way of taking material with potential and asking editors to upgrade and is a standard approach. The book summaries have a great deal of potential but more sources to the original works are needed and that is why it seemed like a good idea to work that out on talk and then move back which happens in many articles here. Anyway, as I said, I won't revert the edit but I do think more sources are needed and trimming will happen when that happens. I've added sources for the rest of the article and corrected two mistakes so the rest of the article now conforms to WP:BLP. If these summaries can be better sourced and trimmed it is fine. BLPs should be up to the highest standard for sources. -Classicfilms (talk) 19:42, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

I know we are talking about Butler and the idea of summary seems in some respects contradictory, but this is an encyclopedia and we need to think carefully about what we mean by verifiability. Some of the paragraphs have no sources at all. Others are linked to a source which directs the reader to a large chunk of pages from a particular text. I can understand the need for that on the one hand but it does also open up articles such as this to subjective interpretations of very dense and complex material which then gets us to WP:OR. Two ways of approaching a rewrite would either be to cite what scholars say about sections of her text or break down the summary to include quotes and page numbers from the text which would move us a step beyond subjective interpretation. The point is that even summaries need to be from some kind of secondary source and that is what I see as the issue at hand here. -Classicfilms (talk) 20:05, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Here is another suggestion at least for the moment until more sources are found. Butler's biography for the European Graduate School offers both a selection of what they consider to be her major works to the time of writing the bio as well as some excellent summaries. This is a good RS to use and perhaps can be used throughout the summaries to clean up what is there - meaning to re-write existing info using this page as the source. In this way, the works are maintained, RS is resolved, and it is possible to at least for now to clean up what exists:

JB Bio, European Graduate School

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/biography/

-Classicfilms (talk) 20:17, 7 March 2010 (UTC)

Editorial essay on writing style

I am concerned about this recently added paragraph:

The issue of writing style is not trivial. Postmodern theorists argue that (modernist) claims that language ought to have "clarity" are linked to naive understandings of language in which it can simply convey or relay an already existing truth. Since the Linguistic turn in Western philosophy, this has been an important and controversial issue. The arguments around Butler's writing style are related to this issue: for modernists who believe in an objective reality Butler's writing is likely to seem "bad", whereas for postmodernists the idea of a text that seriously challenges traditional ideas while remaining "clear and lucid" to those who embrace them is almost self-contradictory.^{[citation needed]} Not surprisingly, the epistemological controversy around language is mirrored by similar controversies around the writing styles of theorists like Butler. Butler's writing about gender is illustrative of this: the taken-for-granted assumption of "natural" biological sex (as a basis for "cultural" gender) makes her arguments all but impossible to articulate in the "clear" language of everyday conversation, because such language is saturated with the very assumptions she is challenging.^{[citation needed]} It becomes necessary to write very carefully in terms that avoid everyday understandings of sex and gender; and such writing appears as "obscurantism" to those who either do not understand her arguments, or disagree with her (and other postmodern theorists') basic assumptions about language.^{[citation needed]}

It seems well-written, and I generally agree with the analysis. It also seems to represent the original thought or WP:SYNTHesis of User:Ψμον rather than being clearly attributed to anyone else in particular. If we can find that Butler herself makes this specific series of claims, great! Let's cite them to particular books and chapters. Or if some well-known postmodern thinker other than Butler provides this summary (with at least some specific mention of Butler, not an original synthesis that such comments must relate to Butler), also fine. But whatever it's quality, Wikipedia is not the place to publish original essays about postmodern thought or writing. LotLE×talk 23:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I removed this paragraph of unsourced commentary only slightly related to the subject of the article as it is a direct violation of Wikipedia:No original research and WP:SYNTHESIS. I do agree that it raises some interesting points but will also say that it is more applicable to a personal blog than a Wikipedia article. -Classicfilms (talk) 14:25, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with the above two comments, and I have one observation. If no one challenged and removed that, it would presumably stay there forever. This is a neat illustration that Wikipedia is what Wikipedians make it. --TheSoundAndTheFury (talk) 02:31, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

Exactly. -Classicfilms (talk) 02:51, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Book summaries

While WP biographies of scholars could include discussion of scholarly works, this discussion should not overwhelm the biographical nature of the article or we fall into WP:UNDUEWEIGHT. In addition, summaries of scholarly works need to be referenced, with page numbers which correspond to the points of the summary. I've pasted the summaries in their current form below. They need rewrites with the above. We probably also need to include all of her works since we do not have a verifiable source which states which are her major ones. -Classicfilms (talk) 15:14, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Another suggestion which I think would be useful and work quite well would be the creation of a subarticle called "List of works by Judith Butler" (and add as a "main link" to the current list of her books in the article). We could then put the list and summaries there. In this way, we include the information without overwhelming the biography. -Classicfilms (talk) 15:16, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Here is an example - the biography of filmmaker Tim Asch contains this link to a long subarticle in the filmography section: List of Timothy Asch films. -Classicfilms (talk) 15:23, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Works overview

Overview

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages ^{[citation needed]}. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine,^[1] Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!.^[2]

The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural." Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.^[3]

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.^[4] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.^[5] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.^[6]

The concept of gender performativity is at the core of Butler's work. It extends beyond the doing of gender and can be understood as a full-fledged theory of subjectivity. Indeed, if her most recent books have shifted focus away from gender, they still treat performativity as theoretically central.

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.^[7] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.^[8]

Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.

Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)

In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance. She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor. Butler warns that such appeals to state power may backfire on those like MacKinnon who seek social change, in her case to end patriarchal oppression, through legal reforms. She cites for example the R. A. V. v. City of St. Paul 1992 Supreme Court case, which overturned the conviction of a teenager for burning a cross on the lawn of an African American family, in the name of the First Amendment.^{[citation needed]}

Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.^[9] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.^[10] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".^[11]

Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context. ^{[citation needed]} Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.^{[citation needed]} On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.

Undoing Gender (2004)

Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity, which is the focus of Gender Trouble.

In her discussion of intersex, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a step father to his wife's 3 children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer had committed suicide in 2004.^[12]

Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself, the limits of self-knowledge. Borrowing from Adorno, Foucault, Nietzsche, Laplanche, Cavarero and Levinas, among others, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject as a relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place. The subject is therefore dispossessed of itself by another or others as the very condition of its being at all, and this process by which I become myself only in relation to others and therefore cannot own myself completely, this constitutive dispossession, is the opacity of the contemporary subject to itself, what I cannot know, possess, and master consciously about myself.

Butler then turns to the ethical question: If my narrative account of myself is necessarily incomplete, breaking down tellingly at the point precisely when "I" am called to elucidate the foundations of this "I", my genesis and ontology, what kind of ethical agent, or "I", am "I"? ^{[citation needed]} Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection. "You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament" (page 78).

Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself. ^{[citation needed]} Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human. ^{[citation needed]} To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice. ^{[citation needed]}

[1]
Butler, Judith (1999) [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. xxviii–xxix. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |nopp= ignored (|no-pp= suggested) (help)
[2]
Larissa MacFarquhar, "Putting the Camp Back into Campus," [[Lingua Franca (magazine)|]] (September/October 1993); see also Judith Butler, "Decamping," Lingua Franca (November-December 1993).
[3]
Butler explicitly formulates her theory of performativity in the final pages of Gender Trouble, specifically in the final section of her chapter "Subversive Bodily Acts" entitled "Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions" and elaborates performativity in relation to the question of political agency in her conclusion, "From Parody to Politics." See Butler, Judith (1999) [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. pp. 171–90.
[4]
For Butler's critique of biological accounts of sexual difference as a ruse for the cultural construction of "natural" sex, see Butler, Judith (1999) [1990]. "Concluding Unscientific Postscript". Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. pp. 135–41.
[5]
For Butler's discussion of the performative co-construction of sex and gender see Butler, Judith (1999) [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. pp. 163–71, 177–8. The signification of sex is also addressed in connection with Monique Wittig in the section "Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegrations and Fictive Sex," pp. 141-63
[6]
For Butler's problematization of the sex/gender distinction see Butler, Judith (1999) [1990]. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. pp. 9–11, 45–9.
[7]
For example, Jeffreys, Sheila (1994). "The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality in the Academy". Women's Studies International Forum. 17 (5): 459–72. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(94)00051-4.
[8]
Butler, Judith (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge. p. 95.
[9]
Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. pp. 129–33.
[10]
For example, Foucault, Michel (1990) [1976]. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. p. 23. A censorship of sex? There was installed [since the 17th century] rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy.
[11]
Butler, Judith (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. p. 140.
[12]
Colapinto, J (2004-06-03). "Gender Gap: What were the real reasons behind David Reimer's suicide?". [[Slate (magazine)|]]. Retrieved 2009-02-13.

Why cannot the information above be condensed, summarised, paraphrased? It's not all or nothing. I feel that what is in there is too long and wordy now. I will be bold and jump ahead with that... later. --TheSoundAndTheFury (talk) 03:56, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Great! Please do. As someone who has worked on many biographies on the WP, my only concerns are the following: a) that we follow WP:BLP, b) that we are careful to avoid WP:OR, and that c) we avoid WP:UNDUE. I am not objecting to book summaries on a biography page by any means. I suppose I was trying to find ways to work with what we have without deleting the text of other editors. Certainly, any edits that improve the article and satisfy WP guidelines are appreciated. Thanks as well for your other edits, they have improved the article. -Classicfilms (talk) 04:05, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

Some rearranging

WP:UNDUE Zionism section

Unfortunately, the section called "Political activism"–which is really just a debate about (anti-)Zionism–is way out of proportion to its significance to Butler's biography... and the section seems to be growing by leaps and bounds as editors find little extra trivia to add to the section. I haven't seen anything added to that section that lacks proper citation. However, there seems to be a Wikipedia-wide trend to expand every article with the vaguest connection to Israel to include more on that topic than on other far more relevant (to that topic/biography) topics. We have definitely gone well past that threshold here. LotLE×talk 18:44, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

The section is needed because it is related to her current work but I agree that it is getting too long with too many quotes. The references shouldn't be removed but it could certainly use a trim. Maybe remove the quotes or rephrase. What would you suggest? -Classicfilms (talk) 18:48, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think the section should be removed, but it is also really not about her "current work" either. She has given a few popular interviews that form the basis of the section, but it has little to do with her actual academic work. Even with a few newspaper interviews here-and-there, Butler is not notable as 'media pundit', but rather as a densely theoretical philosopher... we don't want to misrepresent the reasons for her notability simply because it is easier to parse some popular debate that she has passingly opined about. I'll make an effort to trim the section a bit (but leave references, of course). LotLE×talk 07:56, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan. I don't think anyone is doubting the monumental impact of Butler's writings on gender, nor looking for sections which are "easier" to write about - rather, as with Michel Foucault and his work as an activist in the aftermath of 1968:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Post-1968:_as_activist

a responsible article on Butler will acknowledge her work as an activist which is reflective of themes in her works since 2005. Thanks for taking the time to do the trim, -Classicfilms (talk) 14:10, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from Stephan Cotton, 7 April 2010

Spinoza

Continental?

