Bogomil tombstone near the village of Borje, Albania.
Judith Butler has earned a name for herself—and indeed, herself—as an “intellectual” in this benighted time, having obtaining a cult-like status among academics for around the last thirty years. Her philosophical (or rather sophistical) intrigues began in youth, as the Jewish Virtual Library informs us: “Butler’s interest in philosophy grew out of many years of education at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland, where she was first exposed to existential theology and ethics” (“Judith Butler”). 1
Later in life, she obtained a PhD in philosophy from Yale University and began to write in the world of ivory towers she would one day soar to the heights of. Her first book Gender Trouble: The Subversion of Identity (first published in 1989) is perhaps the most well-known among her works, as the moronic assertion that “gender is a performance” (Butler 178)2 found within this cesspool of rambling words has come to hypnotize at least three generations of professional idiots.
One can—and indeed, it is easy to do so—dismiss this assertion and the other claims in this work as nonsense, but there is more to this story than mere intellectual self-delusion. But in order to uncover this larger context, one must examine the assertion more closely. To Butler, acting according to one’s own gender “stereotype” or norm is what creates sexual identity, not biology. She does not embrace an organic view of life; that gender “roles” are the natural expression of an inward biological nature given to mankind by God. To the contrary, she holds that “acts” are “performed” which create the “fabrication” of sexual identity, as she explains:
Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality…If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.
(Butler 173-174)
The key problem with her proposition is that it operates on an entirely negative view of the term “act” or “acting”. This word has a variety of meanings in English, which I will cite here referencing the American Heritage Dictionary: 3
1. The process of doing or performing something: the act of thinking.
2.
a. Something done or performed; a deed: a charitable act.
b. Law Something done that has legal significance: a criminal act.
3. A statute or other law formally adopted by a legislative body: an act of Congress.
4. A formal written record of proceedings or transactions.
5. One of the major divisions of a play, opera, or film.
6.
a. A performance or entertainment usually forming part of a longer presentation: a juggling act; a magic act.
b. The actor or actors presenting such a performance: joined the act in Phoenix.
7. A manifestation of intentional or unintentional insincerity; a pose: put on an act.
(“Act.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition)
So one can “act” in a play, or one can “act” to lie, or one can “act” to simply do. Action is necessary for man, as this excerpt from My Way of Life, that brilliant expository work on the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, instructs us:4
The external actions of man are the means he uses to accomplish good or evil in the world.
(My Way of Life 182)
Man has a body; he must act with it in order to achieve anything other than thinking and mental prayer. His mind cannot chew his food for him, nor till the soil, nor drive his car. When discussing how “gender” is “performed”, there is, therefore, a truth in that there are actions which correspond to one sex or the other. Some of these are the products of culture, and not strictly based on the biological differences between the two. However, this admission is no victory for Butler’s position. There was no grand conspiracy to gender cooking as a mostly feminine activity in the United States while excluding nations such as Italy or France, where the activity is less gendered; this was the result of an organic cultural development, a concept that dysfunctional minds like Foucault and Butler cannot seem to comprehend. For them, they can only view the evidence of this process as inherently malicious, because they are rebels against both the Divine Law and the Natural Law.5
There are other elements of gender roles which are based on inescapable biological reality, whether physical or psychological. No matter how many times Butler asserts that the “gendered body” has an “ontological status” only on account of the “various acts which constitute its reality”, it is actually the other way around. Essence precedes existence; therefore essence precedes action. For instance, it is evident that only women can perform the action of breastfeeding children, since they have the biological means to make this possible. This is one among many other reasons why the role of the woman in society is more of the nurturing sort than the role of the man. Examining this particular case more closely, it should be apparent to all that the biological development for this process occurs before the physical action can be performed. The capacity for this function is encoded in the genetics of a woman, and thus is present in a dormant sense, activating when she becomes a mother—it is that embedded, yet fools in our time will claim that men can perform this obviously maternal (and therefore feminine) act.
