October 30, 2016, Cairo – In an interview with the Cairo Review of Global Affairs published
today, acclaimed gender theorist Judith Butler criticizes Hillary Clinton’s
“limited” feminism and “hawkish” foreign policy, but says she will vote for the
Democratic presidential nominee in part because Republican candidate Donald
Trump is a “massive danger to democracy as we know it.”
“I would at this point vote for
Hillary,” Butler says, “I don’t care whether you like Hillary or you don’t like
Hillary. You can hold your nose and vote for someone. I’m really not a purist.
I think one has to look at the consequences and wage your bets.”
Butler, author of seminal texts such
as “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” is the
Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the
Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Butler said, “it feels very
compromised to vote for Hillary Clinton,” but that she planned to do so because
Clinton would make better Supreme Court appointments and because of the danger
she believes Trump poses to the country and the world. “He’s a loose cannon,”
Butler said. “He strikes me also as profoundly ignorant [and] dangerous in his
racism and in his contempt for basic rights.”
She told the Cairo Review that Clinton’s “liberal feminism” is based on a
“market-based idea of equality” that does not sufficiently deal with issues of
critical importance to global feminism such as poverty, literacy, and violence.
“I think her feminism is admirable but I think it is limited,” Butler said. “It
could be a problem if her version of liberal feminism comes to stand for
feminism in the United States.”
Butler added that Clinton’s gender
is not a “sufficient reason” to vote for her, commenting: “Maggie Thatcher was
a woman. Golda Meir was a woman. There are women who conducted brutal wars and
caused great suffering in the world. So I don’t think there is anything about
being a woman that is important here in terms of understanding what kind of
policies she might have. I haven’t liked Hillary’s foreign policy. I haven’t
liked her hawkish impulses.”
The
symbolic importance of electing a woman president may be constrained, Butler
said, pointing out that “institutional forms of racism” and “racial inequality”
persisted after the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president
in 2008.
The Fall
2016 edition of the Cairo Review features “Special Report: Democracy
Deficits,” a survey of the state of liberty in the United States and around
the world. It includes “Toward an Egyptian Open Society,” an essay by Nabil
Fahmy, former Egyptian Foreign Minister and the dean of AUC’s School of Global
Affairs and Public Policy, assessing the progress toward democracy since the
election of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi two years ago.
To read The
Cairo Review Interview with Judith Butler, “Special Report: Democracy
Deficits,” and other essays in the Summer 2016 edition of the Cairo Review, go to www.thecairoreview.com.
The Cairo Review of Global Affairs is the quarterly journal of AUC’s School of Global Affairs
and Public Policy (GAPP). The journal is available online at www.thecairoreview.com.
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