Introducing: dimorphic idealism
Source! It’s this talk:
So I’ll be on transcription duty for some time.
29:40:
…and that strong arguments have been made that it was actually colonialism and the kind of capitalism that it spawned that established the binary and heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender for the first time. Indeed, if we consider the work of Maria Lugones, drawing on the work of Anibal Quijano, then colonial arrangements are the context and course of a wide range of issues that we think of as belonging to normative gender relations, including heteronormativity, dimorphic idealism, the patriarchal family, and the very norms that govern appearance. 30:24
So there we go, she does indeed say it. Now I’ll have to find out wtf “dimorphic idealism” is.
I suspect this project will take days. My Xmas present!
My guess is that “dimorphic idealism” can be explained in simple biological terms, but alas, getting Butler to explain anything simply and clearly is not going to happen. Wild horses couldn’t drag ordinary language out of her. Sorry about your Xmas present Ophelia, I can’t think of anything more tedious.
I suspect you’re right. And I further suspect that Butler had to invent a sufficiently obscure synonym for simple biological reality because while the other concepts she mentions could with greater or lesser plausibility (let’s face it, mostly lesser) be identified with Western colonialism, using even the most rarefied of academic jargon for the reality of sex would have let the cat out of normative conceptual containment framework.
Maybe it means sex stereotypes! Woman pretty, nurturing, man strong, brave. That sort of thing.
Of course it could mean anything. But whatever it means I predict that the language she uses will obscure her meaning so that by the time you’ve waded through the morass and figured it out, you’ll be exhausted. Wear hip boots.
Butler isn’t easy to read or listen to, and deciphering her gobbledygook is no fun at all, but can be done by those who have enough patience (and a little outrage). Whenever Judith Butler reemerges on the scene I’m always reminded of Martha Nussbaum’s immensely satisfying essay The Professor of Parody. I reread this last night for the first time in years and it felt like a holiday treat. :)
https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody
P.S. @4, It’s hard to believe that essay is nearly a quarter century old now. Time does fly.