Recently, I came across a woman at one of our top universities who taught a course in Feminist theory and gave her students F's if they spelled the plural of the female of the species "women" on a test or in a paper. She insisted on "womyn," since the powers that be, at some point far back in the mists of history, had built male primacy into the very language itself by making "women" 60 percent "men." How did the students react? They shrugged. They have long since learned the futility of objecting to Rococo Marxism. They just write "womyn" and go about the business of grinding out a credit in the course.
The undisputed queen of feminist theory is Judith Butler, a forty four-year-old Hegel scholar with a Ph.D. from Yale, who is also known as the diva of Queer Studies. She is small and not very prepossessing, but graduate students all over the country say "diva" at the mere mention of her name. A group of them put out a fan magazine called Judy! devoted to chronicling the way she rams home her "performativity" theory of speech and sexual behavior as forms of anarchy.
"All gender roles are an imitation for which there is no original," runs her most famous paradox. She is even more famous for her convoluted Theoryese. In 1998 the journal Philosophy and Literature named her winner of their Bad Writing Contest for a sentence that began "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation....—and went on for fifty-nine words more.
Her zine fans love the insouciant yet erudite way she dismisses such attacks. "Ponderousness," she says, referring to Hegel, "is part of the phenomenological challenge of the text."
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