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bemildred

(90,061 posts)
Fri Sep 7, 2012, 05:04 AM Sep 2012

Frankfurt ripped for honoring Jewish-American scholar who backs Israel boycott

Protests are mounting against plans by the city of Frankfurt to honor Jewish-American scholar Judith Butler, a staunch critic of Israel.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany and the political activist group Scholars for Peace in the Middle East are among groups that have slammed the city for choosing to honor Butler with its Theodor W. Adorno Prize on Sept. 11. The $63,000 prize is awarded every three years for “outstanding performances in the fields of philosophy, music, theater and film.”

Butler is a supporter of the United States Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel and also participated in the Canadian Israeli Apartheid Week in 2011.

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But Frankfurt Deputy Mayor in Charge of Cultural Affairs Felix Semmelroth, a member of the board that decided last week to honor Butler, said in a recent statement to JTA that the board of trustees at its May 30 meeting was "of the unanimous opinion that the Adorno Prize should go to Judith Butler for her comprehensive work on gender theory."

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/frankfurt-ripped-for-honoring-jewish-american-scholar-who-backs-israel-boycott-1.463424

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Frankfurt ripped for honoring Jewish-American scholar who backs Israel boycott (Original Post) bemildred Sep 2012 OP
Butler actually believes Hamas and Hezbollah are progressive... shira Sep 2012 #1
Rip away. bemildred Sep 2012 #2
Judith Butler, renounce the Adorno Prize shira Sep 2012 #3
+1. Very moving. nt bemildred Sep 2012 #4
It's powerful stuff.... shira Sep 2012 #5
Verbal armageddon. bemildred Sep 2012 #6
Hadn't heard of this person, so I checked her Wiki article... shaayecanaan Sep 2012 #7
I consider all such disputes somewhat naive. bemildred Sep 2012 #8
I suppose us being male heterosexuals... shaayecanaan Sep 2012 #9
It's good to be the default, yeah. bemildred Sep 2012 #10
Interesting that some feel this womans views on Israel should trump her work as a scholar azurnoir Sep 2012 #11
Free publicity, is the way I look at it. bemildred Sep 2012 #12
 

shira

(30,109 posts)
1. Butler actually believes Hamas and Hezbollah are progressive...
Fri Sep 7, 2012, 06:35 AM
Sep 2012

...and part of the global Left.

She and those who are awarding her deserve to be ripped.

 

shira

(30,109 posts)
3. Judith Butler, renounce the Adorno Prize
Fri Sep 7, 2012, 04:47 PM
Sep 2012

Dear Judith,

I have recently read up on the controversy surrounding your getting the Adorno Prize. After an initial survey of the field, I think you need to seriously consider the criticism leveled against you. Even those who do not question your sincerity worry about your judgment. Their case is strong. Although you disassociated yourself from Hamas and Hezbollah’s violence, you did stress the “extreme” importance of “understanding [them] as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global left.”

Does that mean you have no particularly strong objections about their pervasive misogyny, their blatant homophobia, their cult of death, their genocidal discourse? They are the antithesis of everything we on the global left stand for: the dignity of voluntary human interaction. They display all the most prominent and negative traits of the totalitarian impulses that imprisoned minds and murdered tens of millions in the last century. How can you not denounce loudly the shocking notion that a group that pervaded with such violently regressive attitudes be even thought of as “social movements that are progressive.” What about them is progressive?

More ripping away...
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/judith-butler-renounce-the-adorno-prize/

 

shira

(30,109 posts)
5. It's powerful stuff....
Sat Sep 8, 2012, 10:25 AM
Sep 2012
You claim that you are not a spokesman for the left, that there are many elements of the left that you do not approve of. What kind of cowardly retreat is that? Your entire audience is on the “left.” That’s where you get you kudos. And when it’s time to criticize them, you absent yourself? It’s a fundamental Jewish principle – Diaspora and Zionist – “do not stand idly by on your neighbor’s blood” (Lev. 19:16). And yet, all of a sudden you want to be a by-stander while your comrades go after the violent deities of “destroying the world to save it”?

You claim to understand the criticism of your work, even though it’s not articulated very well. Really? It’s cogently articulated, both without reference to your particular case, and directly about you. And you still don’t understand. You may be right to argue that Zionism is not identical with Judaism, but it’s equally inaccurate to argue, as you do, that they have nothing to do with each other. (Please come to Israel and see the remarkable flourishing of all kinds of progressive Jewish spirituality possible where Jews have sovereignty.) In making so counter-evidential a claim, you at once privilege your reading of what you so restrictively define as “Diaspora Judaism,” and join in with real anti-Semites who, not blinded by your messianic goggles, understand that in attacking Zionism they are attacking Judaism.

