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and When Gender is Figured as a Threat to humanity, civilization, man and Nature when gender is likened to a nuclear catastrophe or full blown demonic power, then it is the fear of destruction to which political actors are appealing.
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Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's just Ed here today, and I'm introducing the episode who's Afraid of Gender? This is a talk from Judith Butler, who is a Distinguished professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. They are most well known for their groundbreaking book gender trouble from 1990, and also for their theory of performativity. And so, in this talk, Butler offers a compelling and powerful diagnosis of the anxieties and fears that make up today's culture wars over gender. So without further ado, here is Judith Butler.
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What characterizes the passions that I wish to describe today are that they are moral, or rather moralized. That is, they understand the harm they are doing as morally right or necessary. The moral dimension of their expression can operate as a kind of justification for for doing harm. Of course, they understand themselves as doing good as restoring the good life, or as warding off a possible harm or even the force of evil. It is not in their view that they do harm and supply a moral justification for doing so. No, they understand themselves as not doing harm at all, even as doing good, and they conceive of rights stripping or fatal abandonment as activities that will help to restore or achieve a good outcome for society. Sometimes their argument goes further. The only way to restore the good life, or an ideal sense of the good is precisely through rights stripping or fatal abandonment. These are measures that must be taken, the argument goes, to achieve or restore the good life or undertaken in the name of the good itself. To the extent that these Measures, again stripping people of rights or abandoning them to a possible death at sea are conceived as preconditions of the good life or its restoration. And the very act of taking rights away, or denying a life, the possibility of life and legal status is regarded as a good deed, an activity that realizes the good in the course of what it does. Now, in these instances, if one understands the harm one is doing to be morally right, to be justified in advance, if one understands oneself to be doing good or bringing back the good, then whatever one does in the service of realizing that end would seem to be justified. It is so, however, only if the means serves the ends. But if one does not realize that what one is doing is harmful, then there's no need to justify the harm. Harm is not a harm, but something good. Harm has effectively become good, which means that a full transvaluation of values has occurred for those who have undergone this moral conversion. As a consequence, those who hold such views are freed of traditional moral constraints. They are authorized to act in ways that would otherwise be called harmful, with a full conviction that their actions are right or good, or that they restore good to the world, or that it makes a bad world good, or that it safeguards the world against destruction. So when one talks about the conviction that one's action is right, or that it serves the good even though it is doing harm, one is referring to a state both cognitive and affective. If one says, oh, this action that others call harmful is actually beneficial, then one has turned or reversed the meanings of words that name moral values. And this usually happens when other people are turned, turning or reversing the meaning of words in the same way. The problem is not just a generalized semantic confusion, however, since the conviction is a passionate one. And by passionate I mean not just any emotional state. Passion emerges from the Latin for suffering, but also enduring. It's different from an affection that one can reflect upon in the mind. A passion implies being affected by something from the outside. And enduring that condition of having been affected. The passion is endured. And that does not exactly mean it's an object of self reflection. It's what one undergoes. It has the quality of being out of one's control. A passion is, to some extent even by definition, something ungovernable that one goes through. The mind can't easily master it. A passion more or less governs the mind, and that leaves the one undergoing it as both out of control and excited. Excited to be out of control, excited finally to be out of control, ungoverned and ungovernable. Something lawless is in the air, some possibility of living in a lawless way under the law. Especially when the government, its policies and laws not only permit such a passion, but endorse and incite it as morally right. The experience of what is right under such conditions becomes self righteous moralism. And it permits of various kinds of cruelty in the name of what is considered right and good. Of course, it's not morality which would have to explain the principles by which it acts. No, it is rather an excited moralism outside the law, free to do harm, to deepen and incite hatred in the name of what is called right. Indeed, I would suggest that it's no accident that we've arrived here at a language of