Butler is American, and thought I have not read any of her works, I highly doubt she can be appropriately labeled as "Continental". The mainstream philosophy in United States is overwhelmingly Analytic. If she indeed was a Continental philosopher, the apparent acceptance of her philosophy in the United States would be due to her emphasis on feminism? Or she used language that is palatable to Analytic philosophers? Wandering Courier (talk) 07:39, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

"Continental" is a loose label for a style of philosophy (or maybe several styles) that are often contrasted with an "analytic" style. Obviously, the continent directly referred to is Europe, but many thinkers outside of Europe work in a similar style. Not all philosophers in mainland Europe (as opposed to Britain or Ireland for this purpose) are "continental" either: some are pretty well "analytic" and others really can't be classified as either of these styles. As fuzzy as the label certainly is, Butler is a pretty good example of what is often called "continental philosophy". LotLE×talk 08:43, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

There little doubt Butler qualifies as a "Continental" writer. This has little to do with her being American, nor with her working in the United States. For one, it is not a coincidence she does not teach in a Philosophy department but in Berkeley's Rhetoric Department; second, there are some major Philosophy Departments (for instance Northwestern's) that are more strongly Continental than is typical in the United States. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.40.155.155 (talk) 04:09, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

None of the preceding has a verifiable source. KenThomas (talk) 16:31, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

She builds on both continental and analytic traditions - Foucault is for example clearly continental but her work with performativiy also draws from speech act theory which emerged in the analytic tradition. I do think however that she is pretty clearly placed within the continental tradition.·Maunus·ƛ· 16:49, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Some sources: (she gives continental philosophy as one of her interests on her university homepage) and (she is classified as a "continental feminist")·Maunus·ƛ· 16:54, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

"Commentary on style" section -- are political categorizations necessary?

Reasons for my removal of one line

An article to include

Do The Book Summary Portions Really Need Citations?

Education - summary of dissertation and Subjects of Desire

Butler's B.A.

Small mistakes in title of piece and origin ("Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire")

Edit request on 6 May 2013

I would like to ask to have access to this page on Judith Butler in order to clarify errors of fact and misrepresentations. Can you please grant me access?

In the entry on Judith Butler, I would like to make several changes. In the first place, she is not only or primarily a "post-structuralist" philosopher, especially if one considers the work in the last ten years. Her position at UC Berkeley should be stated as follows:

Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory. She is also a Visiting Professor in Humanities at Columbia University (2012-14).

in the main entry, the wording is confusing: "herself being Jewish" is awkward - I would like a chance to make this prose more smooth. The entry does not take into account her contributions to moral philosophy (her title, Giving an Account of Oneself), her two works on war (Precarious Life and Frames of War), and skips from her work on feminism in the early 90s to her most recent work on Jewish philosophy and the critique of Zionism. The work on Antigone deserves to be mentioned, as do her contributions to legal theory. I would like a chance to fill out this academic dimension of her career, including her contributions to psychoanalysis, theories of power, literature and philosophy. The article as it stands is skewed by a preoccupation with her recent politics on Israel.

In the Biography, it is simply untrue that her mother was raised in Orthodox Judaism. What are the parental affiliations with Judaism doing in this article?

She sits on several boards, but a very obscure one is mentioned under the biography section. I would like permission to fill this out with reference to a copy of her most recent CV.

In the section on political activism, the representation of her views are dated, since the essay in Logos has now been superseded by an entire book dedicated to thinking through binationalism.

Moreover, the view that is cited in the article as support for her pro-boycott position is precisely not the view that she has. She opposes going to Israeli institutions, and this citation makes it seem like she does not. In any case, I can supply better citations to clarify her actual and current views.

Similarly, the reference to "Hamas/Hezbollah" is scurrilous, given the contextualization and clarifications that Butler has offered in several venues, including Mondoweiss, The Jerusalem Post, and several German newspapers. It would be better to have a clear understanding of her view on this issue, especially since her own clarifications are not included here.

Although it is true that she is a member for Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the more important affiliation now is the Advisory Board for Jewish Voice for PEACE. She is on the executive board of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin.

Also, she has received honorary degrees that are not cited here: Univ of Bordeaux- III, Universite Paris - VII, Grinell College, McGill University (2013) and St. Andrews University (2013) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Leff haugelin (talk • contribs) 22:26, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

There's no way to allow you specifically to edit the page; you have two options. One is to keep editing other pages on Wikipedia; in 4 days and 10 edits, you'll be able to edit this page directly. The other is to make a detailed request here, like you have, and let an already autoconfirmed editor make the changes.

Let me go through some of your suggested changes.