You think your critics accuse you of anti-Semitism, and that they’ll do that to anyone who criticizes Israel. Instead, the criticism is that you, and some others, go so far overboard in your hyper-criticism of Israel, that you empower the real anti-Semites… that you’re the dupe of enemies of your people, diasporic as well as Zionist. If you declined the Berlin Pride award out of concern that “bi, trans and queer people can be used by those who want to wage war,” should you not also ask yourself if others, even possibly the most high-minded of Jews, also can suffer that fate. You say we need to recognize and fight anti-Semitism in all its forms. Start with your own comrades. (Or is it only right-wing warmongers that disturb you?)

Indeed, you actually missed a great opportunity that day in Berkeley (and so many times since). You could have stood up for all the values of the “progressive left” and certainly of anyone committed to a global civil society. Instead, you punted. You spoke not a word of rebuke; you granted the key premise; you mumbled your objections to some vaguely defined violence for the record. What you should have said is, “Oh my God, no! These groups are the antithesis of our values.”

shaayecanaan

(6,068 posts)
7. Hadn't heard of this person, so I checked her Wiki article...
Sun Sep 9, 2012, 09:30 PM
Sep 2012
The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender. This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative.


So, for example, standing up to piss (and doing it repeatedly, and other such acts culturally associated with being male) is the process by which becomes engendered, so to speak. One becomes male this way, even if, for example, one has Klinefelter's syndrome, and so is genetically indeterminate as regards gender.

She refers to David Reimer in one of her books - although his story tends to refute hers - namely that gender consists in large part of impulses that are biological and immutable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

Or at least thats the way I read it. I had a flick through her book on Amazon and it is the usual po-mo jargon.

Interesting that the habarados would give a toss about instances such as these - I doubt this was going to set the world on fire in any event.

bemildred

(90,061 posts)
8. I consider all such disputes somewhat naive.
Mon Sep 10, 2012, 10:27 AM
Sep 2012

Minute elaborations of the sets of pigeonholes in which we are all to be separated. When in fact we are all categories in one, and nature and nurture are in fact different aspects of a single unified process: "life".

But if one must go there, then it must be admitted that we are small, feeble, ephemeral creatures, and we do well not to get too full of ourselves, to manifest a decent humility about our place in the scheme of things. A bit of gratitude never hurts either.

As far as gender roles, etc., it seems obvious to me that all such things are ritualized social constructs, learned behaviors, and society essentially brainwashes us into believing in them when we are young. Nevertheless, we would do well not to tinker with them too casually.

shaayecanaan

(6,068 posts)
9. I suppose us being male heterosexuals...
Mon Sep 10, 2012, 07:39 PM
Sep 2012

we are probably inclined to take gender for granted, whereas a gay person might be less inclined to do so, a transgender person even more, and an intersexual person would of course naturally be led to question the whole enterprise.

I don't know that there is much profundity to be found in the whole enterprise, and moreover, if there were, I am sure that the vast army of gender/queer/pomo theorists would have found it by now. The set of assumptions that surround gender do not seem to me to be half as elaborate, extensive or pervasive as the assumptions surrounding our shared humanity for instance.

If there were a way of blurring the differences between us and the other animals (for example, if it were possible for humans and other apes to give birth to hybrid offspring, like donkeys and horses can give birth to mules) then perhaps this would lead to a re-examination of those assumptions, in the same way that transgender/intersexual people have prompted an inquiry of the assumptions surrounding gender.

bemildred

(90,061 posts)
10. It's good to be the default, yeah.
Thu Sep 13, 2012, 11:49 AM
Sep 2012

Less to struggle with, but likewise less to think about. I am comforted by the fact that I had nothing to do with it, I've always been as surprised as anybody about what I turned out to be, and I try to keep that in mind when considering other people. That first occasion when you emphatically discover that you are not in fact the way that you had yourself all convinced you were is always disorienting.

I think to theorize much about sex and love is to miss the whole point, they are un-theoretical, biological enterprises. You have to kind of wallow in them.

With regard to the the blurring of the categories you speak of, I think that day is coming, I don't know whether I am sorry or glad that I won't likely live to see it. It could get pretty crazy.

azurnoir

(45,850 posts)
11. Interesting that some feel this womans views on Israel should trump her work as a scholar
Thu Sep 13, 2012, 03:02 PM
Sep 2012

especially seeing as how that work has nothing what so ever to do with Israel

bemildred

(90,061 posts)
12. Free publicity, is the way I look at it.
Thu Sep 13, 2012, 03:24 PM
Sep 2012

I would not be surprised if she felt the same. I would not think that her views on I/P would come up in this regard otherwise.

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