governance, the desire to become ungovernable, and that this points us in the direction of answering the initial question. How do we explain the excited character of fascist passions? How do we explain the excited character of doing harm that is fortified by the conviction that one is either doing good or, or more messianically restoring good to an ailing or imperiled world? What we know about passion is that it has a passive element, that it is an undergoing of something that seems to have an origin external to the self, and that it's either a temporary or an enduring state of feeling, of being ungovernable. What then would make a passion or set of passions ungovernable? Well, if a heightened political discourse like the anti gender ideology movement tells you that your life is being threatened, and if that is the case, then my guess is that you will tend to rise up against whatever it is that has been identified as a threat to your life, well, that makes sense. But if that same authority or discourse tells you that the only way to keep your life, or perhaps your way of life, is to deny or destroy the rights of others, well then you are, as it were, being conscripted into a war. You are told that your rights, your right to life, will be taken away from you by some people unless you move quickly to take away their rights, sometimes even their right to life. You are then fighting for the good at the same time that you are mobilizing your desire to destroy others, your longstanding resentments, or your your newly incited forms of disdain. As you may know, the idea of gender has operated as an excitable concept in contemporary politics. Many political campaigns target gender as a destructive force and construe this phantasm of gender as a threat to national identity and the natural family. The Vatican has added to this discourse by likening gender to a nuclear bomb, the Ebola virus, the Hitler Youth. And when gender is figured as a threat to humanity, civilization, man and nature, when gender is likened to a nuclear catastrophe or full blown demonic power, then it is the fear of destruction to which political actors are appealing. There is of course, the ready and continuous fear of destruction, the source of which is difficult to name. Maybe all of us have some of that, but in this case it's solicited and spiked and organized to fortify religious authorities and state powers or their strengthening alliance, as we see in Putin's Russia, the Republican Party in the US and various countries in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Africa. The displacement of this fear of destruction from its conditions of production, climate, disaster, systemic racism, capitalism, extractivism, patriarchal social and state forms. Well, the displacement of that fear from its origins results in the production of cultural figures and phantasms invested with the fantasy power to destroy the earth and the fundamental structures of human societies. Precisely because that destruction is happening without being named and checked. The fear and anxiety congeal without a proper vocabulary or analysis. And then gender or critical race studies are targeted as the causes of destruction. Gender, a category that describes the division of labor, the organization of states, the unequal distribution of power, has never been merely cultural, but it is cast that way by opponents who want to identify the source of the destruction at the cultural level. And once identified as a cause of destruction, gender itself must be destroyed. And what follows is censorship. The de departmentalization of gender studies in women's studies, the stripping of rights of healthcare for trans people, for gay and lesbian people, for gender non conforming people, increased pathologization, the repeal or rejection of laws that protect against discrimination, violent marginalization and the erosion of democratic norms. So let's remember that the killing of women, trans, queer, bisexual and intersex people, is an actual form of destruction that takes place in the world, the world we know. The killing of black women, black, queer and trans people, the killing of migrants, including queer and trans migrants, all these are actually destructive acts that we are, I would say, morally politically obligated to oppose. And as those numbers increase, it becomes increasingly apparent whose lives are considered dispensable and whose lives are not. The inequality of the grievable makes itself known. And once the phantasm of gender comes to include, as it does in the minds of right wing opponents, abortion rights, access to reproductive technology, sexual health services, gender, affirmative health services, women's freedom and equality, queer colors, freedom struggles, single parenting, gay parenting, new kinship outside of heteronormative models, adoption rights, sex Reassignment, sex, self assignment, gender confirming surgery, sex education, books for young people, books for adults, and images of nudity. Well, then it comes to represent a wide range of political struggles that its opponents seek to shut down in their effort to restore an authoritarian patriarchal order for the state, religion and the family. The only way forward is for all those targeted to gather themselves more effectively than their enemies have, to recognize their potential and actual alliance, and to fight the phantasms prepared for them with a