- The first thing that I have to ask about all of these items is, what are your sources? Changes to WP should be done based upon reliable sources.
- I've removed what you correctly described as awkward "herself being...". I also took out the phrase "recent", because we're not supposed to use that term anyway (given that it necessarily becomes rapidly outdated).
- Regarding her mother, Butler herself made the claim in the Haaretz interview, which you can read by following the citation. As for why it's there, I would say it's because it seems to be relevant to her identity and her work. We could be more general and state that her parents were both Jewish, but I think that the differences between the denominations/approaches is significant enough that it warrants covering in the article.
- As for the boards, we can update it; however, we do not want to provide as much detail as her CV does. We should focus only on those things for which she is most famous. Ideally, we would determine that by seeing what independent reliable sources choose to say about her.
- If her activism stance has changed, we should alter our page; again, we would be much better off working from independent sources. That is, rather than trying to summarize her book itself, it's better if we see how others have summarized it. However, if such a summary is not available, a short (say, a few sentences) of our own summary is allowed, as long as we do absolutely no interpretation (doing so is prohibited as original research).
- On the Hamas/Hezbollah, if her views have changed, we should alter appropriately. However, we should accurately report what was said at both times; that is, Butler is not herself the final interpreter of her own words. But for this I'd need to see some sources to get a better understanding of how to alter the info.
- Memberships and degrees: same as I mentioned for Boards above. For the degrees, we can probably list any she lists on her CV, though we'd prefer independent sources; for memberships, we should limit the list to those which independent sources deem to be notable.

I hope this gives a better idea of where to go from here. Qwyrxian (talk) 02:48, 7 May 2013 (UTC)

Reason for protection

post-structuralist?

"She is also well known for her difficult prose"

New user NOTME NEVERME has twice removed the sentence "She is also well known for her difficult prose" from the lead and been twice reverted. I have removed it again. That sentence is both synthesis and original research. If editors want it in the lead, they need to find a source that says she's well-known for her difficult prose, or words to that effect, because the current sources aren't even in the ballpark. (They're rather old, too.) Please note also that NOTME NEVERME explained their edit in a reasonable way both times; new users can't be expected to know the specific policies, guidelines, and alphabet soup to point to. Bishonen | talk 08:52, 12 August 2015 (UTC).

I tried to delete the phrase "She is also well known for her difficult prose" from the initial paragraph, because it seemed to be a twisted interpretation of the two sources at hand. One source is a random 'bad writing contest'. I don't know why how this singular instance translates to 'she is well known for ...'. In the second source, however, the interviewer wants to demonstrate the accessability of her writing, despite of being somehow demanding. here, even more, i don't know how this translates to 'she is well known for ...' That's odd.. One of the newest publications on Judith Butler, Schipper's Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (2014), elaborates at length that Butler's writing style has significatly changed and that it got much more accessible in the past 10 years. So this phrase 'she is well known for ...' seems outdated – if anything referring to her very early books – and not adequate for an inital paragraph. In the paragraph Reception, there is still the sentence: 'Some critics have accused Butler of elitism due to her difficult prose style'. That seems to me a much better place and a better formulation than the above mentioned. (By the way, I'm not a new user, the English wiki's just not my primary playing field...) --NOTME NEVERME (talk) 08:21, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Oops, please note that NOTME NEVERME posted before I did, see timestamp, and has now moved it down here. I didn't see it up there, sorry. Bishonen | talk 09:02, 12 August 2015 (UTC).

This isssue was brought up at BLPN back in May here. In response to that, I made this edit, back then, adding an additional paragraph of sourced content to the Reception section of body (there already was content about this there, I added more, citing an interview where she talks about it), and restoring a summary of that in the LEAD. And just to say, this is a "sky is blue" thing. As recently as 2013 a writer in the NYT mentioned it as a casual aside on the way to talking about something else. (the reputation is current, not outdated). Butler herself has talked about it (In the source I added) and elsewhere. Her op-ed in the NYT responding to her bad writing prize was also discussed endlessly. And the whole controversy around difficult writing, with Butler's prose as the lead example, was the focus of a 2003 book, Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena. (ISBN 9780804747103). There are many, many, many sources on this. It's a discourse she has chosen to use in some of her most important works, and that is what it is. I would be very fine with content as discussed above by NMNM being added to update the story (everything evolves) but it is a bad thing to erase the past and to to not acknowledge that the "difficult writer" reputation is still present and active. Jytdog (talk) 12:59, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. The sources that were in the lead were poor. The lead doesn't need to be sourced at all, so in fact it might be better to leave the sourcing to the section below. Also, while the lead needs to be concise, I think the phrasing there was a bit too simplistic. But I'm on the run here, going out of reach of internet access for a day or two, so I won't be responding further for a while. Bishonen | talk 13:20, 12 August 2015 (UTC).

Sure. NMNM do you see what I mean in what i wrote above? Jytdog (talk) 14:05, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, Jytdog, I see what you mean and i fully acknowledge that there has been a (productive) discourse around that topic. I also agree with you that the reputation of being a demanding writer still sticks somehow to JB. But I want to argue that the reduction to the sentence "She is also well known for her difficult prose" neither captures the complexity of the issue nor is it a valid or useful information as far as it is placed without context in the lead. Also, consider the scolarly interview she has conducted with Olson / Worsham im 2000: "I believe it is important that intellectuals with a sense of social responsibility be able to shift registers and to work at various levels, to communicate what they're communicating in various ways. I think I probably do that, both in my writing and in my teaching, but it's always possible to seize upon the more specialized moments of my writing and to say that it is somehow exemplary-and that is unfair." I'm concerned with the tendency that wikipedia is citing sources in which random people expressing their opinions or frustrations and lacking substance. I wish other evidences. I also seek to update the whole JB site, as it seems to me that hardly anyone has caught up with the past 10 years. This ambition includes questioning the public opinion regarding her writing style that seems to have stand still for 25 years.. I'll include the source i mentioned in my previous post, because that seems an important addition to what is alread there. Jytdog, do you see my points? --NOTME NEVERME (talk) 16:03, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

