Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind

Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind is an up-close and personal encounter with this educator and author. The film features interviews with Butler - including reminiscences of her formative childhood years, illustrated by family home movies, as a “problem child”-shows her in classroom sessions in Berkeley and Paris, at public speaking engagements, and in discussion with Gender Studies professor Isabell Lorey…

…the first film profile on Judith Butler, will serve to popularize her insightful analysis of sexual identity and gender roles at a time when the cultural and political debate over these issues pervades American society.

Judith Butler rocks my socks, for sure, and I will certainly go see this film. I haven’t heard much about it, but it’s been my experience that documentaries about famous academics are usually pretty bad. I could be wrong on this one, like I said I haven’t seen it.

I do hope the filmmakers took some time to translate Butler’s dense, inaccessible writing so that the discourse she encourages actually leaves the academic community. That’s my problem with a lot of academics. Don’t get me wrong, I think Butler is a genius, an insightful and necessary figure whose books have helped inspire me to get into the anti-sexist work that I do. I just have a problem with academic writing that critiques and talks about the larger mainstream public, but excludes them at the same time. We can all write and talk about what’s wrong with society, but if the public is not engaged in the discussion, the discourse won’t leave the classroom.

I brought this issue up in class a few semesters back. My professor, who totally agreed with me, told me about a conference she had just attended where she brought up the inaccessibility of academic writing to another well-known social theorist (no names!). Her response was, and I’m not making this up, “I try not to make a fetish out of understanding.”

And we wonder where all this anti-intellectualism stuff comes from…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 12:05 pm and is filed under feminist. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.