Book unrecommendation
There are few books which I stop reading because they are too a) incomprehensible b) poorly written or c) not worth my time to continue. Undoing Gender by Judith Butler is one of those few books which meets all three criteria. I got up to chapter five (”Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual”) out of eleven before I stopped. The good that came out of this experience is a newfound desire to read Martha Nussbaum (I picked up Sex and Social Justice today with my Borders birthday discount). It’s also encouraged me in my efforts to clean up my own writing.
Here’s a sample of Butler’s writing for you, to show what I’m getting at:
The fact that I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself follows from the fact that the sociality of norms exceeds my inception and my demise, sustaining a temporal and spatial field of operation that exceeds my self-understanding (Introduction, 15).
Uh…I think she’s saying that social norms influence us in ways that we can’t wholly control or understand, because they were around long before we were born and will continue to be long after we die. The “temporal and spatial field” is redundant hocus-pocus, making an otherwise simple observation appear complex.
This is not the sort of philosophy I want to undertake.
Don’t get me wrong, plenty of philosophers are hard to read and use dense, original terminology (Kant and Husserl, to name two). However, throughout Butler’s book, I found myself straining to pick up a thread of an argument. She tosses out a lot of major players–Foucault, Lacan, Freud, Irigay– but I was at a loss as to how Butler’s interpretations fit into the mainstream. She never responds to alternate views, save in one chapter (the aforementioned chapter five), in which she ostensibly replies to a French critic of her work, Agacinski. Unfortunately, despite reading the chapter twice, I couldn’t get a handle of her opponent’s views or Butler’s response (although I gather it has to do with Lacanian structuralism and Oedipal complexes).
It’s possible that this is due to the shallowness of my reading, but I take heart in the fact that others, like Nussbaum, criticize Butler on the same grounds.
All this is to say that I do not recommend Judith Butler, and that I regret mentioning her in my earlier paper on Nietszche as a paradigmatic lesbian scholar. Hopefully I’ll have more to say about feminist topics later, once I’ve taken up Sex and Social Justice.