‘F***’ the Politics of Disempowerment in the Second Butler

Abstract

This article takes issue vigorously with what it argues are the disempowering effects of Judith Butler's more recent work, for transgendered people in particular and accordingly for the queer movement in general. In so doing it contests the way in which the reception of Butler's work in France has been mediated by a transphobic psychoanalytic establishment and attacks Butler for playing along with their self-interested political agenda by retelling, in Paris, for their ears, an anecdote of a savoury encounter with a transgendered interlocutor in a subcultural queer space in San Francisco.