powerful and regenerative imaginary. If what I'm saying is true, it follows that fascist passions or fascist political trends are those that seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live, and to do so either without regard for their probable demise, or more likely because fascism is an effective mode of annihilating those lives. Authoritarianism is usually understood as a form of state power. And yet authoritarian personalities flourish within democracies stoking fascist passions, where the fear of destruction converts into a moral alibi to destroy other people's lives. The authoritarian who seeks to stoke the incite fascist passions knows too well that the fear of destruction already courses through a public who is experiencing climate disaster, the dissolution of labor unions, the absence of any prospect for financial security under precarious work conditions. Indeed, that fear of destruction is inflamed and organized by the phantasm of anti gender ideology that locates destruction as emanating from foreign and elite powers, engaging age old conspiratorial logics to prop up anti democratic regimes. It may be that arguments can't really address the fear of destruction that motivates the anti gender ideology movement. The movement taps into a sense of a world on its inevitable way to self immolation. It draws upon that fear in order to rally support for its apparently legitimately destructive plan. There is hardly an instance of this movement that does not claim to be saving its believers, particularly the children, from harm. The movement rather finds, stokes and organizes that fear wherever it can. Nothing could be more personal and singular than the fear for one's bodily safety, or that of one's children, or those who are most proximate. But the real fear is felt by those groups unwillingly under the term gender, and not by those who propagate the fear. The fear is one of being injured, killed, pathologized or incarcerated. And who feels that, well, trans kids, they are hurt by this movement that claims to be saving the children. Equally painful is the fear that women feel on the streets as they seek simply to live their lives and move freely without fear, to realize how many women and LGBTQIA people are seized with fear on the street, in the workplace or in their own homes is to know how pervasive and corrosive that fear of violence can be. And it matters. How many black and brown people undergo that fear in proximity to the police or the store owner who regards them with suspicion? How many young black people in the U.S. for instance, have their breath choked out of them by self justifying police? That surely is a singular fear for one's life, a fear that one's life will be destroyed. But it is also a fear that is felt by those before them, by others on the street, by others at the storefront. It is the fear that a parent feels when they send their kid for groceries at the corner store, not knowing what will happen to them. What if political movements were forged from all those who fear discrimination and violence in public and private spaces, who demand to live and love freely without fear of violence? Perhaps, then the fear of destruction could be identified in a way that shows how its fascist exploitation is so egregiously wrong. Consider, for instance, the operative fantasies about migrants that are elaborated in support of xenophobic and racist migration policy. Or the operative fantasies about women as child murderers articulated by the anti abortion movement. Or the figure of trans women as CIS rapists infiltrating bathrooms. In all three of these examples, we are encountering phenomena that are at once social and psychological. When fears run through a population, when hatred is stoked against a concept or idea such as gender that is said to wield the power of total destruction, then the tools we need to understand, deflate and oppose such a movement have to be drawn from several media that have the power to occupy and diffuse the phantasm in the service of another way of imagining alliance. We need this way of imagining solidarity going forward as much as we need air to breathe. For living on and living on together requires solidarity, a sense of living that includes and exceeds the basics of human life. If something or someone seeks to take away what we need to live, well, yes, we begin to fight for survival. But fighting alone never gets anyone very far. The helplessness one feels recalls the primary helplessness of the infant and the clear insight that without supportive infrastructure, the no one's life is livable. When the anti gender movement says that gender will strip you of your sexed identity, they confess the rights stripping that they are actually advocating and doing. They ask the public to experience the psychosocial fantasy of being stripped of a sexed identity by law, when what is really happening is that trans People are asking to be able to assign themselves a new sex status. They are looking for legal recognition. They are not looking to deprive anyone else of their sexed status. This right to self determination takes no one else's rights away. And yet, if this freedom of self definition is allowed, the opponents say, the gender ideologues will strip everyone else of their sex assignment. Well, self assignment, understood as a form of freedom, is thus twisted into a rights stripping activity. Why? Well, seen