The.Ink Judith Butler on the authoritarian war on gender
What is gender, anyway?
When Judith Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990, the philosopher and feminist scholar inaugurated a new way of looking at gender. Butler’s ideas — about gender as something socially constructed, as performative — went on to influence a generation of scholars who have built on their work or challenged it to construct an entirely new way of thinking about gender as identity. The most important thing about gender, Butler tells us, is that its meaning changes all the time.
Judith Butler talked to us about their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, which explores how forces on the right have identified and weaponized a supposed “gender ideology” for use as a tool to frighten and mobilize those already struggling with societal upheaval and the precarity of life in a late capitalist world. We also talked about the history of gender’s many meanings, from a category of feminist analysis to an evolving concept of identity, about what we can learn from the way young people have been able to build on basic lessons about ethical behavior to embrace a more fluid set of ideas around gender, the role and responsibility of political theorists, and Butler’s own legacy as a scholar, activist, and collaborator.
It’s a deep conversation with a major scholar that you won’t want to miss (and we’ve got full audio along with it).
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So thank you so much for making the time. I wanted to start by asking about how your new book, Who's Afraid of Gender, was inspired by this incident in 2017 in Brazil. Can you just tell us a story of that moment and how it puts you on the road to trying to answer this question? Who is afraid of gender, and the progress and new thinking and new understandings of gender in this moment?
Well, I mean, I have to say that I certainly was studying the anti-gender ideology movement before 2017, and I had good colleagues in different parts of the world who had alerted me to what was going on. I had participated in events in Belgium and certainly been in conversations with colleagues in the U.K. and in Chile on this issue. But I had not personally confronted the people who had enormous passions about this topic until I got to Brazil in the fall of 2017.
And I was actually not giving a paper, which was odd. I was curating an event on the “Ends of Democracy,” question mark, where we were thinking about whether democracy was heading toward its end and also what its ends or aims might be. So other people were talking. I gave a brief introduction at most. And I was told that there was a demonstration outside the venue and that I needed security.
And in fact, when I arrived at the airport, there was security waiting for me because there had been a fair amount of chatter online instigated by a group called Citizen Go. That group is a right-wing anti-gender ideology group. They call it gender ideology. That's their name, not really mine.
And they had amassed a petition that was apparently being populated by bots that Judith Butler should not come to Brazil and that Judith Butler should leave Brazil and should not be allowed to speak in Brazil.
So this was right before the Bolsonaro regime took hold. But the passions against gender were also very pro-Bolsonaro. And Bolsonaro also made known his own opposition to gender, characterizing it, again, as an ideology. So I was burnt in effigy in the midst of this protest against me. There was a counter-protest at the same time, and that counter-protest did swell. So luckily, the number of those people actually was larger than the people who were against me.
I continued through the next few days with a lot of security. But when I went to the airport with my partner, Wendy Brown, we decided, "We're fine. We're just going to the airport," but we then confronted another group with posters who were screaming, and they were screaming about pedophilia. And I was like, "Why? What does pedophilia have to do with anything? Where is this coming from?" So many of the things that were set against me and the ways in which I was portrayed struck me as very strange.
I was, for instance, a demon or even a contemporary incarnation of the devil. But I was also apparently in favor of incest or pedophilia. Or I was involved in conscripting young people to become gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans, any number of things. All of these allegations struck me as preposterous, but I saw that these convictions were very deeply held, and the people who held them were willing to resort to violence.
Luckily, I did escape the metal trolley that was coming toward me by virtue of a kind young man who interposed his own body between the trolley and me. Otherwise, I would have had some injuries.
I can't believe you ended up in a real-life version of the trolley problem.
Yes, a real-life version of the trolley problem.