I think updating the artixcle is great. Please know that Wikipedia is not a place to right great wrongs or using Wikipedia to change anything in the real world (that is advocacy, and see WP:NOTADVOCACY) Butler has a reputation for writing difficult prose (which she gained from having actually written difficult prose) and those are facts that we transmit - we are all about recording "accepted knowledge" here. So please do not try to obscure or downplay that. It is fine to add that some parts of her corpus are written in more accessible prose as long as there are reliable, independent sources that say that, that you can cite. And it would be great to add content updating the article, yes. Jytdog (talk) 16:44, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I got that.. --NOTME NEVERME (talk) 21:42, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

OK, so off we go then. how about you do your thing updating the body, including adding whatever kind of content you can find about prose in her more recent writings, and we can consider what to say in the lead about writing style when you are done-ish (the lead will have to be revisited then anyway, per WP:LEAD. no deadline on that, work as you like.. Jytdog (talk) 22:25, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Regarding citations in the lead, it should be remembered that WP:LEADCITE states that, "Leads are usually written at a greater level of generality than the body, and information in the lead section of non-controversial subjects is less likely to be challenged and less likely to require a source; there is not, however, an exception to citation requirements specific to leads." FreeKnowledgeCreator (talk) 02:27, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Sounds good! However, I won't be able doing the update of the body within the next 4 weeks.. --NOTME NEVERME (talk) 09:34, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

there are WP:NODEADLINES here. if it gets too long I will probably add the sentence back to the lead, as it does accurately summarize the existing content of the article. Jytdog (talk) 12:26, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

New book, maybe interesting for the "reception" section

Feminist or queer theorist?

External links modified

Gender Trouble [citation needed]

Giving an Account of Oneself

External links modified

Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

European Graduate School

Maxine Elliot Professor what does it mean?

Threats of edit war

"their work has detractors including Martha Nussbaum"

A recent edit of mine was reverted for being unsourced, but I do not think it should have been reverted. The section "Criticism" discusses some well-known intellectual figures who have condemned their work, and I feel that the lead section as it was (and currently is) without my edit does not accurately reflect reception. AndrewOne (talk) 11:18, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

A couple of things. First of all, I don't disagree that the lead could mention something about criticism, even though it's a given that any significant thinker is going to attract criticism. There might be a WP:DUE issue, about how much space to devote to it, but given it's less than a sentence it's hard to formulate something. I guess I question why Nussbaum in particular, unless her views are recognized as head and shoulders above others', or she's an intellectual leader of a school of opposition or something, but this is minor; maybe she's just one fish in the school and it's a random pick. One way of making it more DUE in the lead, is simply to make the lead a bit longer, in which case an entire sentence about criticism would fit better than it does now. Regarding your undo of the revert of your bold change, I'll respond on your Talk page. Mathglot (talk) 20:32, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

One other thing: I'm not sure if this is worth a TP comment, since it concerns your edit summary in this edit comparing criticism of Butler to criticism of Derrida, and not anything you tried to place into the article so far. But since you raised that comparison, I wanted to address it by saying I believe it is wildly off the mark and certainly should not be echoed in the article itself. Regardless whether one agrees with Butler or not on specific points, there is no serious argument that she's not a profoundly important thinker in the field of gender; people who argue the contrary are FRINGE. The same is not at all the case with Derrida, and there are legions who claim he is a complete charlatan. In the Cambridge honorary doctorate affair, for example, something which rarely garners much notice, much less opposition, there was a revolt among some members of the faculty; in the end, the doctorate was awarded after a vote was taken, which passed 336 to 224, but that is decidedly UNFRINGE. Mathglot (talk) 21:30, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Fictitious book?

"They live" or "They lives"

Pronoun usage

The Guardian interview

Original research

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

Non-binary lesbian?

According to a source Judith Butler is, legally, non binary. But according to the article they is also a lesbian. How is it possible?

I mean, isn't a lesbian, by definition, a woman? I think the information about their being a woman shoul be removed. Also, usually when someone is heterosexual it's not stated in an article, isn't it?

--77.75.179.1 (talk) 15:58, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Non-binary lesbians, like non-binary butches, exist. Newimpartial (talk) 17:11, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

I agree but saying things exist does not pop them into existence. We're not living in a time of magical words and incantations, only with the force of discourse is something given meaning, and nothing diminishes such force as someone asserting from nothing something's existence. It has been a number of years since I've read Butler's major writings, but it would be helpful to clarify from her statements where and how she identifies as a lesbian, since at least from her early writings its not clear that she ever fully accepts such an identity. Certainly, the source for the claim in the article itself does not cite any statement by Butler, so for the time being I'll remove it until better evidence can be produced. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 09:23, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure you understand WP's sourcing policies: we have a reliable, secondary source stating that Butler is lesbian, and no RS stating that they aren't lesbian. We don't need a first-person account stating that Butler ever fully accepts such an identity as a primary source: that isn't how WP works. Also, the original IP objection was to non-binary lesbian existence (I mean, isn't a lesbian, by definition, a woman?), which is OR hogwash. We have no policy-compliant reason to remove "lesbian" from the article text, AFAICT, just feelz. Newimpartial (talk) 13:57, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

