Queer Theory and BDS: The Odd Couple

Rivka Edelman writes:

For the past two years Boycott Divest Sanction, (BDS) the growing college campus movement against Israel, has put every Jewish student and many faculty in its crosshairs. It is the latest incarnation of anti-Semitism to garner the rubber stamp of approval in the academy, a stamp usually reserved for the very PC fields like feminism, Queer Studies and LGBT rights.

The queer movement and BDS actually flow from a shared cultural source, a zeitgeist. That these two movements go hand in hand should not strike anyone as odd considering both movements share, not only toxic tactics, (calling people genocidal murders as they try to make their way from class to class), but also revisionist history of faux victimization, (think of that widely circulated photograph of the dead baby, who was killed by the Israelis in 2007, and killed again in 2009, and yet again in 2014) and violent rhetoric.

The connection runs deeper. They also share a spokesperson, Professor Judith Butler, an Americ academic version of a public intellectual. Judith Butler, once Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at Berkeley, is a literary theorist and a political activist, best known for coining the phrase, “gender is performative” (an observation that was made in the Talmud centuries before Butler). If it were the 1970s and the humanities had rock stars Butler would be their Mick Jagger. BDS was lucky to book her for their gigs. As Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors, states:

“Judith Butler, who has become the movement’s premier philosopher and political theorist, is perhaps the foremost among them. Her work, which carries significant authority among humanists, helps us get to the heart of the movement’s guiding principles.”

As an advocate for BDS, Butler’s has cachet, publications and a background of political “activism.” In this case it is a brand of activism that seems to channel the American conviction “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” She lends a thin veneer of legitimacy to the unsavory notion that if gilt in postmodern jargon, the attitude of “really pissed off, STFU pissed off” is an ethical and philosophical position based on some agreed truth.