as such, it justifies stripping trans people of their rights. Similarly, queer families do not exactly negate heterosexual ones. They only dispute the inevitability and superiority of the heteronormative family form. Those who defend the family are being asked to accept a world in which families take various forms, to understand that they're living only in one such form. This is not a future world we are talking about. It is this world, the one in which we actually live, where families are complex, blended, queer. It can feel overwhelming. How to call all of these inversions, these attacks on legitimate freedom out? How to call them out in the most public terms? Can the psychosocial dimension of new fascism become understandable in ways that everyone impacted will understand? Without such an analysis, we cannot come to know how our most intimate fears and desires are woven into the social fabric in which we live, including the social ruptures and conflicts, those tears in that fabric that pitch into precarity, whose exploitation we can only live through if there are others who refuse to let us fall. So I'd like to conclude my remarks just by reminding you that the anti gender movements stoke the fear that ordinary cishetero people will be stripped of their status as mother, father, man or woman, that words such as these will no longer be speakable or others will have taken them over for nefarious purposes. But the call to deny the rights of trans people to their sex is reversed within the phantasmatic scenario, producing the idea that permitting such rights of self definition will entail, logically or historically, becoming stripped of them for other people. Here, the political right shares a supposition with trans exclusionary feminists. Sex is a property to which one has exclusive rights, and any effort to challenge the property framework is a ruse of those seeking to steal or appropriate what is not rightfully their own. Throughout the anti gender ideology movement, a morally righteous sadism has triumphed over the powers of capacious alliance or any commitment to cohabitation on the basis of equality. The only way out of this bind is to ally the struggle for gender freedoms and rights with the critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones, and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity, provides health care, shelter, food across all regions, that opposes violence, that for all those who are vulnerable, such an agenda would develop an understanding, I think, of the individual within the social world. We persist only to the extent that we are bound up with one another. So when we say I want to be free or I want you to be free, we are speaking, yes, about these distinct selves that we are, but also about social freedoms that should be accorded to everyone as long as no real harm is done. For that caveat to work, we have to expose the fear mongering that would recast the claim to fundamental freedoms as harms and make freedom into a new and vital object of desire. Fascist passions emerge in part from a fear of destruction that is amplified by those who wish to augment their own power, including their power to do harm. The opposition to rights stripping, forcible displacement, negligent homicide and racism, well, all this is not wokeism. It's rather a call for a version of humanity and cohabitation that should ideally become more desirable than any fascist illusion. Fascist passions are those that seek to strip people of their rights, convinced that their activity is saving the world from destruction even as it escalates destruction. Fascist passions are those that seek to restore a time of patriarchal and heteronormative privilege with all the effacements and exclusions that entails. What counters that passion can only be another passion, one that makes freedom, justice and equality into the ideals we passionately embrace, despite the difficulties and antagonisms, or rather because of them. A difficult solidarity, then, is the one we embrace precisely because we know what we must oppose. Okay, I have a question. I wonder if Judith would like to comment on the gulf between radical intellectuals and the left behind demographics on either side of the Atlantic. In France, rural communities who experienced huge cuts in public services, including women's refuges, are likely to vote for the far right. I don't believe the trans issue is a priority with them or that they are inherently fascist, but the far right message appears more reassuring than anything the left is able to offer. Any comments? Well, I do think that the far right, and if we're talking about France, does tend to circulate the idea or the ideal of a return to a former time, a time when communities were small or relatively independent, a time when neighbors knew each other and there was racial and cultural homogeneity. So the far right does exploit feelings of racism. It also interprets the destruction of the manufacturing base and the rise of corporate powers that increase precarity for so many workers. They understand that not as a critique of capitalism, but rather as something that neoliberalism and the Left have brought to them. And unfortunately, the left, as we know, has split in a place like France. And we now see that something like the Socialist Party is more allied with Macron and Macron's neoliberal agenda. What is left of the Socialist Party