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But Do You Know Who Really Tells It Like It Is? Judith Butler

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I am really interested to know what you all think about this.

First, this is really funny.

Second, I think it is brilliant because it cuts all ways. It satirizes the endless stories about blue-collar white Trump voters. But the real target of the video is how the left talks to itself. It makes two pretty solid points about the left broadly, but gender and queer theory specifically. First, most of gender and queer theory, and much leftist theory around race, gender, and sexuality, is pretty spot on. Second, none of it is language anyone can understand except for educational elites.

The second is a pretty big problem. Now, I am admittedly a fundamentalist when it comes to plain language. While there can be a reason to talk that fancy talk while talking to scholars in your field, usually there’s no actual good reason to create such arcane and opaque language that no one but 25 other people in your field can understand it. Moreover, even if such things are necessary to have that conversation, there’s most certainly no good reason this can’t be translated into language regular people can understand.

In my writing, I have one goal: If my parents, neither of which graduated from college can’t understand what I am saying, then I have done it wrong. And I’m not talking about the blog here. I’m talking about my books. When I finished Out of Sight, my father in law said that he liked it because he thought his 8th grade granddaughter could understand it. I take that as a point of pride. Whether or not the book is any good is up to the reader to decide, but at least I didn’t use unnecessarily fancy words that make myself feel good.

Let’s let someone who is the opposite of Judith Butler comment on this:

“Is the idea to inform your reader or make him feel like a fucking dunce?” is pretty much the greatest line about writing ever.

Good writing is pretty much the only way to take ideas and turn them into social change. Judith Butler is of course brilliant, but even I, with a Ph.D. in History, have a really hard time following most of it. That’s really not a good thing. And if we want to apply our insights on all these means and structures of oppression and reach out to people who don’t go to Swarthmore or have advanced degrees, we have to be able to get out of our bubbles and express them to people in real words. This I believe. I’m not saying it will actually convert the steelworker who voted for Trump. That’s always going to be a joke. But I am saying that social change doesn’t happen when nobody knows what the hell you are talking about.

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