Nothing that Judith Butler represents is so fragile that it cannot survive without her.
The best way to kill interest in a topic is to write that the matter involves a letter signed by academics, which instantly marks it as boring and Not Relevant To The Rest Of Us.
But there are the exceptions, like a letter signed by fifty academics, about Avital Ronell, dated May 11, 2018, and addressed to Andrew Hamilton and Katharine Fleming, President and Provost, respectively, of New York University. The letter’s first signatory is Judith Butler, who signed off as a professor at Berkeley and also as the President-Elect of the Modern Language Association (2020).
The document has rightly been widely denounced for what it is: a horrible, vile, spiteful attempt to rain suspicion upon a former graduate student and advisee of Ronell’s, Nimrod Reitman, who has claimed in a lawsuit that she subjected him to years of sexual harassment. Among its many problems: it hints that Reitman is someone Of Whom Not Everything Is Known and Therefore Untrustworthy (“some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her”), replicating a classic attempt at undercutting women when they dare complain about men’s sexual abuse.
This rapidly unfolding saga reveals what many of us with even brief experiences with and in academia know too well: in any given situation involving unequal power relations (and advisor-advisee relations are fundamentally always that), even the most seemingly progressive/left faculty members will quickly band around one of their own and will happily absolve themselves of the responsibility to, at the very least, give all voices in a dispute equal benefit of the doubt.
I’m researching and writing about The Ronell Affair for a much longer piece that includes lengthy analyses of how power works in academia, and that should be out in the next fortnight. In the meantime, I’m breaking off smaller chunks, as it were, shorter essays that deal with issues that might otherwise get lost or swallowed up in the longer essay.
One of these is a demand that Butler should resign from her position as president-elect of the MLA. She has since apologised for having signed the letter with her MLA affiliation, but the current President of the MLA still felt compelled to write to MLA members that the organisation recognises “the power disparity between faculty members and graduate students.”
One signatory on the online petition writes, “I’ve long admired and drawn on Judith Butler’s work, but until she can show she will unequivocally stand up for scholars in vulnerable positions—whether they’re grad students, adjuncts, or early career tt [tenure track] profs—she has no place representing the MLA.”
I will admit that my own feelings on whether or not Butler should resign, are in line with the petitioner. But there were at least two factors that initially caused me to hesitate.
First: it seems more than likely that a lot of the anger against Butler stems from an animosity towards her anti-Zionist politics. She was an advocate (not an organiser) for an MLA Delegate Assembly resolutionin in support of boycotting Israeli universities; that effort failed. The resolution was oppossed by academics like Cary Nelson, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana professor who campaigned for the firing of Steven Salaita. Nelson has also relentlessly attacked Butler in the most virulent terms possible. In August, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a letter calling for Butler to resign, signed by Rachel S. Harris. Harris signs the letter as “Associate Professor of Israeli Literature and Culture, and Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MLA Delegate Assembly Representative for Women and Gender Studies.” And some mild googling reveals that she has an essay entitled in a book titled, The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, co-edited by Cary Nelson.
Nowhere in her letter does Harris mention that, perhaps, she may just, perhaps have some deep ideological differences with Butler on certain very potent political matters that continue to divide the organisation of which both are members. Now, let us imagine what it was like to to be an editor at the esteemed Chronicle and decide to not point that out, in the sort of editorial comment that is quite commonplace among publications, that a letter writer and the subject of her letter are in political opposition to each other on a matter of some importance.
But, of course, such a comment would reduce the number of eyeballs to the Chronicle’s website. Reveal the internal power dynamics and histories at play in any correspondence and bore readers, or publish a juicy, fiery letter that obfuscates said power dynamics and histories and brings more people to a page, all dying to see a fight? In a world where formerly staid academics and their publications are all now clamouring for public viewership, the answer is obvious.
To be fair to Harris: she has written of her own sexual harassment by a professor, so it’s not as if she has no right to speak about the issues at the heart of the Ronell matter (and, to be clear, to run counter to the current demand that we prioritise those with direct experience in such matters: even those never subjected to harassment have a right to speak out about it). But, still, that her other and salient political affiliations and interests go unremarked upon in a reputable publication is an indication of how much we may not know about those who want to bring down Butler. We can surmise that those claiming to want her gone because of their anger on behalf of the vulnerable are in fact people who don’t ordinarily give a damn about such but who nurse animosity towards her for her political views.
Another issue: The MLA consists of over 20,000 members, across the world. Butler stepping down would be a triumph of sorts for several different factions in the organisation, but, really: stones, glass houses, and all that. The annual MLA conference is so large that it can only be held in a handful of cities big enough to accomodate all the attendees. And the various departments of language and literature (including Comparative Literature, of which Ronell is a part) have for centuries, in various protean forms that existed long before the MLA, been “teeming with pervy, power-obsessed old-school humanists,” as one critic and graduate school survivor remarked to me. Consider just this one fact about the conference alone, known among many but rarely discussed in public: for years, graduate students have worked as bartenders at various departmental parties held at the conference and, for years, female graduate students working in that capacity, for not much more than $10-15 an hour, have had to spend entire evenings dodging the many arms of lecherous professors while they exhaustedly filled drink orders. For years, women have been accosted by interviewers on search committees after their interviews, and bluntly told to come to hotel rooms in order to gain a leg up, pun intended. And so on, and so on — I mean, really, I could go on and on and on. What the Reitman case brings to the fore, regardless of where we stand on his claims, is that such forms of harassment are not gender-specific and that they are an established part of life in most departments overseen by the MLA.