is, of course, always struggling to achieve greater political representation. I do think that anti gender is there in France, and they have been fighting it for some time. It's understood as an American imposition or as a way of undermining Frenchness and as a threat to nationalism. And I think we can see that in various conservative movements throughout Europe. A second question. What role does Judith see for education, particularly in secondary schools, in promoting critical engagement with the diversity of gender expressions? I think it's really important, and I've been dismayed to see, especially in the US but also obviously elsewhere, how many books are becoming banned, how many forms of artistic representation are being canceled that open up questions about gender? And kids of all ages need to know about human sexuality and about gender diversity. They need to know the kind of artwork that's out there, the kind of literature that's out there. And when books and artwork are banned or taken out of the classroom, then children are harmed because they then lack the resources to understand their world. Of course, when books and images are banned, those who are banning them say that those books harm children. The mention of gender harms a child. The mention of slavery in certain states in the U.S. not just the south, also places like Wyoming, the mention of slavery is said to harm children, or the teaching of gender is said to be a form of indoctrination or seduction. Well, that's not what happens in the classroom. The classroom is a place of open critical inquiry. And young people get to experiment and imagine and learn about the world and find their own way, but we can't tell them what to believe. And that also means that religious doctrines are not appropriate for the classroom. We have to keep the classroom, especially for younger kids and those who are not yet at the university level. We have to keep it into a place of experiment and critical open thinking. Here's another question. How much does language escalate or de escalate the debate about gender? How is the word critical used in debates about gender? Okay, first of all, I think those who call themselves gender critical are simply saying they are opposed to the idea of gender. And many of them argue that they believe feminism should be based on notions of biological sex and not gender. I think that's a fair characterization. But critical has another meaning. The operation of critique and thought. The tradition of critical theory, well, that's a reflective idea, a reflective activity in which some of the received presuppositions of everyday life are called into question. We ask ourselves, why do we refer to people this way and not some other way? We ask ourselves whether gender really has to be binary. We ask ourselves, what's the best way to live? What is the good life? We even ask fundamental questions from a critical perspective, not to tear concepts down, but to turn them over and to see, how were they made? What purposes do they serve? Are these terms we want to keep or dispense with or remake in another way? So I consider myself a critical theorist. I work in that field. So I have never quite understood the gender critical category. I think perhaps what they mean is that they are opposed to gender and that they. They think of gender as. As opposed to biological sex. But in fact, when we think about biological sex, there are many different ways of designating sex and many different languages. So I think we do need to consider that there are shifting debates about what constitutes sex. We see this in many debates on sports. Should it be chromosome? Should it be the way somebody looks, how they appear manifestly? Should it be hormones? What would be the test that we would use to decide? And many sports organizations have decided it's not always possible with these criteria to rigorously distinguish who's a man, who's a woman. Especially when you have intersex people engaged in sports or you have trans people engaged in sports who have made a transition legally and or surgically or hormonally. So then the question becomes, who can participate in women's sports? Who can participate in men's sports? And that's very different from settling the question who's a man and who's a woman? I don't think I'm making things too complicated. I think that biology is a really interesting field, and it has some competing frameworks. It's also gone through a lot of historical development, and a lot of the work in developmental biology doesn't accept anymore a rigorous distinction between sex as something natural and gender as something cultural. They actually use an interactive model that does make things more complex. But it may be that that complexity is closer to truth. Should the question of what it means to be A woman remain an open question. Is there anything we can do to ensure this happens? Feminism has always been dedicated to calling into question how people define what a woman is. Simone de Beauvoir's amazing the second sex goes through every possible discipline. What did the biologists say women are? What did the philosophers say? What did the psychoanalyst say? What about anthropology? What about history? And so many of the definitions of what a woman is turned out to be pretty patriarchally embedded and mobilized. And she stepped back and asked, well, to what extent is the freedom of women