Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler in Conversation with Lisa Wedeen

Join Judith Butler and Lisa Wedeen for a bold and essential conversation of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti–gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless—a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.

“A profoundly urgent intervention.” —Naomi Klein

“A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in reimagining collective futurity.” —Claudia Rankine

Speakers:

Judith Butler is the author of several books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection; and The Force of Nonviolence. In addition to their numerous academic honors and publications, Butler has published editorials and reviews in a wide range of journals and newspapers, including The New York Times, Time, and the London Review of Books, and has been featured on radio programs and podcasts throughout the world. They live in Berkeley, California.

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and Associate Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). For this newest book, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020); the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award for the book that brings the most distinction to the University of Chicago Press (2022). Wedeen’s co-edited volume with Joseph Masco, entitled Conspiracy/Theory was published in January 2024. Her edited volume with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth on reimagining cosmopolitanism will be published in 2025. She is now beginning work on a book on revolutionary disappointment and recalibration and another on interpretive methods in political theory.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Women & Children First.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y93iGH7Nurw

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