Tea at Trianon: Judith Butler’s Trouble

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Judith Butler’s Trouble

From Dr. Angela Franks at First Things:

Butler’s gender theory is especially ill suited to trans-activism, which is committed to a rigid and binary understanding of male and female. The transition narrative insists that a male-bodied person’s inner experience of being a woman means that, in fact, the person is not a man but a woman; moreover, the essence of being a woman resides in one’s appearance, just as Butler’s mother and grandmother seemed to think. As Caitlyn Jenner once said, “The hardest part about being a woman is figuring out what to wear.” And he wears not just a dress but a femme fatale dress, complete with heavy makeup and carefully done nails. It’s drag-chic, just more expensive.

But Butler says that in drag—as in all gender performances—we are failed copies. That would make Jenner a “failed copy” of womanhood, a conclusion that is anathema to the trans narrative. Further, Butler’s “queer” performativity calls into question the “sexual binary.” She urges “proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman.’” “Male” and “female” are symbols, “never inhabited by anyone, and that’s what defines them as symbolic: they’re radically uninhabitable.” Yet the entire trans narrative doubles down on “man” and “woman,” arguing that those sexes are habitable. One transitions to a destination, the narrative insists, not to Butler’s endless wandering. Without this assumption, one cannot justify hormonal interventions and the surgical removal of breasts and genitalia in the service of “matching” the body to a person’s conviction of being the opposite sex. (Read more.)