March 1, 1999

Letters to the Editor
The New Republic
1220 19th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Dear Editor:

We are the Board of Directors of a major center for lesbian and gay studies and are committed to presenting various (and often opposing) points of view about major trends and ideas in the field. We take exception to Martha C. Nussbaum's recent characterization of Judith Butler's work and person.

Among other things, Nussbaum accuses Butler of "collaborat[ing] with evil." This accusation offers a dramatic final flourish to Nussbaum's attack on Butler, but what on earth has Butler done to merit such a charge? In Nussbaum's eyes Butler stands accused (and summarily convicted) of disengagement from the messy "real" of politics. Instead of fighting the good fight for equal justice for women, for lesbians and gay men, and for other marginalized subjects, Butler (Nussbaum's Butler, that is) has retreated into the lofty heights of what Nussbaum derisively calls "verbal and symbolic politics." Worse still, Butler is influential! She is widely read and talked about! Thus, seduced by Butler's bad example, a whole generation of feminist and queer scholars has been lost to the cause of social justice and feminist politics.

We respectfully beg to differ. (And in doing so respectfully, we already part company from Nussbaum's uncharitable and mean-spirited attack on Butler.) Far from encouraging complacency and quietism, as Nussbaum charges, Butler in fact challenges her readers to ask hard questions about politics; identity; how norms work, how gender grips the body in such a way as to make many of us (perhaps most of us) believe, sincerely and truly, that we "are" our gender, that we could be and do in no other way. But because Nussbaum presumes in advance that she knows what politics is -- where the political happens -- she waves Butler's own political interventions aside as no politics at all. Contra Nussbaum, and with Butler, we must acknowledge that there are multiple ways to think and do politics, multiple ways to understand the relations between theory and politics.

We want to make clear that our criticism of Nussbaum's misrepresentations of Butler's work (and of Nussbaum's highly personalized attacks on Butler) is NOT the same thing as saying there is only one right way to to do theory and to do politics (though Nussbaum surely seems to think there is only one right way to do each, her way). There is room for, even need for, respectful and informed disagreement about the uses of theory, what identity is or does, how to effect political change. But Nussbaum's essay is not an example of such engaged critique. The personalized attacks and misrepresentations that pass for "discussions" of queer theory in the pages of The New Republic (and we would refer your readers also to Lee Siegal's autumn "discussion" of queer theory) are no substitute for the open and even-handed debate we advocate.

Sincerely yours,

The Board of Directors,
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies
City University of New York

(Letter in response to "The Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler" by Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Republic, February 22, 1999, pp. 37-45.)