Who’s afraid of Gender? - Judith Butler

good morning or good afternoon everyone it is my honor to open the second session of our conference doing global gender and i'm especially pleased to welcome julie butler as our speaker today they're well known in gender studies and social sciences in general but nevertheless i will make a short introduction before the floors are yours so judith butler is elliot professor at the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the university of california berkeley in the u.s in addition to her broad scientific work professor butler has been active in several human rights organizations including the center for constitutional rights in new york and the advisory board of jewish voice for peace they received their donor prize from the city of frankfurt in 2012 for outstanding contribution to feminist and moral philosophy the putna prize from yale university for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies and the catalan international prize in 2022 professor butler is a member of the american philosophical society and was elected to the american academy of arts and science in 2019 they received a phd in philosophy from yale university in 1984 and hold 13 honorary degrees moreover they outlet also several books including gender trouble feminism and this version of identity and undoing gender and they are currently writing their first non-academic book with the title who's afraid of gender which is also the topic of today's presentation so after the presentation we have also time for discussion and we invite everyone to address questions and comments in the q a section so professor butler welcome and the floor is all yours now well thank you very much um for your kind invitation and introduction both i'm pleased to be here and um i should say that i am pleased to talk with you about gender today uh but in saying this i have already run into a problem what do we mean by this term and what do others mean has its meaning ever been firmly established across time and space the answer is no the term emerges into a field of contestation about its very meaning and use subject to coinage and translation as it moves from one discipline to another from one language or region to many others in other words gender has never not been a contested term whatever gender is it is a field of contestation in fact no definition of gender can ground the field of gender studies we can however present a range of approaches and delimit a field of methodological debates indeed that way of proceeding demonstrates what is actually true namely that gender studies is interdisciplinary by definition and that the ontological question what is gender may not be the right question at all one challenge of the anti-gender ideology movement raises this question in a new way since the version of gender that the anti-gender position circulates is not one that anyone within gender studies can recognize how is a conversation to take place under such circumstances and what chance is there that any agreement or adjudication can be accomplished when there is no agreement on terms it is nearly impossible to bridge that epistemic divide with good arguments because many of those who oppose gender refuse to read in the field of gender studies indeed some who oppose gender do not read books in gender or feminist studies queer or trans studies queer of color critique black feminism or any version of race theory indeed for some they will not read those works and they don't believe that others should read them in their view and i can see that this is a generalization gender is a singular ideology by which they mean a false way of knowing that has captured the minds of those who operate within its parameters some of them believe in censoring such texts because they do not belong in schools and only do harm to those who read them at such a moment we can see that the term gender or whatever gender stands for is imagined to have enormous power it is understood to capture the mind exercise a seductive force indoctrinate or convert those who come under its power for instance those who follow the vatican both the last and present pope have been told that gender is a diabolical ideology that is to read works in gender studies would be tantamount to trafficking with the devil in such cases reading the act of reading is tantamount to ideological seduction so if any of us start to read one of these books we would be taken in and taken over thus more than one protester in the groups i have encountered when asked whether she has ever read my work or the work of my colleagues has made clear that she would never read such a book this raises the question of whether we could ever have a debate about what we have read as we often do within the classroom in high schools colleges or universities where such topics are discussed if we have to debate about the value of books that some people refuse to read then the debate is not very useful unless we discuss first excuse me the value of reading and the possibility of reading any text critically if some of them read the bible as if it were manifest truth refusing the rich tradition of biblical hermeneutics by the way then perhaps they imagine that gender studies people whoever we are also read in that same way and that we accept and internalize all that we read they are imposing a literal approach to biblical reading on those of us for whom reading broadly construed is a critical exercise and by critical i do not mean negative but only an approach that asks about unacknowledged assumptions and unwitting consequences that considers how a text is crafted to understand what effect it may have that considers what is true or false in any given text along with what is useful or not for understanding social reality or the world in which we live the opposition to gender is not always based on a refusal to read but it sometimes surely is this matters in part because reading in thoughtful ways examining premises and presuppositions considering how a text is crafted and to what end is part of what happens in the humanities and in the university more generally thus perhaps we can conclude that the opposition to gender of the sort i have been describing is bound up within opposition to reading critically and by implication an opposition to the idea of the university its role in cultivating critical thought informed judgment open inquiry and open debate it is surely worth asking whether advocates of the anti-gender position those who regard gender as an ideology are to some extent committed to not reading critically because they imagine that reading is an uncritical exercise for themselves and their opponents reading in other words is a submission to the authority of a text considered authoritative on the one hand they imagine that others read gender theory as they read the bible as i have suggested or that they accept those readings that authorities provide less gender theory relies in their view on wrong-headed texts authored by false authorities who exercise a rival and parallel power to compel submission to their claims on the other hand the opponents of gender may well imagine that gender studies students and scholars engage in forms of critical reading which would imply calling it to question the very textual and ministerial authorities they accept without question if it is this last point that proves to be right then presumably those who engage in gender studies also tend to engage in forms of critical reading this refusal to read the texts they oppose on the part of anti-gender advocates the refusal to read the text they oppose makes sense if the only way they can read is uncritically if uncritical reading of their authoritative texts is what they are defending then they are part of a broader anti-intellectual trend marked by its hostility to critical thought in particular all this above leads me to wonder whether the argument we should have if arguments were possible is about reading for what kind of reading do we do in