by Judith Butler — the art of branding fashionable mumbo jumbo .[embedded content] Judith Butler’s theory of identity rests on the idea that there is nothing between the Scylla of the metaphysical ‘modernist’ subject and the Charybdis of the totally deconstructed identity where the subject becomes nothing but a fictitious fantasy. But this can’t be right. The social constructivist anti-essentialism is unsatisfactory and ends up in an idealist ‘slippery slope.’ Just shifting a biologically over-determined concept with a discursively over-determined concept is not enough to make us understand or explain gender. Merely inverting a reduction and redescribing it do not re-make it. If social science is to have an emancipatory potential it has to go beyond a
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Judith Butler — the art of branding fashionable mumbo jumbo
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Judith Butler’s theory of identity rests on the idea that there is nothing between the Scylla of the metaphysical ‘modernist’ subject and the Charybdis of the totally deconstructed identity where the subject becomes nothing but a fictitious fantasy. But this can’t be right. The social constructivist anti-essentialism is unsatisfactory and ends up in an idealist ‘slippery slope.’ Just shifting a biologically over-determined concept with a discursively over-determined concept is not enough to make us understand or explain gender. Merely inverting a reduction and redescribing it do not re-make it. If social science is to have an emancipatory potential it has to go beyond a purely discursive level and get in touch with the structures and powers that operate in the world in which we live. From that critical realist perspective, we can also see that there is a middle ground between Scylla and Charybdis where gender/sex/identity are something both biological and socially constructed.