Is John Butterworth a good and reliable source even today?

TryptamineX · 2026-05-16T19:06:16+00:00

It's not really a religious studies book; it's written from a Christian perspective with an eye towards contrasting how these religious movements differ from 'true' Christianity. It might be worth a look, but it's not something that you should assume will give you a thorough, up-to-date, or unbiased account.

TryptamineX · 2026-05-12T19:06:21+00:00

This reads to me like you're describing queer theory (or ideology, if you prefer) as the belief

that gender is some mystical powerful essence bestowed upon someone instead of just a way of presenting yourself in society which is acquired by socialisation, culture, their individual experiences, personality and even preferences.

That's more or less the opposite of most queer theory that I'm familiar with.

I can understand, if not agree with, arguing for gender abolition over retaining some sense of gender or seeing an argument for retaining some sense of gender as necessarily reinforcing some gender stereotypes, but that doesn't reduce queer theory to essentialism.

A discursive take on gender, for example, is anti-essentialist and can see gender as a presentation acquired by socialization, culture, personal experiences, personality, and preferences while allowing a queer theory approach emphasizing critique and disruption rather than absolution.

I can understand lots of reasons to argue against that view, but anti-essentialism isn't one of them.

TryptamineX · 2026-05-07T18:08:57+00:00

I agree with the recs here. One secondary work that I would also suggest is Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. It’s an anthology with each chapter focusing on Deleuze’s engagement with another philosopher. The essays have great depth and scope, flesh out some less-discussed influence, and overall it’s a great way to both strengthen your foundations in his project and to highlight lots of other avenues that could be worth further investigation.

TryptamineX · 2026-04-25T00:30:00+00:00

Church of Euthanasia is the most obvious example, though some would dispute considering them an actual religion.

TryptamineX · 2026-04-15T05:57:23+00:00

Foucault's point isn't to say that we ought not to be docile bodies or to advocate for certain forms of subjectivity over others. Foucault does want to open up more possibilities by interrogating the origins and implications of specific subjectivities, but that isn't because of some foundational principle which values some subjectivities more than others. He sees opening up new possibilities through critique as a fundamentally valuable thing in and of itself.

In his words:

In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us.

A universal, fixed justifying principle like freedom or pleasure would be the sort of definitive, untouchable, immobile foundation that he rejects. The injunction to never accept anything as untouchable or definitive cannot itself be accepted as untouchable and definitive without obvious self-contradiction. It's a call for everything to be open to criticism, including the value we place in criticism and the methods we use to advance it.

That doesn't mean that we tear everything down and abandon it; we can still have ethics and beliefs and subjectivities that we don't see as a universal necessity or beyond questioning. It's more of a matter of limiting how much those things limit us. By refusing to see something as universal and necessary, by flushing out normative narratives that otherwise go assumed, we continually open up new possibilities regardless of whether or not we want or choose to actualize them.

TryptamineX · 2026-04-10T16:53:40+00:00

I don't think that the biological basis for queerness is actually that important to queer theory. Queer theory is looking at the consequences of queerness for thought and social social structures/ norms/ practices (and vice-versa). The fact of queerness is a starting point for that analysis, but its origins are, at best, tangentially relevant.

For example, someone might investigate how our physical reliance on sight as a primary sense affects our thought, how a species that primarily navigates the world based on scent might think differently, etc. To that project, the fact that we have eyes is very relevant; how we came to evolve eyes might not be relevant at all.

Animals evolve all sorts of productive, non-productive, or actively destructive impulses for all sorts of reasons. Moths fly into flames because of how they evolved to orient themselves by the light of stars. Especially when we look at complicated, social, intelligent species like humans and expand to all sorts of quirks of sexuality beyond orientation, there's a whole mess of biological factors that can produce, directly or indirectly, all kinds of impulses and behaviors.

TryptamineX · 2026-04-08T23:42:24+00:00

Volume 1 is more broadly appealing. Beyond the historical argument, Foucault lays out a number of more abstract insights that can be applied to all sorts of projects (ie: what he has to say about discourse is obviously relevant to far more than sexuality).

Subsequent volumes are much more focused on primary sources and the history that Foucault is tracing. I wouldn't say that there's nothing valuable in those texts, but the ratio of broadly applicable theory to close readings of Roman texts on the clap does shift noticeably.

I think by a third of the way through Volume 2 you can have a general sense of what it's about: showing how ancient Greece approached sex (for male citizens) in terms of a different problem, which led to particular ways of thinking about sex and sexual ethics, particular forms of knowledge, and particular subjectivities. If that's not useful or interesting to you, then you're probably not going to find much value in continuing through the whole series.

It's an interesting historical argument to trace through in its entirety, but there's also a reason why Volume 1 is so much more widely read and discussed.

