What do you want to know about the relationship between Rubin and Butler? Rubin was NOT Butler's mentor. JB did all her training at Yale; GR was NEVER at Yale. Did JB read GR? of course. In fact, there is an entire section of Butler's book, Gender Trouble, that addresses GR's UNDERGRAD essay, "The Traffic in Women, which is an amazing piece of feminist theory from an undergrad--and a co-founder of the radical feminist collective, Radicalesbians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalesbians.

This blog (as most blogs) is inaccurate on many levels. 1) Butler doesn't haven't anything to say about incest in Gender Trouble (beyond the taboo's psychic work qua Freud, but not literal incest, ever). 2) the quote about incest is from Undoing Gender (2004)--long after White left college. Gender Trouble DOES NOT LEAN INTO INCEST w/a gusto--or, at all! Moreover, 3) Sahlins has no influence on Butler; both GR and JB are indebted to LEVI-Strauss! They explicitly read his analysis of the cultural impact on the prohibition on incest through the history of structuralism. Their critique is that this taboo is thought to produce 'normal exogamous heterosexuality', but their point is: why does this fail so often? Why the NORM of heterosexuality? That was their point.

If you want to know anything about this history, read Gayle Rubin's look back at her later work that everyone loves to hate, "Thinking Sex."

As feminists, we need to know the history of infighting and canceling that wrecked the feminist movement so that we can not repeat its ugliness, this includes listening to lesbians whom we might very well disagree with. "Thinking Sex" was a short-sighted piece of academic writing by a graduate student; shocking! bad writing comes from narcissistic young grad students who think their sex lives are fodder for their writing. Men have done this shit for how long? eons. Norman Mailer is still glorified, by a young lesbian feminist, Gayle Rubin, is evil incarnate. huh. funny how that works.

Here are some interesting highlights from an older and hopefully wiser lesbian feminist: "Social construction was little more than the application of ordinary social science tools to sexuality and gender. What seemed so radical was in many respects a conventional set of approaches to an unconventional and highly stigmatized set of subject areas."

"Writing “Thinking Sex,” I dimly saw the outlines of the shape of things to come, but badly miscalculated their reach, persistence, and consequences. My comments on sex and children were made in a different context, in which I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that no one would imagine that I supported the rape of prepubescents. Even now, as I write this, I am aware that whatever I say will be interpreted in the worst possible way by some antipornography advocate or right-winger, and misconstructions are inevitable."

She is wrong about misreading Thinking Sex; it is poorly written and filled with false analogies. Time has only proven that piss-poor grad student self-indulgence was precisely that. But so is almost all grad student writing (esp one that has already been singled out as 'special').

I wrote a whole close-reading of Butler's discussion of the incest TABOO in Undoing Gender. It may be lost to history here (under 'deleted' name), but it is here somewhere. I am angry I am defending JB. She does not deserve it. She is a traitor to feminism. I know all of this. And still, I defend these women for the same reason I came to ovarit in the first place: FEMINISM. I am a feminist. I believe in hearing women out, arguing with them when they are wrong or problematic, allowing them to learn and change and possibly come to a more feminist consciousness--one that I designate, of course. And in this lays the problem. GC feminists are canceled and silenced left and right (quite literally). I refuse to do more of the same. I will do my own due diligence and homework to give women the benefit of the doubt. I certainly will never except what MEN say about women as the god's honest truth. Haven't we learned better than this by now?

This blog reads like a Law & Order: SVU plot: a woman is always to blame, even behind the most fucked male act. Funny how that is always the case! Mike White wrote some edgy, if repugnant TV episodes? Oh, well two lesbians are to blame for that! Let's blame the women who do not even KNOW Mike White! The privileged, wealthy (Wesleyan!) gay white guy who gets all the press and attention. But if there is something that makes us take pause before he is given more awards and more cash, well, that must be the fault of lesbian academics trying (and failing) to explain butch/femme relationships (and, yeah, they are both butches who basically are trying to talk about being butch lesbians).

frickin hell Malcolm Clark always has the receipts 🧾💅🏽