If it weren't for the fact that Butler wrote an entire article (in truth, multiple) about her discomfort with identifying with the term, I would entirely agree with the sourcing policy. However, given that it is a constant current in her work to problematize the acceptance of identities (especially sexual identities), I feel it is overly rash to attribute to her a "lesbian" identity when its quite clear that without an explicit, recent statement, it would not be one which she would readily, universally, accept. I myself have had what could be termed "gay sex", but if someone wrote a wikipedia article about me and said that I was gay I would vehemently object, since sexual identities are by their nature something that one "accepts" and "gay" or "queer" or anything else in those categories I reject. Although, ironically, it is also fundamental to her work that identities are foisted onto people and the notion of voluntary decision within social-sexual relations is illusory, so by calling her a Lesbian you would be in fact "performing" the very object of her critique. To add to all that, although I generally judge that notions of "social justice" are usually thinly veiled forms of violence born of resentment, I think at least its in good taste to respect the subject of the article by not using a single source to attribute a sexual identity that the subject herself does not fully accept. In just the same way that there are non-binary lesbians, there are women with woman life-partners who do not identify as lesbian, and denying that is as violent as enforcing a certain regime of identification. To quote Imitation and Gender Insubordination , the relevant article referenced above, "..identity categories tend to be instruments of of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression." Which ironically follows with (in the context of this discussion): "This is not to say that I will not appear at a political occasion under the sign of lesbian, but I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies." 74.105.253.119 (talk) 09:03, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

Well, the WP:5P carry policy weight, and your feelings don't. The moment your views are repeated in reliable secondary sources independent of the subject is the moment we need to pay attention. In any event, from the OP above I would have to say that permanently unclear, as an objective, has been achieved for the sign "lesbian" as applied to Butler. Newimpartial (talk) 13:18, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't want to contribute to the general public's poor understanding of Butler, and add to the droves and droves of supposed "queer feminists" who clearly haven't gotten through a single page of the author. Saying she's a lesbian allows people to "claim" her (via a "shared identity") without actually reading her, significantly de-radicalizing the potential of her texts. And besides, its a positive claim; there are not going to be any articles that explicitly say she's not a lesbian. Positive claims without evidence or argument shouldn't be taken as an acceptable source. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 05:08, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

This business of evaluating whether the RS have evidence for what they say has been proposed again, and again, and again on WP, IP, and the community simply does not agree with the proposal. Newimpartial (talk) 05:39, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

"Contentious material about living persons (or, in some cases, recently deceased) that is unsourced or poorly sourced—whether the material is negative, positive, neutral, or just questionable—should be removed immediately and without waiting for discussion."

The article used for the source has only 2 academic citations, and the authors in question have no related affiliations or publications, and do not seem to be experts on the subject matter . The only reason it has any prominence seems to be because it's cited as a source here. Given the above lack of a source, and this information, I cannot say this is reliable by Wikipedia's standards, even if it is academic. If you could show me a source from an author whose work was well-cited, which itself cited primary sources, and who'd published other articles about the subject matter in the past, then I would be obliged to keep the claim in the article. As it stands, the citation and the Wikipedia article itself appear to be the only two clear references to Judith Butler's sexuality. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 08:19, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

I would add that one of those two citations listed in google scholar is this very Wikipedia page so in truth it has only one academic citation. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 08:28, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

The other is a dissertation, which discusses her with reference to pedagogy. In fact, the only article that uses this citations as a source for this claim is this very Wikipedia article. There are no other secondary sources I can find about Judith Butler that make this claim. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 08:34, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

The IP has absurd, non-policy-related views about sourcing, and the claim that Butler's lesbianism is unsourced or contentious is false to a truly ridiculous extent. And the IP's attempt to evaluate not just the RS, but the sources of the sources of the RS, is pure WP:OR source criticism and entirely counter to WP's policies and values. Newimpartial (talk) 12:09, 12 March 2022 (UTC) Added explanatory comment - Newimpartial (talk) 17:32, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that the balance of the argument is in favour of the status quo. Butler has described themself as both non-binary and a lesbian. The only possible wiggle room for argument would be if somebody could demonstrate that Butler ceased to describe themself as a lesbian after they came out as non-binary. If we have even one single valid source showing them describing themself as a lesbian after coming out as non-binary then that's the end of the matter and we can just roll up the TL;DR on this discussion. It doesn't matter whether the specific phrase "non-binary lesbian" was used as that isn't in the article anyway.

I would also like to remind people that identity labels are not always as rigid and consistent as maybe some encyclopaedia editors would like. It may well be that some people adopt a term and other people, even in a very similar situation, choose not to. So long are we are reporting sincere statements, and not indulging trolls pretending to be attack helicopters or whatever their latest pointless nonsense is, we should trust what people say about these matters even if we are thinking "I wouldn't have put it that way myself". --DanielRigal (talk) 14:26, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

This isn't disagreement, but it's not only that some people adopt a term and other people, even in a very similar situation, choose not to - what is also the case is that some people adopt a term and then in a slightly different situation us another term instead, themselves. In a different situation the person would still use the former term. Butler's use of sexuality labels seems to have this quality, and it would be entirely inappropriate (and unnecessarily dismissive of Butler's body of work) to insist on binary, mutually exclusive categories here. Newimpartial (talk) 14:31, 12 March 2022 (UTC)