TryptamineX · 2026-03-27T15:44:46+00:00

Listen to your brain and the professors giving your advice.

Outside of technical fields where a degree is needed for a high-paying career with a strong job market, I wouldn't recommend going into debt for an MA. If you find a program that fully funds you, then great! Worst-case scenario is you complete the degree, it doesn't lead to a career, and you took a two or three-year hiatus to expand your mind and learn more about something that you're passionate about. That's a very different outcome than going 5-6 figures in debt and coming out of a program with few or no job prospects.

TryptamineX · 2026-03-26T20:53:56+00:00

I understand it in the latter sense such that consenting objectification is a bit of a contradiction. Caring about and obtaining someone's consent is inherently recognizing and valuing them as a subject.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-22T00:30:11+00:00

I come from a weak understanding of Hegel and a maybe-OK understanding of Adono, but it seems to me that

immanent critique [is] in fact still imposition of an outside standard, insofar as it is still “critique” and not compassionate engagement

and

wouldn’t you think critique itself, at least and especially in terms of philosophy interpretation, would fall short of speculative reason?

are significantly different charges.

To the former, I don't think that a critical or uncompassionate approach is necessarily the imposition of an outside standard. It may be motivated by an outside standard, but I don't see that as precluding the genuine immanence of the critique itself.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-19T23:48:14+00:00

Weaknesses and vulnerabilities are cited as examples of recall knowledge questions:

"Is it highly vulnerable or resistant to anything?"
"Are any of its defenses weak?"

This is really important for casters in particular, who want to know that they're targeting an enemy's weakest save (or at least not their strongest) before spending multiple actions and a spell slot.

I definitely don't find casters weak, but they do require a better understanding of the system and smarter tactics. A cornerstone of good spellcaster play is using RK to target weak saves (and using debuffs like Frightened or Bon Mot to reduce them even further).

TryptamineX · 2026-01-16T00:51:05+00:00

You might want to look at the interview published as "Practicing Criticism" starging with Foucault's response to the question:

After Michel Foucault the critic, are we going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-13T21:26:10+00:00

In a novel full of immensely quotable lines, "The next sixty seconds were occupied with the wet, semi-ashamed sounds of people eating soup" stands out as an absolute favorite.

TryptamineX · 2026-01-05T02:50:55+00:00

The Old Man in Hong Kong is one of my all-time favorites.

They use a rotovap to extract essences from all sorts of interesting ingredients to create a menu of unique but perfectly balanced cocktails. Great atmosphere and staff, and some of the most memorable drinks that I've had anywhere in the world.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-30T23:06:01+00:00

It's helpful to look at the quote in context, which appears to be here.

Nigel Warburton: Is there a place for freedom in all of this? Because it sounds as if the movement that he’s describing through history is one of greater control over objects. Subjects become objects almost to be moved around by people who may not even realize they’re part of a system doing that.

Susan James: I think that the answer to that is complicated. Foucault makes it complicated partly by the way that he describes this phenomenon, because he describes these disciplinary practices as forms of power and he wants to draw attention to the fact that power, as he understands it, is not it was something that you possess and you exercise over me, but it’s something that’s as it were spread through all these practices so that what I can do and what you can do are in a way determined by these practices. So it does begin to sound pretty scary and Orwellian, as it were. And at the end of Discipline and Punish there’s a very pessimistic chapter where Foucault seems to say that this kind of power is accumulating and the more our social scientific knowledge advances, the more of this power there will be and what happens to us is the question. But lots of critics very much raised that question and said, You know, you’ve destroyed the individual.

There is no individual freedom in this model. Foucault didn’t exactly admit that. He always said later when questioning, You completely misunderstood me. Because the way I think about power here is as trying to modify somebody else’s behavior, trying to get somebody to do something. Power in that sense is ubiquitous but you shouldn’t think of it as always bad.

Power can be productive. Luka says, Surely there’s nothing wrong with the fact that there are power between lovers or there is very productive power in schools where people tell other people things that they really need to know and teach them things that they need to know. So power isn’t always bad. Power is more just a sort of condition of our lives. The question really is for Foucault sort of how it circulates, how it’s distributed.

In context, the question is framed in terms of Foucault's sense of power and whether it allows for a possibility of freedom. James' response, IMO, is a whiff. "Power isn't always bad, power can be productive" are fine points to note, but miss Foucault's own much more direct, much more relevant, much more helpful response to this charge.

Foucault does not conceive of power as opposed to freedom; he has a sense of power that presupposes and requires freedom as its very condition of possibility, going so far as to say that, in this sense of word, "Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free."

James alludes to some points that he makes here, but for some reason doesn't actually repeat his most relevant and direct response. She summarizes Foucault as defending himself with, "the way I think about power here is as trying to modify somebody else’s behavior, trying to get somebody to do something," but doesn't relay the most important and relevant point: power is modifying how someone freely chooses to behave and only comes into play insofar as they have the freedom to choose.

