Judith Butler and the fear of gender
In the 1990s a new philosophy helped open up alternative ways of being. Nobody predicted it would lead to war.
by Lyndsey Stonebridge for The New Statesman
In the mid-1990s a university colleague would begin feminist theory classes by showing two recent TV adverts on VHS tape. The first was for Levi Jeans and featured a strikingly beautiful jeans-clad trans woman in the back seat of a yellow cab being subjected to the creepy teeth-licking gaze of her driver. In case the viewer did not get the “joke”, at the end of the ride she pulls out an electric shaver and trims her chin. “Levi’s – Made for Men” the final frame quipped. The second ad was for Clairol’s “natural” hair dye, and showed a young woman dying her hair while lip-synching, with increasing abandon, to Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman”, until she spots her male partner watching her. “Steven!” she cries.
