Link: “Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’”
I really liked this interview. Both the part about gender being a “negotiation” – the interplay between the expectations society places on you and your desires for yourself – and this part about identity making a poor basis for politics that I will just quote in full:
My own political view is that identity ought not to be the foundation for politics. Alliance, coalition and solidarity are the key terms for an expanding left. And we need to know what we are fighting against and for, and keep that focus.
It is imperative that we work across differences and that we build complex accounts of social power. Accounts that help us to build links among the poor, the precarious, the dispossessed, LGBTQI peoples, workers and all those subject to racism and colonial subjugation. These are not always separate groups or identities, but overlapping and interconnected forms of subjugation that oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia but also capitalism and its destructions, including the destruction of the Earth and indigenous ways of life.
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Jessica Smith on .