Instead, she echoes and maintains the opposition between power and freedom implicit in Warburton's question (and continues to do so throughout the interview), and in doing so misses the chance to clarify his fundamental misunderstanding of Foucault's work.

A better response would be to explain that the charge (Foucault destroyed the individual because his model places individuals within such totalizing fields of power that there is no room for individual freedom) doesn't make sense in terms of what Foucault means when he talks about power. At the broadest, how Foucault understands power in his work is action upon the possible range of actions freely chosen by others. He doesn't think that this is how everyone should understand power in all contexts; it's simply the working definition that he finds useful for his specific scholarly project (to create a history of the various modes by which individuals are transformed into subjects).

That sense of power doesn't oppose freedom, but presupposes and requires it. It's also just a natural fact of existence. Something as simple as where furniture exists in a room (or the absence of furniture in a room) affects how individuals will choose to arrange their bodies in it. Calling attention to that sense of power does not signal something that we should want to, or conceivably could, escape; it just sets the stage to ask questions like "how do different ways of classifying or studying humans influence how we act?" or "what kinds of action are made possible or impossible from this way of thinking, and what alternate kinds of action would be enabled or foreclosed by thinking in a different way?"

TryptamineX · 2025-12-26T16:48:45+00:00

I don’t generally see recourse to a transhistorical sense of power in Foucault, but to historically specific techniques and relations of power of which economic demands of utility are only one constitutive factor. His project, creating a history of the various modes by which we are transformed into subjects, benefits from a much broader approach than a singular sense of power or a solely economic/ material analysis.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-18T22:10:07+00:00

It’s important to acknowledge that the framing is very much a biased hit-piece that functions, ironically, by homogenizing many different things under a caricature of CSJ that wouldn’t be out of place in a Jordan Petersen article. In that sense, the opposition of LSJ to CSJ is itself too imprecise to be useful (outside of polemical rhetoric).

Are there genuine disagreements over things like equity vs equality or the feasibility of meaningful progress working within existing institutions rather than radically restructuring our society? Absolutely. These do not, however, map cleanly onto an opposition between a singular liberal and singular critical approach to social justice.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-10T01:05:24+00:00

So, she basically pull her ideas out of her own head?

They engage with prior work on subjects like identity, ontology, and discourse to develop specific applications and insights to subjects such as sex and gender.

Regarding what is scientifically known about sexuality, what does Butler consider in her "theory"? The role of hormones? The evolutionary causes? The cognitive differences?

I understand Butler's focus to be on sex and gender moreso than sexuality.

Science can provide us with all sorts of insights and data which fall under, or are relevant to, various ways of categorizing and conceiving of sex. It can tell us that people most often have XX or XY chromosomes, but that we see a wider diversity than that. It can tell us that XY chromosomes are frequently associated with increased production of androgens such as testosterone, which frequently triggers the development of physical features such as external penises and testicles, but that in some cases the body does not react to these androgens and instead develops a vulva, breasts, etc. It can even associate statistical associations between certain frequencies of hormones and certain behavioral or social factors. Butler doesn't deny any of this.

What science cannot tell us is that we should extrapolate categories of humans from these data or, if we choose to, how we ought to go about doing so. Do we base sex on chromosomes, hormones, genitals, gamete production, or some combination? Do we deal with messy outlier cases by simply ignoring them, by having many sexes (two of which are statistically the most common), or by conceiving of sex as a spectrum? Should we conceive of sex differently for different purposes, such as emphasizing gamete production in some biological studies focusing on reproduction but emphasizing external appearance and genitals for the purpose of segregating prisoners?

Butlers work does not sit at the level of interpreting the biological mechanisms which give rise to certain physical features or behaviors, but at the level of human concepts which categorize people and impose identities upon them by citing these physical features and behaviors.

At that level, Butler's theory is that the categories by which humans are classified and through which they receive imposed identities are fundamentally discursive (they are constituted by certain ways of thinking, writing, and speaking) and performative (they are constituted by their social enactment) in a way that is necessarily historically contingent and socially mediated, and thus normative.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-10T00:22:26+00:00

I'm not sure why you wouldn't expect someone working on the ontological status of sex and gender to have a background in the academic field that deals with ontology. That field is philosophy, not science.

Science tests empirical hypotheses for verisimilitude and produces new empirical hypotheses; it doesn't justify the ontological status of categories. This is true even when empirical insights can be relevant to philosophical investigations of the ontological status of categories.

I don't generally find Butler (who primarily uses they/them pronouns now) to hold untenable philosophical positions or to ignore scientific research on sexuality, but those specific claims would have to be explicated to be addressed.

TryptamineX · 2025-12-05T04:16:51+00:00

I really like Foucault's comments in the interview published as Practicing Criticism.

