Thread by @sally_hines

#JudithButler The anti-intellectualism and defensiveness at the heart of the Gender Critical movement has been ever more apparent this week following Butler’s interview in @NewStatesman

Rather than taking the time to engage with her arguments, writers for some of the UKs most prominent media outlets have collectively stomped their feet and cried that they don’t understand Butler.

It is beyond parody that a significant section of the UK’s prestigious feminist commentariat have turned into homework refusing children in reaction to a piece that discusses anti-intellectualism.

Further, each and every one of these take downs of Butler does not address the current interview in question. It lifts the very same paragraph from her 1997 book ‘Further Reflections on the Conversations of our Time’.

Butler is one of the most prestigious writers of our time and has sole authored 25 books (and a multitude of papers and chapters) so there is much to chose from. But it is no coincidence that the identical paragraph has been used in critique.

In 1998 the right-wing journal ‘Philosophy and Literature’ awarded Butler it’s ‘bad writing’ award for this passage, highlighting it as an example of incomprehensible text emerging out of the humanities particularly in work on (you’ve guessed it) work on gender, race, sexuality.

This was of course picked up by the conservative media in the States and briefly became a talking point about language, culture and politics in academia. This week the 23 year old passage and the terms of debate were resurrected by modern day UK conservative thinkers and writers

They couldn’t understand Butler, they cried. No one could understand Butler, they stomped, using the same paragraph - disingenuously without reference to its context - to plead their case.

So here we have a bunch of contemporary writers simply rehashing- literally copying and pasting-the same piece of writing to duplicate the very same critique from 23 years ago and passing it off as novel thought to slate one of the worlds most original thinkers.

This is not only extremely lazy thinking, it is writing practice that borders on plagiarism. Or is that too complicated to understand?

I don’t understand gender critical thinking. Not at all. Not in the slightest. But I *have* read every gender critical text over the last 20 + years. I *have* spent a very long time trying to decipher this dense and impenetrable culture. No one can accuse me of not trying.

In short, by every turn, Gender Critical’ thinking is simply very tired - literally decades old-conservative thinking.