Judith Butler breaks down why people fear gender

CBC

28-01-2025

Judith Butler's first book, Gender Trouble, argued that gender is performative — and solidified Butler's position as an important gender and political theorist in modern times.
Butler's theory and writing is now often assigned in university, which is where Bookends host Mattea Roach first encountered it.
"Their seminal book, Gender Trouble, is an examination of gender categories that really spoke to me as a young person, trying to figure out how to show up authentically in the world," said Roach in the introduction to their conversation with Butler on Bookends.
Since Gender Trouble came out in 1990, Butler, based in California, has written several more books including Bodies That Matter, Power, Excitable Speech and The Force of Non-Violence and has published editorials and reviews in many journals and newspapers.
Butler's latest book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, discusses why people are so afraid of the discourse surrounding gender in our polarized world. On Bookends, Roach and Butler dove into this new book and why the term "gender" is so hard to define.
Mattea Roach: What does gender mean to you? When you're doing work in gender, what are you talking about?
Judith Butler: I'm going to sound like a true academic. What I mean by that is a term like gender has a long history and it has shifting meanings. So if I am interested in the history of gender, I can't give you a single definition and say this is what gender is.
I can only say, "Well, it's been seen that way and it's been seen this way. And a lot of people use it in the following way. It's come to be accepted in certain social movements or in certain academic settings as a term that can be interpreted in the following six ways."
If I were to give you a single definition and say this is the right one, then I would be faking a dogmatic position to make things easier for you.
I understand that people need to know "What is this gender anyway? Maybe Butler can tell us." But my job is to raise questions about how it's used and what it's being used for, but also what its history is and how we've forgotten that.
What its place is in progressive social movements. How it's figured in a phantasmagoric (having a deceptive appearance) way by right-wing movements and sometimes by feminists who are opposed to trans-affirmative health care or legislation. But if I were to give you a single definition and say this is the right one, then I would be faking a dogmatic position to make things easier for you.
MR: You've said before that you wrote Who's Afraid of Gender? out of a sense of obligation. Obligation to whom? And what brought about that feeling of obligation?
JB: We're all very mindful right now of scholars and artists and public intellectuals who are being attacked for expressing political views or they're being regarded as embodying certain political or social movements. And there's a question that gets posed for each of us who are attacked or censored or even lose a job or an important employment opportunity. And that is, do we take this personally?
In other words, is it about me? Do we become more individualistic or do we look around and see who else is being attacked in this way?
In my case, I'm being attacked, as I was in Brazil in 2017, because I represent something called gender ideology. And I was considered to be diabolical, like an actual incarnation of the devil. So when right-wing Christians tried to do harm to me physically or chased me from the country, they were actually trying to expiate the notion of this diabolical presence.
Now, I could have just collapsed and said, "I was badly attacked," and go to a therapist and work it out, which is important to do, by the way. But it seemed important to find out what was happening in Brazil, like who else is being attacked? And what about my colleagues in the queer and trans movements who are facing this every day?
It's important to link one's own situation to what other people are experiencing. And I'm an extremely privileged person from the global North and I can be attacked. Nothing protects me from violence. But the likelihood of that is diminished for someone in my position, because I can, to a large extent, determine the conditions of my protection.
But a lot of people have no such power. It's important for me to think about what's happening on the ground so I started to investigate again. Who are these people? What is this thing called the anti-gender ideology movement?
It turns out to be a concerted, highly-organized group that was convened at various world congresses, on the family and on religion, and whose media presence is amplified by various groups in Spain and elsewhere that have elaborate ways of using the Internet to reach a large number of people. I started to do a history of that movement, and I found along the way that there were a number of contradictory ways that the people who were opposing gender, especially on the Christian right, were conceiving of gender.
Sometimes it was a devil, a demonic force, sometimes it was likened to the Ebola virus or nuclear war or Hitler Youth. Sometimes it was associated with totalitarianism, indoctrination, child seduction, pedophilia. Other times it was hyper-capitalism and imperialist imposition from the global North.
I just looked at this bag full of accusations, not all of which were consistent with one another and had to ask myself what is happening here? And what I ended up concluding was that the anti-gender ideology movement gathers and incites a wide range of anxieties people have about their lives, about the durability and persistence of their way of life. I think actually that their lives are being threatened by capitalism and climate destruction and war and new ways of devastating unions and labour conditions.
We can name many reasons for why people are living with such a radical sense of instability. But these right-wing movements appeal to those anxieties and fears. They also stoke and strengthen those anxieties and fears. And they give people a way to blame migrants or critical race theory or gender ideology for their felt sense of insecurity and fear.
We can name many reasons for why people are living with such a radical sense of instability. - Judith Butler
So I tried to come up with some account for why people were drawn to that: why they could be mobilized by it, and how it has ended up becoming a movement that calls for the reversal of enormously important progressive legislation on gay and lesbian rights, on women's rights to reproductive freedom and justice, to trans people's rights.