to define themselves important to the very category of women? Do we allow freedom to be part of, of what it is to be a woman, including the freedom of self definition? So when she said one is not born a woman, she's saying, don't seek recourse to a biological sex to tell me what work I can do, with whom I can live, how I should love, how I should appear. No, one is not born a woman, but becomes one and one becomes a woman or another gender. I would add, in the course of history, culture, institutions, what does it mean to become a woman in this day and age? What are the ways in which women have been defined and what are the ways in which they continue to redefine themselves? That process of redefinition has been crucial to a feminist philosophy and politics of freedom. I don't see why trans women are not part of that. They are at least those who are trans feminists. And I don't see why trans men can't be part of the reproduction of masculinity. It seems all to the good. Masculinity becomes increasingly interesting and capacious and ethical by virtue of that inclusion. So in my view, keeping the definition of gender open is quite important. So when Rishi Sunak says, what, you can't define what a woman is, we should all say, any definition you might give is one that we or women more broadly have the right to contest and redefine. Because self definition is central to feminism, there's no reason why we shouldn't, we shouldn't extend that same principle to others. Do you have an opinion on how we can go about reducing animosity and fear around gender debate and in the anti gender ideology movement more specifically? Well, in my view, it seems like many of the groups that are opposed to one another, they all want an end to discrimination, they want an end to violence, they want equality, they want freedom, they want justice. And yet I think those who would deny certain kinds of gender freedoms are committing a contradiction. They want freedom for themselves, but not for others. Or they want to oppose discrimination against themselves, but they're in favor of discrimination against others. That's a contradictory position. It's one that's not supportable over the long haul. But if we look in places where there are really broad alliances, where feminists are on the street with trans people, with migrants, with those who are opposed to the precarity of labor, with people in unions, with people who are socialists, who are looking to, to remake the economic system in a way that provides for basic needs and healthcare and shelter and employment. I mean, those are large coalitions. Those people are not the exact same as one another. They don't agree on all issues. But they do have a larger view of what they're opposed to. They're opposed to state violence, they're opposed to rogue violence, they're opposed to discrimination of all kinds. They're opposed to capitalist exploitation. They have a clear idea of what they're opposing. And so the internecine battles are much less important. One accepts them, one lives with them. Because solidarity is not the same as love. Even love is probably not the same as love. It always has some aggression and antagonism in it. Well, solidarity certainly does, but I think we have to live with those antagonisms and make them work to our advantage. I wish that there were some ways to bridge this divide more effectively. I think we have to have a powerful imagining of what an alliance can do in order to convince people that they'd rather be in alliance than in mortal combat. Do I have any final words about how we interact with the phantasm of gender in our day to day lives? Well, I think it happens a lot. People make terrible suppositions about each other. They assume something about who you are. They still operate with stereotypes in a lot of different ways. So in an everyday way that happens. But what has become every day, what has seeped into our everyday lives are really authoritarian kinds of policies. Censorship, border control, the denial of parenting rights, the de departmentalization of gender studies, the abolition of sex education, The rolling back of rights to reproductive freedom and to gender self definition. So these are, these are censorious policies that have become part of everyday life. They're rights stripping activities that are becoming more and more common in certain areas of the world where other areas of the world are pushing back. So I think we need to watch and see, oh, what needs to happen, what is an effective alliance and how do transnational and multilinguistic alliances have to form so that our ideas of democracy, justice, our radical opposition to violence, our radical affirmation of collective freedom can become the kind of world in which we all want to live. Okay, thank you very much for joining me today. I appreciated your question. I hope you enjoyed or at least learned something from my remarks.
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Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our Times. I really hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did, don't forget to like and subscribe. Share with your friends and family. And if you had any thoughts in particular, you can reach us via the email that is in the show Notes. But until next time, take care and have a good week. Bye Bye. This podcast is sponsored by IQ Bar.
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