The article you cite above has this quote from Butler, which encapsulates my argument exactly, "It’s painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity." It's quite clear that by calling Butler a Lesbian outright in this article, she is exactly being "consituted...as a token". It is not about how she identifies, that much is unclear (in so far as throughout the article there is never a single statement as "I am a Lesbian", only, "I was a member of lesbian communities..." etc.) By foisting the identity onto Butler, you are not leaving in nuance of tenuous boundaries in sexuality, you are excluding that nuance in favor of a rigid identification. Anyone can read Butler's work and see quite clearly the instability of identities that she plays with, and the quote I've found from your source demonstrates that. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 11:53, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

Did you read the source I linked above? Newimpartial (talk) 11:56, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

This article was written in the 90s, and even then the line I quoted above and those immediately following and preceding it in the article clearly states that she no longer, at that time even, solidly held onto the identity that she "came out" as. But this is irrelevant because it's a primary source, and to use your own words, "The moment your views are repeated in reliable secondary sources independent of the subject is the moment we need to pay attention." Since a) the secondary source you used is not reliable, and b) you could only attempt to reproduce the claim in a primary source, which I quoted again (just in the same way I quoted an article by Butler written only a few years prior) to make the same argument as I had before. Really, this issue is now more about whether secondary sources can be used reliable to attribute sexual identity. Clearly, by your very own argument, they can't, because you relied on a primary source to demonstrate the validity of the secondary source, even as I showed that primary source can easily be interpreted to contradict the secondary source.

And besides, its not anywhere near contemporary. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 14:06, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

You may not be familiar with this, but statements by BLP subjects about themselves in reliable sources have a different status than statements by others. They are not required, but where available, they count.

In your recent post, IP, you make a number of claims that are false/misleading/incompatible with WP policy:

But this is irrelevant because it's a primary source - we already have secondary sourcing for Butler as lesbian; you continued to object and asked for a basis for that in primary sources, so I made the mistake of giving you one (never feed a WP:SEALION).
the secondary source you used is not reliable - nope; it is an RS interview in which the BLP subject refers to "my lesbian life".
you could only attempt to reproduce the claim in a primary source - nope: I was responding to your claims that Butler's lesbianism was contentious or unsourced - see my previous comment about feeding marine mammals.
And besides, its not anywhere near contemporary - this is irrelevant unless there are more recent sources, reliable for the statement, announcing that Butler is no longer lesbian. To my knowledge, there aren't. Saying effectively "lesbianism is complicated" is nothing like saying "I no longer identify as lesbian", which I'm quite confident the RS would have picked up if it had actually occurred. Newimpartial (talk) 14:43, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

It's inappropriate to characterize me as trying to be endlessly pedantic and wear editors down to push a specific viewpoint. As I hope you can tell by my comments, I am not a TERF or anything like that, I merely have a level of expertise in the material and noted what I believe to be a common misconception being reproduced as fact in the article when I reading the talk page. If the information on Wikipedia is to be ruled by those with the most edits or the most history, then how can I ever trust that any page is more accurate than that one on the Scots language. Any content policy that continuously produces more similar cases will only harm the website as trustworthy in the long-run. While I hope this isn't the case, it is disingenuous to assume that I'm merely a troll.

My point still stands. If interviews are reliable, then in no part of the interview does the subject directly refer to themselves as a lesbian or "my lesbian life", the quotation (or what I assume is a paraphrase) you use does not exist in the article either in text or spirit. And if it is as you say, that Butler claims her relationship to sexual identity is complicated, why not put that in the article instead?

74.105.253.119 (talk) 16:36, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

To note: there are far more acceptable sources that make the claim that her relationship to her sexual identity is complicated than that she is "just" a Lesbian. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 16:42, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

The WP article says that Butler is lesbian, not that they (Butler's preferred pronoun, which you aren't using for some reason) are "just" a Lesbian (sic.).

And the relevant passage is, I actually came to think that feminism did as much to produce guilt around sexuality and sexual fantasy as mainstream culture did, and I found that my own lesbian life in some ways was very much opposed to what feminism was prescribing at the time. Butler is citing their own lesbian life in a positive sense against the prescriptions of feminism in a negative sense. It isn't all that complicated. Newimpartial (talk) 16:56, 13 March 2022 (UTC)

I apologize I haven't responded in a while. I believe the part of the article references her sexual identification in the 70s and 80s, whereas her more current identification at the time of writing is one which is more uncertain (with reference to the portion I quoted above). If you like I can share a very early article she wrote in '83 or so which clarifies her own identification at that time, but which sows the seeds of her doubts about it later on. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 02:18, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't want to do anything too rash and would prefer to wait until you've responded but I did think a good compromise here, and one which is also more accurate accounting for the plethora of sources which support it, is changing the text to "Judith Butler identifies as Non-Binary, and at various times has identified as a Lesbian." I think that there are probably more recent interviews that would clarify this sentiment, so if anyone else has bothered reading this far, it would be helpful to share what you've found. 74.105.253.119 (talk) 06:13, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

We have recent, reliable, secondary sourcing for "Lesbian". It isn't the job of editors to second-guess that sourcing on the basis of our own primary research. We have to follow WP policy hwre; in this case, WP:NOR. Newimpartial (talk) 08:27, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Not neutral