And thus, a “performance” too can mean many different things. An actor performing on a stage is not doing the same thing as a mechanic who performs a car repair. The actor performs not to lie, but to express a fictional or real personage through the means of his external expressions. The mechanic performs his task to do his job, so that he can feed his family. Neither of these performances, of course, are the same thing as a man who performs the act of proposing to his beloved on his knee, so that he may express his inner love for this woman outwardly. A liar could, of course, externally manifest these outward things to cloak his deceit; but this is an aberration which men naturally despise. Who, after all, would gladly be friends with a serial liar? It is naturally expected that one’s words will correspond with one’s deeds.
Acting, therefore, is necessary to express one’s real internal dispositions, desires, and thoughts. Why then does Butler employ only a negative interpretation of this term?
To understand the true subversion of identity at work here, one must go centuries back in time. One, in fact, could indeed go back nearly two thousand years and find striking similarities between Butler’s thinking and the positions of the original Gnostic heresy.6 But in consideration of the excellent treatment of the Bogomilist sect and its contemporaries by noted Byzantine scholar Dr. George Ostrogorksy in his book History of the Byzantine State, it is fitting to evaluate this postmodern Gnosticism in light of its medieval predecessors. Dr. Ostrogorksy, detailing the history of the aforementioned Bogomilists and their beliefs, writes that:7
There thus appeared in the Bulgarian kingdom during the reign of Peter the sect of the Bogomils, radically opposed to the Church. The teaching of the priest (pop) Bogomil, the founder of the heresy, had as its starting point the doctrine of the Massalians and in particular the Paulicians who had lived side by side with the Slavonic population of Bulgaria and Macedonia, having been transported to Thrace in large numbers by the Byzantine government. Like Paulicianism, which in its turn derived from the old Manichaeism, Bogomilism was a dualistic doctrine, according to which the world is governed by two principles, Good (God) and Evil (Satanael), and the conflict between the two opposing powers determines all that happens on earth and in the lives of men. The whole visible world is the work of Satan and as such is given over to Evil. Like their eastern predecessors, the Bogomils strove after a purely spiritual religiousness and a strongly ascetic way of life. They vehemently rejected any outward worship, any ecclesiastical ritual, and indeed the whole Christian church order. The rebellion of the Bogomils against the ruling Church entailed also rebellion against the existing temporal order, whose most powerful spiritual support lay in the Church…
…The sects of the Bogomils, the Babuni, the Patarenes, the Cathars, the Albigenses, as also their predecessors in Asia Minor, are all so many outward expressions of the great movement which spread from the hills of Armenia to the south of France and flared up sporadically in different places. The heresy gained ground most rapidly in times of crisis and oppression, for it was in such periods that its basically pessimistic outlook, which rejected not only one definite order, but the terrestrial world as such, found richest nourishment, and in which its protest made its most effective impression.
(Ostrogorsky 268-269)
As with Bogomilism and its related heresies, the late twentieth-century sexual Gnosticism of Butler has a “basically pessimistic outlook” which rejects both traditional social hierarchy and the traditional Catholic Faith. Since evil is a corruption of the good, these systems make their evil nature apparent by the fact that they base themselves on negation. Their self-destructive tendencies are the logical fruit of their first principle that the material world is evil. Though Butler does not assert a belief in God or the Devil, or that these two are equal, she assuredly does believe that externals of man are seemingly doomed to falsehood. If the material world is evil, then the body is too, as the body is corporeal. That is why she terms “gender” (or sexual identity) a fabricated “performance”. The cynicism which underlies this concept must be further stressed, in order that the violent contempt it holds towards healthy human relationships be better grasped by the reader. To the disciple of Butler, the young man who pushes beyond his nerves to speak to his beloved and court her is “performing” a lie; the little girls who play at being mothers with their dolls are engaging in a “fabrication”; the man who takes his son to fish is deluding himself and his son in an arbitrary “act”.
