Updated. Succinctly put, Judith Butler is a mess. You may not know her, but your daughter very likely will —or did. We can forget all about Butler’s sophist philosophical rationalizations. They are a mishmash of true and false. None lead necessarily to her systematic conclusions.
Judith Butler has, by her own intentional will, become a heart of darkness. The heart of psychological and spiritual confusion. She, like Mary Daly of Boston College, fled the binary, created nature of relationships and reality through obsession, fascination, and grasping at what was not hers to take. Through an infantile studied revulsion of that member of the opposite sex — which should make her whole — she cleaved woman from herself (the bride), and the bride from the mother; and thus the mother from the future; for Woman is, second to God, she who makes the Future possible.
Butler’s work, especially in Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender, challenges the normative assumptions behind gender roles, kinship, and the “heteronormative family.” She doesn’t reject the idea of family outright, she says, but rather interrogates how power and identity are structured within it. Needless to say, she despises even the scent of any kind of patriarchy. She sees herself as a kind of primal disembodied Spirit, neither male nor female. We could call her an especially bright reflection of Gaia without laughing. (Tears, without mockery, should suffice).
Her advocacy often centers on expanding the concept of kinship beyond biological or patriarchal models — embracing chosen families, queer parenting, and non-normative caregiving arrangements. —SH
Judith Pamela Butler[1] (born February 24, 1956) is an American feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism,[2] queer theory,[3] and literary theory.[4] —Wikipedia
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Mary Daly: The Witch of Boston College
Note: Mary Daly died in January 2010.
It is good to be tolerant, even of incoherent things, we are told today. The devil himself ought to be given a seat at the table. So the courts have ruled. But that can’t stop us from noticing that Mary Daly represents the meltdown of the dissident transgressive mind, the logical end of neo-modernist rebellion. She is a witch. Her aggressive mission is to “spin new covens” everywhere within the “shell” of Roman Catholicism. The stronger the resistance the better. She rejects the Creed as mythological, “perfectly dead” (1), and yet has no problem believing that toads, spiders and bees send her messages all the time (2). Nor does she blush to admit that she regularly “conjures” the presence of many deceased womyn (sic) at the beginning of her lectures; among them the lesbian poet Sappho; Hypatia, an ancient philosopher, Hildegard von Bingen; Sojourner Truth, and Virginia Woolf.
She weeps for “murdered trees” (3) but is cold to the bloody legacy of Roe v. Wade. Mary Daly taught so-called Feminist Ethics at Boston College and is, I’m afraid to say, the emblematic pseudo-intellectual. Her involvement with the college goes back to the 60’s when she was appointed assistant professor in theology with the blessing of the notoriously conflicted John Cardinal Wright, whom, she says, was “known as a liberal”(4), and who more or less nurtured her aspirations ( even helping her financially).
Catholic Critique 