I was thinking a bit more about the notion of the power of words in Judaism when my wife passed on to me a recently published cover story in New York Magazine about Judith Butler, whose work was so ground-breaking in the field of gender studies (in the spirit of full disclosure, Judy Butler is an old friend of ours.) Judy's work drew on that of J.L. Austin. See this excerpt from the New York Magazine article...
In formulating her idea of gender performativity, Butler had drawn on the work of J. L. Austin, the philosopher of language who first proposed “performative utterances”: These are speech acts that don’t just describe reality but change it, like saying “I do” in a wedding ceremony. Her move was to apply this idea to actions as well as words. But as Austin pointed out, performative acts can still be “infelicitous” — saying “I do” doesn’t change things if the people saying it aren’t allowed to wed. There’s always the element of social context, a need for recognition and reciprocity. Paying attention to matters like pronouns “acknowledges and takes very, very seriously the idea that language matters,” Butler says.
I was struck by this excerpt as it relates to a recent blog topic of mine on how words matter in Judaism. Performative utterances can create worlds, but as was pointed out in the article, utterances that are compelled, allowed only to some, or stated without real intent don't have the same effect. Behavior matters too, needless to say. So, in the realm of gender, we are now creating new worlds with pronouns, but sometimes apparently words just aren't enough. Again from the article...
In a small class, Butler asks students’ pronoun preferences; sometimes they care, sometimes they don’t. “It’s the most immediate, local way to make an intervention,” she says. “But it doesn’t exactly attack the foundations of transphobia or homophobia,” she continues, in a vein Nussbaum [Martha Nussbaum] might appreciate. “I don’t think we can engage in the kind of linguistic idealism that would say that, ‘Oh, if we only change our language, we change the world.’ "
The irony of this statement for me is that in fact Judy Butler's words (as hard as they are to understand at times) were instrumental in changing how people thought about gender, and likely started the momentum that ultimately brought us to where we are today, a changed and changing world we all inhabit. So, maybe words don't "attack the foundations" of various entrenched ways of thinking and behaving, but then again, maybe they do.