Despite the absurdity of this concept, it is this promising of unmasking something beyond material appearances— “hidden knowledge”, or gnosis—which allures students and professors. To imaginations defiled by materialism and bored by its hollowness, the opportunity to deny the externally obvious in search of something which appears metaphysical sounds exciting. However, there is a large difference between Butler’s gender denialist cult and the Bogomilist sect—the Bogomils could actually claim to be rebels because they were attacking a thoroughly Christian medieval society which enforced a well-ordered hierarchy, while Butler and her disciples are willing stooges for the present Liberal-Marxist power structure. The way in which her sophistry has been conveniently utilized by them bears resemblance to how, as Orestes Brownson wrote:8
The Reformers would have accomplished little or nothing, if politics had not come to their aid. Luther would have bellowed in vain, had he not been backed by the powerful Elector of Saxony, and immediately aided by the Landgrave Philip; Zwingli, and Oecolampadius, and Calvin would have accomplished nothing in Switzerland, if they had not secured the aid of the secular arm, and followed its wishes; the powerful Huguenot party in France was more of a political than of a religious party, and it dwindled into insignificance as soon as it lost the support of the great lords, distinguished statemen and lawyers, and the provincial parliaments. In Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the Reform was purely the act of the civil power; in the United Provinces, it was embraced as the principle of revolt, or of national independence; in England, it was the work, confessedly, of the secular government, and was carried by court and parliament against the wishes of the immense majority of the nation; in Scotland, it was effected by the great lords, who wished to usurp to themselves the authority of the crown; in this country, it came with the civil government, and was maintained by civil enactments, pains, and penalties.
(Brownson, “Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism”)
Butler, akin in this manner to Luther, would also have “bellowed in vain” were it not for the aid of the civil power of the United States government. Her first professorial position, after all, was at the University of California, Berkeley—a public university, an intellectual arm of the state, funded by the unwitting taxpayer. The propaganda machine of the transvestite industrial complex, before it could really begin its work of mass mutilation, needed an intellectual justification to convince new generations of civil servants that acquiescing to the synagogue of Satan’s newest offensive was an act of liberation; and in Butler, they found just what they needed.
The “theory” of Butler, then, is Gnostic sophistry parading as academic science. Though there is certainly more that could be done to illustrate the connections between the thought of Butler and Gnosticism, this survey should be sufficient to demonstrate how they overlap in their erroneous tenets. To combat these falsehoods, us Catholics must have recourse to the Holy Rosary, for by it St. Dominic—as he was commanded to by the Mother of God—converted many Albigensian heretics, which as Dr. Ostrogorsky relates, were members of a similar Gnostic cult to the Bogomilists. We should pray for those deceived by these errors, for those who are being indoctrinated in them at present, and for ourselves, that we may obtain the fortitude from Heaven to confront and confute these errors of darkness with the light of God’s truth. In contemplating the true mysteries of the Holy Rosary, we will find the fruit to dissipate the false mysteries of Butlerian sexual Gnosticism; moreover, worthy study of Catholic philosophy and spiritual reading (particularly St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa) will aid us in these efforts. “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11).
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“Judith Butler.” Jewish Virtual Library.
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Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: The Subversion of Identity. Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. All other quotes from Butler in this article are lifted from the same version of this text.
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“Act.”The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Fifth ed.
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This quotation from My Way of Life is extracted from the 1952 edition, published by the Society of the Precious Blood.
- This is not to argue, however, that all cultural changes are natural. Most historically were. However, many of the “changes” (civil “rights”, gay “rights”, etc.) over the past sixty or so years have been unnaturally shoved upon a mostly apathetic populace, in the United States and across the West. Of course, the Liberal-Marxists will never identify these actual social constructs as such, because these infidels forged these false causes to begin with.
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For intrigued readers, it may be worth further investigating the relationship between Gnosticism and Judaism. One praiseworthy source is the fourth chapter in the Fourth Part of The Plot Against the Church by Maurice Pinay entitled “Jewry, the Father of the Gnostics”.
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Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. 7th ed. Rutgers, 2002.
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Brownson, Orestes. “Protestantism Ends in Transcendentalism.” Brownson’s Quarterly Review for July, 1846.