Judith Butler on the Global Backlash to L.G.B.T.Q. Rights

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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🗓️ 18 March 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

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Summary

Long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at which Butler was burned in effigy, depicted as a witch, inspired their new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” It covers the backlash to trans rights in which conservatives from the Vatican to Vladimir Putin create a “phantasm” of gender as a destructive force. “Obviously, nobody who is thinking about gender . . . is saying you can’t be a mother, that you can’t be a father, or we’re not using those words anymore,” they tell David Remnick. “Or we’re going to take your sex away.” They also discuss Butler’s identification as nonbinary after many years of identifying as a woman. “The young people gave me the ‘they,’ ” as Butler puts it. “At the end of ‘Gender Trouble,’ in 1990, I said, ‘Why do we restrict ourselves to thinking there are only men and women?’ . . . This generation has come along with the idea of being nonbinary. [It] never occurred to me! Then I thought, Of course I am. What else would I be? . . . I just feel gratitude to the younger generation, they gave me something wonderful. That also takes humility of a certain kind.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the political scene and I'm David Remnick.
0:07.0	Now long before gender theory became a real focus, a real target for conservative
0:16.2	lawmakers, it existed largely within academia.
0:20.1	And if you were interested in gender, one of the people you were definitely reading was Judith Butler.
0:26.0	Butler is a philosopher, and in 1990, they published gender trouble, feminism, and the subversion of identity.
0:32.7	This is a crucial book.
0:34.1	It began popularizing the idea that gender is a social construct or a performance, to use Butler's
0:40.0	terms.
0:41.2	In that view, gender is not just a matter of biology, but is determined by a set of behaviors that are learned as part of culture.
0:49.0	Those ideas of Butler's proved extremely influential and are now furiously contested by a
0:54.3	younger generation of Americans whether they've read Butler or not. Those ideas
0:58.8	are also furiously contested by major conservative political forces around the world, from the Vatican to
1:05.0	Vladimir Putin.
1:06.8	Judith Butler addresses that backlash in a new book called Who's Afraid of Gender. Professor, an important part of any philosophical or political discussion is defining terms.
1:18.8	What would the definition of gender be in the context that you are using it?
1:24.1	Well, in general, I would say that gender
1:27.8	is a way of organizing society.
1:30.2	We start with a general question, like,
1:32.3	oh, how is gender organizing, public life, health care, education, and then we go about trying to understand it.
1:39.0	Sometimes we start with a binary notion of gender that is an assumption that there are only
1:46.1	two genders and of course what we then discover on the basis of that hypothesis tends to be
1:51.9	the third two genders. So sometimes we have to open
	...

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