The Name We Should All Know

Statistics about Americans’ positions these days often hover around the middle mark. “56% of Americans believe…,” “47% approve of…,” or “65% hold to….” When you hear numbers like these, you ought to pause for a moment and realize, whoever is claiming the majority, it still means that about half the people in this country likely think the opposite.

So, let’s take gender and sexuality, a subject on which the United States is deeply divided. I mean, deeply. Such that, you can hardly believe that someone on the other side actually believes what he is saying, it seems so crazy to you.  If you are one who believes that men and women are real categories, that describe created, moral, beneficial realities, you must face the fact that many, many of your neighbors do not. Now, if you want to understand how nearly half of Americans think so differently, and how the up in coming generations are seeing the world, I mean, really understand, there is a name you should know: Judith Butler.

Growing up with gay-identifying cousins, identifying at age sixteen as queer (and tiring of being queer thirty years later), raised on a diet of Hegel, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault, Freud and Nietzsche, and observing a troubled uncle, as she describes him, who struggled with his body and was institutionalized for it, this professor boldly came to theorize a different way of thinking about man and woman.

Today, Judith Butler, as a representative of feminist or gender theorists, stands alone in influence. She has received honorary degrees from eleven universities. Her works are translated into twenty-seven languages. Searching the Princeton Theological Seminary Library catalog quickly displays the impact. The key term, “Judith Butler,” turns up 919 books, 999 dissertations, 2,400 book chapters and 3,700 journal articles. While these contain duplications and overlaps, the size of the list counts up her canonical prominence in the academy. Her work has been educating American students for three and a half decades. As Butler apologist, Sara Salih reports, “Judith Butler…has changed the way we think about sex, sexuality, gender and language.”

The influence is all the more surprising given the obscurity of the prose. To read Dr. Butler’s books, you have to digest a lot of long words, without much help from her in defining them: precariousness, classificatory, and phantasmatic. Are all those extra syllables really necessary? In 1998, Butler won the first prize in the journal, Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest. Salih, again, notes: “Many readers…[find] her writing infuriating…repetitive, interrogative, allusive and opaque, leaving you asking yourself after a few pages, why read Butler at all?”

But this very obstacle to reading her testifies to the power in what Butler writes. Despite their inaccessibility, her ideas have nonetheless, in the grand conversation of human anthropology, found the itch to scratch.

So, what are the notions that so many have found so compelling?

Her career-defining text, Gender Trouble (1990), and the few that follow, are very hard to read unless you are already prepared by study in poststructuralism, psycho-analysis and existentialist philosophy. But I have found a book I can recommend, one that is intelligible to the untrained. Her last (parting?) book was called, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024).

This more popular offering allows you into the thinking of queer theory from the queer theorist par excellence. If you really want to understand how your neighbors have come to believe that gender is not a given, and that even male and female are “discursive imprintings” on our bodies (cultural constructions), this is it. Carl Trueman attempted a philosophical explanation of how we got here, and even condensed it for folks, which I appreciated. But, for grasping the intellectual trail to the deconstruction, and destruction, of the gender binary, wading through Who’s Afraid of Gender is more helpful.

The book shows the way Butler works with exceptions and aberrations until they seem like the most important thing, the thing that should define our categories of thought, why she is shocked at how some so-called feminists do not buy into her work (along with the backward papacy), and how reproduction of people made in God’s image, though a nice idea, is no mandate for life. One can hear how she considers what she does as innocent help for the marginalized. All she is doing is trying to make life more livable for people, less oppressive. How could any sane person object?

You may start to feel the spell. If anything, the book demonstrates just how far into intellectual hinterlands one can travel if one simply disregards what Christians call God’s revelation to us. As believers see it, we do indeed need the Lord’s take on things to understand our world and flourish in it. Because, if you really reject “He made mankind…male and female” (Genesis 1:27, Deuteronomy 4:16), you can construct a mental bridge to just about anywhere.

Thus, if you truly do want to understand your neighbor, or just the world of your grown children, I would recommend taking the journey to these regions through this book. You can do it in small doses if you need to. In between chapters, you can put down the book and go study the cheek of your brother or sister. You can stroke the Adam’s apple of your spouse’s neck, or lack thereof. You can marvel at the embodied truth of the soul. You can glory in the identities shaped by sexual distinction. Then go back and read some more.

Judith Butler graduated with her PhD on the same day, in the same year and from the same school I graduated with a bachelor’s degree (1984). That Commencement day, we both sat there on Old Campus, a woman and a man, both gowned for the occasion, awaiting the future. We little realized where each of us was headed, this woman and this man. She was setting off to tear that distinction down. I was thinking about how to celebrate it.