Latest news with #JudithButler
CBS News
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Bay Area Book Festival holds Bookworm Block Party for second day in Berkeley
The 2025 Bay Area Book Festival kicked off its last day on Sunday in downtown Berkeley. Here's what to know The festival begins at 11 a.m. in downtown Berkeley and will have several free events for people to attend until 5 p.m. The two big events of the day, which will each have several things for attendees to see and do throughout the day, are the Bookworm Block Party and Inside Ideas. The Bookworm Block Party, formerly the outdoor fair, spreads across five areas, including three stages. There will be live presentations, local food trucks, and literary-themed exhibitors BART Plaza Stage, 2170 Shattuck Avenue Poetry Stage Kittredge, Street and Harold Way Family Stage Allston Way, and Milvia Street Health in Community Row, Allston Way Small Press Alley, Allston Way Inside Ideas has six indoor stages where there will be a variety of panels with topics such as fiction, essay discussions, tech, and romantasy. Brown Center, 2150 Allston Way. Two stages: the Goldman Theater and Tamalpais Room Hotel Shattuck Ballroom, Crystal Ballroom and Courtyard, 2086 Allston Way The Marsh Berkeley 2120 Allston Way. Also has two stages The headliners will speak at two ticketed events that take place at 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ticketed events Who's Afraid of Gender with Judith Butler, Micha Cardenas and MK Chavez takes place at 5:30 at Freight and Salvage, 2020 Addison Street. The 7:30 p.m. event, Portable Intersectionality: Roxane Gay in conversation with Alicia Garza, will also be at Freight and Salvage. How to get to the Bay Area Book Festival Taking BART to the Downtown Berkeley station will drop riders off right next to the festival. There are also other transit options, with the 51B, 79 , 67 and 7 line all near the festival.
Irish Examiner
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
Suzanne Harrington: Trans women are not a threat — there is plenty of room for all
Outside the Houses of Parliament in London last weekend, an unplanned gathering happened. It was huge. Police weren't prepared, roads hadn't been closed off, yet people were pouring out of Westminster station in their hundreds, their thousands. Pink blue and white flags fluttered in the breeze, as trans people gathered, surrounded by their allies. There were a lot of allies — friends, families, loved ones, gay people, straight people, non-binary people — with not as much as a microphone between them. There'd been no time to organise. Just a shout-out on social media to turn up, to show support for the fact that two days earlier, a judge had decided that in the UK, trans people no longer legally exist. People who have been living peacefully as women were now legally men, and vice versa. Like the lady standing in front of me, whose passport, driving licence, health and credit records are all registered as female, because she's lived as a woman for decades. Except now she's legally a man. She might as well be legally a hatstand or a banana. Other women, who identify as TERFs, have been celebrating this judgment. They have been worried that women like the trans woman standing in front of me, in her floral dress with her legal paperwork, will bombard and overrun female spaces, posing a danger to all women. That trans women are dangerous and invasive to cis women, like Japanese knotweed in gardens. A genuine threat. This is genuinely baffling. Trans men and women are estimated to be between 0.44% and 0.55% of any given population. They are a micro minority. Yet these other women, the ones who identify as TERFs, are overjoyed to have caused the legal erasure of this tiny group, a minority statistically far more likely to be on the wrong end of discrimination and male violence than cis women. How is this a cause for celebration? TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, but there is nothing radical or feminist about othering and excluding, about making another person a non-being. It's not feminism, says feminist philosopher Judith Butler — it's fascism: 'Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you're operating within a fascist logic. That means there might be a second one you're willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth. Then what happens?' Perhaps women who identify as TERFs are getting trans women confused with the real threat to all women; the violent men who assault, rape and murder us all, day in, day out, year in, year out. Also – and here again is the utter illogicality of the UK's legal ruling — do TERFs want trans men in the Ladies, as we send trans women to the Gents? Who polices this? Who gatekeeps? Will they be scanning genitalia at the door? Because that's what this ruling decrees. Outside the Houses of Parliament, amid the fluttering flags and people hugging each other, a large square of turf is surrounded by crash barriers, so that everyone is squashed onto narrow pavements. In a moment of exquisite symbolism, a lone woman carrying a trans flag moves a barrier, opening the space for everyone. Everyone files peacefully onto the turf. Nothing bad happens. There is plenty of room for all.
CBC
28-01-2025
- General
- CBC
Judith Butler breaks down why people fear gender
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.
