Gender Trouble

This dynamic is partly a matter of intrasexual competition and what the sociologist Erving Goffman called impression management in his classic text, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Goffman's text predates Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, which popularized the idea that gender is performed rather than biologically fixed.

People in left-liberal spaces often take up this notion of performativity but apply it narrowly to gender roles.

However, Goffman's book is far more interesting in my opinion because it shows that far more behavior is performed than gender expectations alone, and that the persona people perform on a daily basis is highly shaped by the norms and incentives of the particular context they are in.

But it does seem to me that I can have no intention whatsoever about fashion.

So here I think it's really helpful to look at what Judith Butler says about gender performativity in their book Gender Trouble.

Because I think this is a nice analogy here.

And it's actually part and parcel of the whole thing.

He uses narrative to draw out that vision of creation as a good thing, something designed by God and something that we do not control, but rather we receive and we give ourselves to.

In this episode, I'm interviewing Josh Herring on his new book, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve, which is about C.S. Lewis's vision of gender And especially how that interacts with some feminist theory, some of the ideas that are really part of a lot of the gender confusion today and a lot of the conflicts about gender today.

So we're going to look at C.S. Lewis's fiction work, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy.

to really look at how his view of creation as a gift, his view of gender and sex, permeates everything that he writes and provides a powerful vision that can be very helpful for us today.

You're listening to That'll Preach.

We are here with Josh Herring, and he is the director of the Logres Institute.

And he's got a new book out with Davenant Press called Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, talking about some of C.S. Lewis's ideas regarding gender, especially through his fiction works, which I think will be a really fascinating conversation to have.

But Josh, thank you for coming on to the show.

I mean, right after, right in the summer, Pretty Woman came out in March of 1990.

As I say in the book, it's the same month that Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's book, was released.

[laughs] Um, but, uh- Crazy [laughs] ...

I know, it's, it's wild.

But this book is about, right, like, how habits, how acting this rivalry out, like, inculcates the rivalrous mindset that's all occurring within people who live within, like, 12 miles [laughs] of each other is kind of one of the fun parts about it.

And then my third hobby horse book, which I think people talk about this book all the time, but I feel like a lot of people have never actually read it, is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler.

It will blow your hair back.

The reason [laughs] that we sit down and have...

I'm a huge listener of manosphere podcasts along with yours.

I'm a really big listener of Joe Rogan.

And the reason I bring it up all the time is I'm like, "Has Joe read Gender Trouble?" 'Cause wow.

I mean, he's camp.

Decolonization is one of the radical things that the cultural leftist types like to LARP about because it is much easier to cheer on radical movements outside of one's country or ones that no longer exist that they are far removed from than it is to build radical movements with the people in your own country.

You see this often with leftists less than a few years into their radicalization phase promoting leftism 101 reading recommendations, typically with books like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Angela Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete?, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Edward Said's Orientalism, Peter Kropotkin, sometimes Lenin and various radical thinkers who have very little useful to offer for today's political context.

I even saw some of these cultural leftists who would have previously clocked any talk about the Israel lobby as a Nazi talking point, posting introduction to Hamas books as recommended reading and lots of pro-Hamas messaging in general.

This surprised me as a Lebanese Canadian who got into left-wing politics at a very young age through anti-imperialism and figures like Noam Chomsky and Richard Wolff and politics of democratic socialism that eventually busted onto the scene during the first Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016.

back-Okay.

The one thing, the one book of hers I agreed with was Gender Trouble.

A whole bunch of creative gender ideas, vice ver- Anyway, in, in Gender Trouble, the, the- I thought she beautifully talked about drag.

And the difference between drag and the transvestite with conceptual is the relationship to the perceived framework of gender.

So the transsexual or transvestite is totally bought into this idea of what the gender definitions are, and they're slavishly adherent of it.