Tag: New Republic
The Phantasms of Judith Butler
Judith Butler, for many years a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, might be among the most influential intellectuals alive today. Even if you have never heard of them (Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns), you are living in their world, in which babies are “assigned” male or female at birth, and performativity is, at least on campus, an ordinary English word. Butler’s breakout 1990 book, Gender Trouble, argued that biological
When Did the Left Forget How to Boycott?
I was a child soldier in the California grape strikes, my labors conducted outside the Shattuck Avenue co-op in Berkeley. There I was, maybe 7 or 8 years old, shaking a Folgers coffee can full of coins at the United Farm Workers’ table where my mother was garrisoned two to three afternoons a week. I did most of my work alongside her, but several times an hour I would do what child soldiers have always done: served in a capacity