Which is to say: sexual predation/improprieties in all sorts of academic spaces will not end with Butler stepping down. At best, even if we believe that all those calling for Butler’s resignation are guided by nothing other than their intention to stamp out power imbalances and sexual harassment, Butler’s removal will only render her a convenient scapegoat. Furthermore, positions on the Executive Council are not decorative, and they do involve some pretty serious heavy lifting and matters of jurisprudence: will her stepping down help or cause more turmoil? And then, again, should we care about such turmoil or, insist that an example be made in this case?
And yet, and yet. Butler has seriously enabled and tried to excuse Ronell’s behaviour, the evidence of which lies even in the correspondence that Butler, Lisa Duggan, Jack Halberstam, Slavoj Zizek and several other luminaries have attempted to explain away as playful and harmless. Matters are massively complicated—that people want to bring down Butler to serve their own political agendas does not have to mean that they are not viscerally affected by the issues raised in the Ronell case. That people are viscerally affected by what they read about the case does not mean that they’re not responding in order to satisfy their own vested and political interests.
And yet, and yet. Surely, Butler should be held responsible for the fact that she supported (and continues to support) Ronell’s behaviour, and surely the tens of thousands of graduate students and junior faculty who must constantly confront quotidian forms of misogyny need some affirmation that support for such behaviour will not be tolerated, even on the part of a leading figure in the MLA. There has been a strange silence around the matter of her resignation, except from those who want her gone, and I suspect that this comes from a felt sense among many that, yes, she is a target of Zionists who are using this issue as an excuse to topple her and that her resigning would harm the pro-BDS movement within the MLA. But surely the BDS movement can survive without figureheads like Butler. In fact, we might argue that it needs to survive without such if it is to move forward as a vibrant movement that galvanises the membership from and at all levels, not just because Very Famous Scholars believe in it. A movement that relies on “names” to garner support for its work (and to be clear, the BDS movement is not that at all), is a movement doomed to fail.
And furthermore, surely our attitude towards those who claim feminist agendas, as Butler no doubt does, should be: your personal friendships and professional alliances ought not to cloud your judgement when it comes to making decisions that affect thousands of the most vulnerable in your field. Butler, of all people, whose life’s work has been about understanding the mechanisms of power, especially in matters of gender, knew what she was doing in signing on to a letter that was so laden with class elitism and a desire to malign someone acting from a position of much less power (and as with all matters to do with power, a more complicated analysis is required, and forthcoming). Her resignation could also signal, finally, that matters of sexual harassment are not simply about sex: what matters is not only that we call for accountability on the part of those who actually committed acts of harassment but those who aid and further such exploitation. (I leave aside for now the fact that we are yet to think more thoroughly about non-sexual forms of coercion and bullying in academia).
Some might argue that Butler’s stepping down will cause damage to the field of gender studies, which includes trans studies, all of which might in turn affect those already marginalised. But here we have a chance to be clear: Butler did not invent gender performativity; she was among the first to theorise it and a very particular set of institutional and cultural factors, including this sycophantic New York article which claims she is directly responsible for gender-queerness, has enabled the mythology that she is the Queen Mother of Gender. No, actually, she’s not. Centuries of what we might now call “genderqueer” people are responsible for that, sacrificing their lives along the way. The point is this: the idea that gender is a fluid construct existed before Butler and will thrive long after her. Her work remains important—though not for the reasons stated in either academic or popular publications—and it deserves study. It will continue to be studied.
Yes, Brian Leiter—the University of Chicago philosophy professor who first posted the infamous letter on his blog—is among those white men who are furious about seeing the place of traditional and very white male philosophy supplanted by what they consider the evils of theory (they call it “bad philosophy”) and, yes, all of them have a vested interest in bringing down a prominent, queer woman who is also a philosopher. But, as with BDS: none of this means that theory will fall if she resigns and, frankly, perhaps it’s time we disengaged theory from its famous people anyway.
It is highly unlikely that Butler will actually resign—for one thing, the powers-that-be at the MLA will not want this because of its sense that it could all prove to be chaotic. But the relative silence around this matter, even from those who are disgusted, as I am, by her support for Ronell, is disconcerting; it tells us that too many of us have endowed the figure known as “Judith Butler” with too much significance. It tells us that, ultimately, nothing in academia will change as long as we continue to believe that “stars,” especially those who support progressive causes and seem to come from the left can actually go against the grain of their own work and philosophy in order to come to the rescue of their friends, no matter how badly they behave. (Butler is in fact not much more than a liberal, a topic to be addressed later). But surely we can and must move forward understanding this: Nothing that Judith Butler represents is so fragile that it cannot survive without her.
Judith Butler should resign.
Many thanks to Uday Jain for reading this, and for helping me untangle some particularly vexing issues. My thanks also to the many others who have taken the time to talk through these matters with me, in real time and online. Any inconsistencies and problems in this piece are mine alone.
This is the second in a series on #MeToo and academia. See also “Asia Argento and Avital Ronell Or, Humans Are the Worst People.”
Forthcoming: “Avital Ronell and the Death of Queer Theory.”
This piece was edited on September 6, to reflect the fact that Butler is not much more than a liberal. It was also edited on September 7 to reflect her role in the MLA BDS campaign: she was an advocate, not an organiser of that effort.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509-11.