Conclusion: Dworkin and postmodernism
By Dora Landon
Till now, though I have invoked her theories, I have not said much on Judith Butler. I have already discussed the reference to Woman Hating with which she frames Dworkin as pro-trans. Since she does not make an argument beyond citing that book and referencing Stoltenberg’s 2020 essay (276n5), there is nothing else to say that pertains particularly to her book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, in relation to the topic of transgenderism and Andrea Dworkin. But I would like to draw attention once again to the present fact that Butler, a world-famous academic queer theorist, has attempted to assimilate Andrea Dworkin, a grassroots anti-pornography activist—a political effort Butler sneers at in Excitable Speech—into her queer-feminist narrative. Given Butler’s superhuman status in the academy and reputation for defeatism (see Nussbaum), the comparison she tentatively invites with Dworkin (barely known in academia apart from her alleged sex-negativity; a militant radicalized by her experiences as a prostitute and battered wife) seems absurd. What does it mean that Butler has attempted to appropriate to stuffy, establishment-approved queer feminism the most legendary icon of second-wave agitation, the overall-clad anti-porn superstar herself?
Dworkin may have something to say about this appropriation. Her final book of theory, Scapegoat (2000), is unjustly neglected today despite containing some of her best and most provocative writing. Her most ambitious book, it draws parallel historical narratives of the oppression of women and the oppression of Jews—hence the title, for both groups have been used as scapegoats of societal evils since the dawn of human memory. Naturally, the book dwells on Nazism. To Dworkin, the Nazis embodied the worst excesses of patriarchal male sadism. But, as she points out, there was also an irony at the heart of the Nazi project. While the Nazi emphasis on turgid masculinity bolstered male identity, to “Hitler the masses were ‘feminine’…The men in the mob felt more male, more German while their leader was, in his mind, treating them like a girl” (89). An empire built on a lie requires more lies to sustain it. When language is deployed in service of a lie, it is degraded. The degradation of language, she observes, is an enduring legacy of 20th century authoritarianism.
Dworkin writes about how after Hitler’s defeat “a genius for linguistic and intellectual obfuscation descended on Europe…there were so many crimes to hide…that to muddle meaning was aggressive self-defense” (134). In her view, it is no accident that on the heels of this postwar “sacking and pillaging” of language came the postmodernist turn in philosophy. She does not compare these phenomena by way of analogy. She argues that there is a lineage, a hereditary link between the fascist manipulation of language and postmodern linguistic derangement. “[T]he deconstructionists and postmodernists,” she writes, “especially in France, the home of Holocaust denial[,] continue the project of turning degraded language in the post-Nazi world into a movement of jargon and abstraction.” These theorists are “Heidegger’s intellectual children”—Martin Heidegger having belonged to the Nazi party (134).
Dworkin writes of the postmodernist intellectual movement with a thrilling lack of affection and sentimentality. In her account, the postmodernists are buzzards who have descended on the killing field left by Nazi propagandists to feast on the mutilated carcasses of words. This is not only shameful but criminal, because words, Dworkin says, “determine human destiny” (136). Her tone is mordant. For the intellectual tradition that birthed Butler she has only acid:
“Deconstructionists and postmodernists were academic royalties; and the emperor’s swastika did not embarrass them at all. They had learned the mesmerizing tactic of nothing meaning nothing, everything meaning nothing, nothing being both itself and its opposite as well as the absolute unknowable; they read books written by no one nowhere and, more miraculously, wrote such books themselves. How these nonauthors handled their noncorporeality was kept a trade secret” (135).
She ridicules a celebrated essay by queer theorist Leo Bersani, an essay in which Bersani discusses Dworkin’s work, as “uncompromised by meaning.” She touches on the discourse around sex with an occult jab at Lacan and/or Derrida: “Some questions did emerge: what was or was not female; what was or was not male; what male and female each were or were not, especially considering that the female was an absence” (ibid).
Dworkin has no time for such navel-gazing abstractions. She knows who the women are, and she knows history owes them a debt. In a section of the book on maternity she writes of the “courage of pregnancy and childbearing.” “There is not a man alive who could stand it,” she affirms. “Women’s blood is the blood of life, not death; the pain is hers, not inflicted on someone else. Men can climb a million mountains and still that physical act does not begin to approach the will to live expressed doubly in childbirth: two living humans sharing the same blood—hers” (186). One of the most publicized transsexuals of the last century, Jan Morris, summited Everest when he was still James. Dworkin would have known of him, as Raymond discusses his case in her book (86 ff). Perhaps the dig at mountain climbers is a coincidence. Either way, Dworkin is implying that women’s procreative power, that capacity not held by all women but exclusive to them, determines in some measure women’s social and political destiny. “[T]here is meaning,” she says, “to the fact that the fetus lives inside the mother—not a metaphorical meaning but a literal one.” Even so, if you are a woman, “the children need not be your own to be yours: women are a group with a relationship to children not their own” (200). This inherent relationship makes women’s political presence more, not less, important: “How long,” she asks, “before we put public life in the hands of those who make life?” (202).
Disappointingly, Butler’s equivocating discussion of sex does not begin to approach the points put forth by Dworkin or other radical feminists regarding the meaning of sex difference. Like Stoltenberg, she gutlessly straw-mans the sex-realist position, which according to her implies that “one loses [one’s] sex, or never arrives at that sex, if one cannot or does not engage in sexual reproduction” (172). Plainly she has not lost her affinity for parody. Women may be treated differently based on age, fertility, and reproductive status, but variations in those characteristics do not make a woman “less” or “more” female. She is already as female as she can be by definition. Radical feminists are fully aware of this, which is why we fight for the sex-based rights of all women and girls.
In attempting to exonerate Dworkin of TERFism, Butler, Stoltenberg, and Duberman, as well as Halberstam, have picked a losing battle, if only for the reason that no woman yet accused has been exonerated of TERFism, just as no woman was ever exonerated of witchcraft. Regardless, neither Butler, nor Stoltenberg, nor Duberman has succeeded in producing a reading of Dworkin’s work that counters the radical feminist reading. Such a counter-reading would have to prove that Dworkin separated not only woman’s oppression, but her existential courage, from her female body. On the contrary. In a speech as far back as 1975, Dworkin identifies the “heroic commitment to the worth of human life”—a commitment women demonstrate through their continued sustenance of life under systematic patriarchal violence—as “the source of our courage as women” (“The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage,” 65). She dedicates the speech to her mother, Sylvia.
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Macmillan, 2024.
Duberman, Martin. Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary. The New Press, 2020.
Dworkin, Andrea. “The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage,” Our Blood, pp. 50-65. —. Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation. The Free Press, 2000.
—. Woman Hating. Plume, 1974.
Halberstam, Jack. “Toward a Trans* Feminism.” Boston Review, 18 Jan. 2018. <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/jack-halberstam-towards-trans-feminism/>.
Nussbaum, Martha. “The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler.” The New Republic, 22 Feb. 1999. <https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody>.
Raymond, Janice. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Teachers College Press, 1994.
Stoltenberg, John. “Andrea Dworkin was a Trans Ally.” Boston Review, 8 April, 2020. <https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/john-stoltenberg-andrew-dworkin-was-trans-ally/ >.
—. “#GenderWeek: Andrea was not transphobic.” Feminist Times, 28 April 2014. Internet Archive,
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160317032310/http://www.feministtimes.com/%e2%80 %aa%e2%80%8egenderweek-andrea-was-not-transphobic/>.