THE BUTLER DID IT: chapter one: Prosser vs. Judith Butler! This was the hardest chapter for me to fight through, largely because a) Butler’s prose is notoriously dense and b) the body-as-projection shtik she was arguing for struck me as so patently false and silly that I really might just have been misunderstanding her. I mean… I hear so much about how Freud is worth reading as literature, but every time people quote him admiringly, I just stare blankly and say, “But people aren’t like that! Isn’t that kind of grossly oversimplified to the point of being both false and boring?”

So anyway, Prosser is arguing a few things here. There’s some queer-theory infighting about whether the attempt to weaponize transgendered identity into the central proof that all sex is gender–there’s no nature to sex, just culture (and malleable culture at that?) all the way down–is based on an appropriation and misunderstanding of how transgendered people actually think about their own personal bodies and lives. Thus Prosser is also defending the body as a real thing; matter matters. While I agree with his points to the extent that I understand them, I don’t know that they’ll be especially controversial to readers of this blog.