NEW YORK, NY.- The first thing I did when reading Judith Butlers new book, Whos Afraid of Gender?, was to look up the word phantasm, which appears 41 times in the introduction alone. (It means illusion; the phantasm of gender, a threat rooted in fear and fantasy.)
The second thing I did was have a good chuckle about the title, because the answer to the question of who is afraid of gender was ... well, I am? Even for someone who has written on gender and feminism for more than a decade and who once carried the title of this newspapers gender editor, to talk about gender today can feel so fraught, so politicized, so caught in a war of words that debate, or even conversation, seems impossible.
I am perhaps the intended reader of Butlers book, in which the notoriously esoteric philosopher-turned-pop celebrity dismantles how gender has been constructed as a threat throughout the modern world to national security in Russia; to civilization, according to the Vatican; to the American traditional family; to protecting children from pedophilia and grooming, according to some conservatives. In a single word, gender holds the power to seemingly drive people mad with fear.
Butlers latest book comes more than three decades after their first and most famous one, Gender Trouble, brought the idea of gender as performance into the mainstream. As it turns out, Butler who has written 15 books since never intended to return to the subject, even as a culture war raged. But then the political became personal: Butler was physically attacked in 2017 while speaking in Brazil, and burned in effigy by protesters who shouted, Take your ideology to hell.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: Did you ever think youd see a world in which your ideas would be so widespread and so fraught?
A: When I wrote Gender Trouble, I was a lecturer. I was teaching five classes, trying to work on this book I thought no one would read. Still, I knew I wasnt just speaking for myself; there were other people who were strong feminists but also lesbian or gay or trying to figure out gender in ways that werent always welcome. But today, the people who are afraid of my ideas are the people who dont read me. In other words, I dont think its my ideas that theyre afraid of. Theyve come up with something else a kind of fantasy of what I believe or who I am.
And, of course, its not just my views that are being caricatured, but gender more broadly gender studies, policies that focus on gender, gender discrimination, gender and health care, anything with gender in it is a kind of terrifying prospect, at least for some.
Q: So ... who is afraid of gender?
A: Its funny, I have a friend, a queer theorist. I told him the books name and he said, Everyone! Everyones afraid of gender!
Whats clear to me is that there is a set of strange fantasies about what gender is how destructive it is, and how frightening it is that a number of forces have been circulating: Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Giorgia Meloni, Rishi Sunak, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, and, of course, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and lots of parents and communities in states like Oklahoma and Texas and Wyoming, who are seeking to pass legislation that bans the teaching of gender or reference to gender in books.
Obviously, those folks are very frightened of gender. They imbue it with power that I actually dont think it has. But so are feminists who call themselves gender critical, or who are trans-exclusionary, or who have taken explicit positions against trans politics.
Q: Can you describe what prompted you to return to this subject?
A: I was going to Brazil for a conference on the future of democracy. And I was told in advance that there were petitions against me speaking, and that they decided to focus on me because Im the papisa, the female pope, of gender. Im not quite sure how I got to have that distinction, but apparently I did. I got to the venue early, and I could hear the crowds outside. Theyd built a kind of monstrous picture of me with horns, which I took to be overtly antisemitic with red eyes and kind of a demonic look with a bikini on. Like, why the bikini?
But, in any case, I was burned in effigy. And that freaked me out. And then, when my partner and I were leaving, at the airport, we were attacked: Some woman came at me with a big trolley and she was screaming about pedophilia. I could not understand why.
Q: You thank the young man who threw his body between you and the attacker, taking blows. Was this the first time youd heard that pedophilia association?
A: I had given a talk on Jewish philosophy, and somebody in the back said, Hands off our children! I thought, What? I figured out later that the way that the anti-gender ideology movement works is to say: If you break down the taboo against homosexuality, if you allow gay and lesbian marriage, if you allow sex reassignment, then youve departed from all the laws of nature that keep the laws of morality intact which means its a Pandoras box; the whole panoply of perversions will emerge.
Q: As I was preparing to interview you, I received a news alert about the Dont Say Gay settlement in Florida, which says that schools cannot teach about LGBTQ topics from kindergarten through the eighth grade, but clarifies that discussing them is allowed. You write that words have become tacitly figured as recruiters and molesters, which is behind the effort to remove this type of language from the classroom.
A: Teaching gender, or critical race theory, or even ethnic studies, is regularly characterized as forms of indoctrination. So, for instance, that woman who was accusing me of supporting pedophilia, suggests that my work or my teaching would be an effort at seduction or grooming.
In my experience of teaching, people are arguing with each other all the time. Theres so much conflict. Its chaotic. There are many things going on but indoctrination is not one of them.
Q: What about the warping of language on the left?
A: My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I dont think we should become the police. Im afraid of the police. But I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language. And it seems like moral discourse comes in then: Call me this. Use this term. We agree to use this language. What I like most about what young people are doing and its not just the young, but everybodys young now, according to me is the experimentation. I love the experimentation. Like, lets come up with new language. Lets play. Lets see what language makes us feel better about our lives. But I think we need to have a little more compassion for the adjustment process.
Q: I want to talk for a moment about categories. You have occupied many butch, queer, woman, nonbinary yet youve also said youre suspicious of them.
A: At the time that I wrote Gender Trouble, I called for a world in which we might think about genders being proliferated beyond the usual binary of man and woman. What would that look like? What would it be? So, when people started talking about being nonbinary, I thought, well, I am that. I was trying to occupy that space of being between existing categories.
Q: Do you still believe that gender is performance?
A: After Gender Trouble was published, there were some from the trans community who had problems with it. And I saw that my approach, what came to be called a queer approach which was somewhat ironic toward categories for some people, thats not OK. They need their categories, they need them to be right, and for them, gender is not constructed or performed.
Not everybody wants mobility. And I think Ive taken that into account now.
But at the same time, for me, performativity is enacting who we are, both our social formation and what weve done with that social formation. I mean, my gestures: I didnt make them up out of thin air theres a history of Jewish people who do this. I am inside of something, socially, culturally constructed. At the same time, I find my own way in it. And its always been my contention that were both formed and we form ourselves, and thats a living paradox.
Q: How do you define gender today?
A: Oh, goodness. I have, I suppose, revised my theory of gender but thats not the point of this book. I do make the point that gender identity is not all of what we mean by gender: Its one thing that belongs to a cluster of things. Gender is also a framework a very important framework in law, in politics, for thinking about how inequality gets instituted in the world.
Q: This is your first book with a nonacademic press. Was that a conscious decision?
A: Oh, yeah. I wanted to reach people.
Q: Its funny because many of your ideas do reach people, albeit in internet-era sound bites. Im thinking about, for instance, of gender is a drag T-shirts or Judith Butler explained with cats. It strikes me that a lot of people who claim to have read you have actually just read the Instagram caption of you.
A: Well, I dont blame them for not reading that book. It was tough. And some of those sentences are truly unforgivable. Hopefully, I didnt do that in Whos Afraid of Gender?
I feel like Im more in touch with people who are mobilizing on the ground at the global level than I have been before. And that pleases me.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.