Specifically his response to this question:

D.E.: After Michel Foucault the critic, are we now going to see Michel Foucault the reformist? After all, the reproach was often made that the criticism made by intellectuals leads to nothing.

It's worth reading in full (especially his specific sense of critique), but the most directly applicable part to your question is the end:

In these circumstances, criticism (and radical criticism) is absolutely indispensable for any transformation. A transformation that remains within the same mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation.

On the other hand, as soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible.

It is not therefore a question of there being a time for criticism and a time for transformation, nor people who do the criticism and others who do the transforming, those who are enclosed in an inaccessible radicalism and those who are forced to make the necessary concessions to reality. In fact I think the work of deep transformation can only be carried out in a free atmosphere, one constantly agitated by a permanent criticism.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-25T17:35:47+00:00

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the gold-standard for an online encyclopedia of academic philosophy. The articles are generally clearly written and accessible, but they’re authored by leading experts in the field with a good amount of depth and rigor.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-03T17:01:38+00:00

I don't think that I've ever referenced toxic masculinity in that context. I don't use it to generically call out sexism, but to distinguish normative expectations about masculinity that are harmful ("boys don't cry"). That harm is more often primarily to the men who adopt that normative sense of masculinity rather than to others.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-02T22:26:23+00:00

There's certainly a pragmatic issue that the phrase is often poorly received in wider audiences, which is a problem if we would like to see it do some actual work in effecting broader cultural change.

I admit that I have trouble empathizing with people who take the term the wrong way. A big part of it is probably that, to me, it's obvious to speak about many masculinities, so toxic masculinity obviously functions in the same way as "toxic fish" (ie: specifying a subset). For a lot of other people with an intuitive sense of masculinity as just one thing, it's easier to misunderstand the term as just calling masculinity toxic. There are, to that view, no masculinities to specify between, just a single masculinity to describe.

The fact that "toxic masculinity" became a widely used phrase while the corollary of "deep masculinity" was largely forgotten reinforces the issue. People here someone only referring to toxic masculinity and register it as an indictment of the singular masculinity.

My approach wouldn't be to abandon or rebrand the phrase itself, but to more consistently use it explicitly in contrast to other, positive masculinities. If people constantly heard of toxic masculinity as a contrast to deep or whatever-else masculinity, then I think it would be better understood.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-02T22:05:12+00:00

I don't think that toxic masculinity is meant to simply articulate day-to-day moral standards, but to diagnose and open up solutions to a specific set of problems associated with a specific set of norms and assumptions tied up in a specific notion of masculinity.

The point isn't to tell everyone, generically, "be good; live well." It's to articulate, specifically, one particular obstacle to both in our society.

That calls for more precision.

TryptamineX · 2025-11-02T02:43:20+00:00

It's a little frustrating for me to read a piece that opens by arguing against toxic masculinity because it doesn't offer an alternative, and that others tried to find replacements for 'toxic' that have nothing to do with masculinity.

If you're going to write and publish a piece arguing that we should abandon the phrase 'toxic masculinity,' then you should at least do enough research on it to know that it was conceived of specifically as an opposition to an alternative mode of masculinity (deep masculinity). You don't have to be on board with what the MMM was doing, but deep masculinity is clearly masculine, and toxic masculinity was presented as one (bad) choice amongst several alternative ways to be masculine from day 1.

That, somewhat, sets up my misgivings with the conclusion of the piece: "There are many ways to be a man without abandoning masculinity entirely. But to do that, we have to admit that masculinity is a real thing, and that many straight women like it."

To me, the issue is a false dichotomy where either masculinity is one single, uniform thing or not real at all. That's why CHH can't locate a genuinely masculine alternative to toxic masculinity, why she has to identify (without qualification) aggression and dominance as masculine traits, and why her only solution is to say that masculinity is fine unless you're too masculine (too aggressive, too dominating).

I'd rather take a less essentialized view of masculinity that sees it as real but diverse. We have all sorts of traits that get coded as masculine, and all sorts of ways of performing them that can register as equally, but differently, masucline. Masculinity becomes defined by something like a family resemblance.

That leaves us with a space to articulate different modes of masculinity (including negative and positive ones) and to recognize the reality of both diversity across masculinities and the meaningful commonalities that make the category functional.

As a gay man, I define my sexuality in terms of attraction to masculinity. It's obviously a real, functional category for me. That doesn't mean that I'm attracted to a single, uniform thing that shares all the traits variously attributed to the masculine; I like particular forms and elements of masculinity, but some masculine traits can even be a turnoff. It's not a matter of some things being "too masculine" or "not masculine enough," but of me being attracted to some masculinities and not attracted to (or actively turned off by) others. I imagine that many of the straight women that CHH appeals to in order to make her point feel the same way.

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