Singular They

According to this German news articel https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/queerspiegel/gender-und-grammatik-das-pronomen-ist-frei-vom-koerper-aber-es-ist-nicht-frei-vom-geschlecht/25826376.html from 2020-05-13, Butler prefers singular they pronouns. The relevent part is in paragraph two: "Welches Pronomen bevorzuge ich? Butler lacht [...]. 'Es ist they', sagt Butler [...].", which translates to "Which pronoun do I prefer? Butler laughs [...]. 'It is they', Butler says [...]." I couldn't find an English source for this and the article also says that this is the first time Butler publicly stated this preference, so there might not be an English source. Anyway, I will change the pronoun (in accrodance with the Wikipedia rules on pronouns) and add a sentence on their pronoun preference. Spiegeleier (talk) 11:52, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Well, it's gibberish, but if you're going to do that, you still need at least to attempt to follow the rules of English. So where, for example, you've written 'where they have served, beginning in 1998'; you'll need to write 'where they has served, beginning in 1998' - JB may self-describe as 'they' but JB is still just one person, not multiple people. Mr Miles (talk) 18:22, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Then why do I say "I have" in English, and not "I has"? - Alison ^❤ 19:53, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Because the pronoun “I” is first person singular, and it needs a verb that is recognised as first person singular. “Has” is used after third person singular pronouns, and here 'they' is being used as a third person singular pronoun. Mr Miles (talk) 20:39, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

That's not how singular they works;

I have
You have
He has
She has
They have - singular or plural they.

It can be used as an epicene (gender-neutral) singular pronoun with the same phraseology. It's how the language works when English speakers don't know the gender of someone they are referring to - Alison ^❤ 21:54, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

And merely substituting the word 'they' for 'he' or 'she' is not how singular they works either, it's only used in very specific circumstances, as listed in the linked article. Used as is in this JB article, it reads as gibberish. Mr Miles (talk) 22:06, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Welcome to the 21st Century - Alison ^❤ 23:17, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Well, no. More like, 'welcome to 2020, different rules to 2015', this highly political ideology (critical theory), has infected many of our institutions in the last few years, including dictionaries. Regarding plural they, it will be dropped once the detransitioners class-action lawsuits start. Mr Miles (talk) 09:17, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

I've no idea what that means, but it sure sounds like you have an agenda. Well, find a reliable source for that, or move on ... - Alison ^❤ 21:43, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Just ignore him. It's not worth it. - Daveout(talk) 00:12, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

While I do not understand the comments Mr Miles is making, indeed the most recent one seems a bit like word salad to me, the topic being discussed here is inherently political. So while it is probably true that he has an ideological ax to grind in this instance, everyone else yourself included has one as well. Using or not using various novel gender pronouns is a political and ideological statement. The most that can be said, from a neutral perspective, is that Judith Butler prefers to use the pronoun 'they'. ETERNAL GENERAL SECRETARY AND DEAREST LEADER (talk) 05:25, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Butler is fine being referred to as she or they. We could discuss which one we should use in this article. Either one is fine imo. But MrMiles' last comment is simply some sort of offense attempt. - Daveout(talk) 05:42, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree that using the singular they in this section is absolute gibberish. “They live with their partner” is needlessly confusing. 2600:1700:93B0:2E70:B505:58D5:3DF7:4CEF (talk) 22:57, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

This is even more confusing: "Butler has supported lesbian and gay rights movements and they have spoken out on many contemporary political issues". First Ms. Butler is singular, then Ms. Butler is plural. I thought Wikipedia's object was to spread knowledge, not feminist propaganda. 81.226.106.132 (talk) 21:32, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

Some feminists would call that anti-feminist rhetoric. Firejuggler86 (talk) 00:51, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't see anything confusing about it. Singular they takes a little (and I do mean a very little) getting used to but then it slots into normal English usage just fine. More to the point, this is not the right place to argue about this in the general case anyway. It is fine to raise issues specific to how we write about Butler, as some people have done above, but general kvetching about singular they is off-topic here and potentially disruptive. When I see ridiculous accusations of "feminist propaganda" being made I wonder whether disruption is the intent. --DanielRigal (talk) 18:45, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

I always use they/their for unknown third person singular, but I found the singular "they" a little jarring to begin with (came here to edit it before seeing the note). I can live with it IF that really is how JB prefers to be referred to, but if that's the case then you CAN'T say in the next paragraph that she prefers she/her. That's the bit that stands out. In regards to the OP contention about the German interview, do we know the context? Was is definitely about her preferred pronoun for herself, or was she being asked about, e.g., her stance on the he/she vs. their in general writing? I know I've argued with a few editors over the need to bring back they for the third person singular, and perhaps that is what was meant? Failing that, if there are more sources available for one claim over the other, or if only one claim can be supported in English media, that should presumably be the standard used? Unless anyone can ask they about it?

Even if Butler prefers "they", she still accepts "she", as is stated in the article itself. For the majority of people reading the article with "they" is less convenient. As Wikipedia aims to provide knowledge as correctly and CLEARLY as possible, I see no point in using 'they'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.247.250.123 (talk) 20:39, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Why would you think Butler prefers "she/her"? Newimpartial (talk) 22:59, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

When "the article" means the Tagesspiegel article linked at the beginning of this section, the comment above that Butler "still accepts "she", as it is stated in the article itself" is false. The news article doesn't state anything about Butler's pronouns except that Butler prefers "they". The author of the news article makes some comments about themselves, but it was not Butler who wrote this. LilaKranich (talk) 12:33, 31 December 2022 (UTC)

Works overview

Overview

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)

Undoing Gender (2004)

Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

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