The only reason why there is so much hand wringing and angst about the meaning of the word 'woman' is entirely due to bloody postmodernism getting its claws deep into feminism in the 80s and 90s. The author approvingly regurgitates Judith Butler like it's gospel: "By demarcating feminism’s subject matter — by articulating a concrete category of harms that deserved feminist attention — feminists inadvertently defined womanhood in a manner that implies that there are right and wrong ways to be a woman. “Identity categories are never merely descriptive,” she insists in “Gender Trouble,” “but always normative, and as such, exclusionary.”

What Butler means is this - by thinking there exists such a thing as the category 'woman' in the world, you are literally bringing that category into existence. 'Women' don't exist, pre given, in reality. We create them by talking about them. And when we create any category, that is automatically normative, with rules about how to be a member of that category. And that is also exclusionary - and being exclusionary is wrong. Butler is literally mad that feminists have the audacity to think feminism has a subject matter - 'women'. The solution, says Butler, is to get rid of this exclusionary, oppressive concept of 'woman'. There is no such thing as 'woman'.

Now, as far as theories go, it's fucking mad. There's no reason to believe it. It's a travesty that feminists have spent so much time thinking about this shite. Butler never provides any reasons or arguments for her points. She just pronounces things as if they are truths from the mouth of God. Firstly, most normal human beings are realists - that is, they believe there is an external world and things exist outside of ourselves. There is no reason to believe that 'woman' is not a natural, pre-existing concept as opposed to something we just fucking made up because.Secondly, there is no reason to think that delineating a category is necessary normative. Categories can be merely descriptive of the way things are, as opposed to the way things should be. And thirdly, Butler never explains what is so heinous about being 'exclusionary'. I don't fit the definition of being five years old, or being a dog, or being a millionaire, but it's odd to say that the categories themselves are exclusionary in any malicious sense. But years of postmodernist bullshit has led us to think that 'excluding' men from the category of women is bad somehow.

The absolutely worst thing about this shit is how it's so selectively applied. Postmodernism applies to everything - EVERY category is normative and exclusionary. Carving out categories like 'disabled', 'old', 'black', 'poor' are just as problematic to the postmodernist as the category 'woman'. And yet the only category which is ever held up as problematic is 'woman'. Why is that, I wonder? Could it possibly be convenient to deconstruct the concept of women the second that women actually start to make some material gains in the world? And why do people so unthinkingly accept a barmy, half baked piece of philosophy that stems very heavily from a few French, male, sexist thinkers?