#wittig

Join us as we discuss one of the worst-written books we've had to cover: Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. It is considered a landmark text of the so-called third wave of feminism, but is it all it's cracked up to be? Given that it kicked off queer theory, it certainly got a few things wrong. Join us as we walk through the good, the bad, and the paradigm-shifting aspects of Judith Butler's seminal work.

Our companion episode on Patreon is on Monique Wittig!

TERF or Transfeminist Avant la Lettre? That is the title of a paper on Monique Wittig that is almost certainly clickbait. We discuss a paper by Blase A. Provitola examining Monique Wittig's work and the appropriations of it by scholars, feminists, and activists with very different politics, asking important questions such as "why is everyone so bad at reading" and "how badly can Talia mispronounce French words".

We actually have a fairly extensive library of Patreon episodes by now. You can get early access to our next episode (on The Beauty Myth, out soon) as well as Patreon-exclusive episodes on:

The Genderbread Person,

Jack Halberstam discussing how toilets are bourgeois,

Kadji Amin's fairly controversial paper We Are All Non-Binary,

Les premières féministes n’ont pas réussi à considérer l’histoire comme un processus dynamique qui se développe à partir de conflits d’intérêts. Plus même, elles continuaient de penser comme les hommes que la cause (l’origine) de leur oppression se trouvait en elles (parmi les Noirs, seuls les oncles Tom s’accrochaient à cette idée). Et les féministes de ce premier front après quelques victoires éclatantes se sont trouvées dans une impasse et ont manqué de raisons pour continuer à se battre. Elles soutenaient le principe illogique de « l’égalité dans la différence », une idée qui est en train de renaître en ce moment même. Elles sont retombées dans le piège qui nous menace une fois de plus : le mythe de la femme.

Preparation of a phosphonium ylide for a Wittig olefination.

Triphenyl phosphonium ylides also called Wittig reagents. They are usually prepared from a phosphonium salt, and a strong base such as sodium hydroxide, potassium tert-butylate (as in this case, added on the second gif) or butyllithium.

What happenes here? This:

[Ph3P+CH2R]X− + C4H9Li → Ph3P=CHR + LiX + C4H10