I want to make a joke like

“– Gender Trouble, 1990”

but I hung out with a bunch of English majors when Cornell was one of the last bastions of Theory so I‘ve actually read Judith Butler and that’s not a fair representation at all

it is striking how I never saw Judith Butler refs on tumblr given how pioneering she was to basic tumblr concepts like “gender as an unstable construct socially constituted through discourse”

then that was the ‘90s though, when you were supposed to actually make coherent arguments for your position and be judged on them rather than form into tribes, fight, and then retroactively try to backform (completely nonbinding) principles out of your ad-hoc strategic discursive maneuvers

but on the other hand you got to! I mean I see common expressions now all “‘debate’ and the idea of improvement through purely ideological conflict is a sham”, takes looking back at the 90s as stagnant and reactionary, sometimes I make those takes, but Judith Butler really made a good enough argument that professional Culture judges were like “okay fair, 3 points to gender contingency” and university and university-adjacent parts of the culture followed and dedicated effort to forming a coherent worldview and praxis incorporating that insight

Now the easy comeback is “kontextmaschine, this only took place at the level of Ivy League campuses and magazines and while that might be important to your youthful formation it doesn’t represent real power over the lived experience of The People”

To which my medium response is that if you don’t realize how that phase - only words! - softened things up for the current assault, and all the years of rediscovering from the memory hold how queer pre-Code Hollywood and pre-50s America was, well ho ho

(The bonus expert-level insight is that holy shit, did I really just articulate a cultural conservatism in defense of Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_?)