Academic males won't be able to get it up unless they cite Butler? Hey, pretty funny, Barkley. Penis jokes yet. Smiley faces make everything alright, don't they? Depending on which parts of the academic terrain one is writing and working in, Butler might or might not be important. Since mine was a critique of the turn to Butler, presumably this puts me on the side of the penis deflators? Leaving aside the unpleasant metaphor for a minute, Butler, whether one likes her work or not, is trying to deal with some fairly serious and complicated issues. I for one have found some of her writing very lucid (e.g, her contribution to Feminists Theorize the Political (eds.) Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Routledge 1992). Some of the rest is more technical and harder -- pause for the penis joke from Barkley -- but that is equally true of almost any specialised field you care to name. I guess I just don't get it either: part of what seems to be implied by some of the responses to the discussion of Butler is the view -- profoundly undialectical in my opinion -- that there really isn't anything to be learned from all of the work carried out by scholars like Butler. Either 1) Marx -- or some other card-carrying Marxist -- said it already or 2) its just idealism/bourgeois etc. etc. (take your pick). Gee, I guess Marx was pretty lucky that the major bourgeois economists and other writers of his day -- whom he read very carefully -- just were important. Timing, it appears, is everything. Mark Laffey