the field of gender studies although gender is characterized by its opponents as a single theory there has never been one theory one tactic of the opposition is to reduce a complex and contested field of inquiry into a single idea or a slogan and that single idea is is meant to stand for and efface the burgeoning complexity of the field in fact the very existence of gender studies depends on an array of texts objects and archives a wide range of methodological approaches and theories that are not accepted as such they differ from one another they have to be read comparatively and critically and scholars have to come up with their own view and defend it with arguments and evidence and decent logic and yet gender studies is caricatured as an ideology inculcated into the minds of youth indoctrinating akin to totalitarianism if not the new totalitarianism and in some versions of the critique of gender it is figured as the means by which students are instructed on how to become gay or lesbian it is characterized as a mode of seduction even a practice of pedophilia thus a mandatory prescription and conversion we can and should dismiss all these false caricatures and make clear what gender studies does and does not do but the problem that lays before us is one that argument alone cannot solve for in all these cases above and many more we are in the face of a phantasmatic scene and by phantasmatic scene i adapt the theoretical formulation of jean laplace the french psychoanalyst for thinking about psychosocial phenomena for laplace fantasy is not simply the product of the imagination a wholly subjective reality but in its most fundamental form has to be understood as a syntactical arrangement of elements of psychic life thus fantasy is not just a content of the mind a subliminal revery but rather an organization of desire and anxiety that follow certain structural and organizational rules much could be said psychoanalytically in distinguishing between conscious and unconscious fantasy but here for our purposes i would suggest only that the organization or syntax of psychic life is at once social and phantasmatic although laplace was interested in infancy and the formation of what he called an original fantasy i am asking whether we can appropriate some aspects of his view to understand anti-gender the position of anti-gender as relying on and reproducing a phantasmatic scene my wager is that we will be better able to respond to this movement and its discourse by framing the matter this way for when the scene is set and something called gender is imagined to be acting on children academics or the public in nefarious and destructive ways then the term gender is acting as both a substitution for a complex set of anxieties and an over-determined site where the fear of destruction gathers it is a prefer perverse form of flattery to imagine the contagious and powerful operation of gender and yet the power attributed to gender is not generated by gender studies or any of its myriad theories they are bundled into an inflammatory syntax in which some foreign element wields enormous power to destroy social structures as many have known them the family the nation civilization and man himself the scenes of anti-gender opposition seem to fall into these broad categories each of which is staged as an accusation gender it is said is a colonial imposition or a foreign intrusion either an imposition of a foreign power or the entry of an unwanted migrant gender is an ideology that relies on indoctrination as its mode of operation and denies either material material reality or the fact that material reality is god-given gender is said to permit or enact pedophilia a form of unwanted seduction of the youth for some gender is a concept based on the denial of material reality the facts of sex themselves and in this instance the right wing opposition to gender joins the gender critical movement which as you know is not critical in any way that critical theory would accept to take up this criticism we will need to consider how gender studies has approached the materiality of the body or and even the material construction of sex itself history of a phantasm the vatican's discourse on gender intense intensifies its phantasmatic power within contemporary politics as a fearsome and destructive phantasm gender is difficult to discuss it must be dispelled like a demon or destroyed like a plague or criminalized like a child molester how does one argue with opponents under such conditions the answer is that was to study the phantasmatic nature of the term as it has been constructed and circulated in order to ask what are we really talking about when we talk about gender today if we act as if gender is the only problem because gender is named then we fail to take into account all the social anxieties and fears that have collected at the site of gender but if we say that the debate about gender is really about something else then we fail to account for why those anxieties collect in the way they do organized by their specific syntax at the site of gender and not some other place yes what is happening with gender studies is also happening with critical race theory and ethnic studies so we should clearly also be aware of the opposition to critical thought more generally to forms of thought that illuminate say the systemic character of racism the compulsory forms of gender regulation regulation and the pathologization or criminalization of lgbtqia lives the anti-intellectualism the refusal to read to discuss to affirm an open form of inquiry is also an attack on the academy and the idea of the university the idea of what a university open to the public concerned with public life should be although the movement against gender has many religious dimensions in different parts of the world it is not always a religious movement a secular group in bordeaux protested me once because they claimed that i did not believe in science i do by the way and am doubly vaxxed and boosted and philosophy of science is one of my favorite fields but sometimes what is called science is either natural law which stipulates the differences between the sexes or positivism which does not account either for how observation is socially formed inflecting the object that it sees and records nor in what way social norms craft the human morphologies that are legible to us for some christians natural law and divine will are the same god made the sexes in the binary way and it is not the prerogative of humans to remake them in another way of course some feminist scholars of religion dispute this suggesting that the bible has some conflicting views on this very topic we could say that this is older science that this older science holds to the proposition that sex differences are established in natural law in the sense that the content of that law is established by nature and that therefore presumably has validity everywhere that law does not change by virtue of positive law but positive law the law established by humans should be grounded in natural law and not defy its precepts since nature is itself established by god created by god to define natural law is to defy the will of god what follows from this set of beliefs is that if one has a will or acts willfully then then not only does one defy god but one has presumably taken over his will this is but one of the christian points against gender as i presume you know the furor began some years ago when the pope's family counsel then directed by joseph ratzinger warned that gender theorists were imperiling the family by challenging the proposition that christian family roles could and should be derived from biological sex it was according to the vatican in the nature of sex for women to do domestic work and for men to undertake action in employment and public life the integrity of the family understood as both christian and natural was said to be imperiled by this gender ideology ratzinger first made public his concern at the beijing conference on the status of women in 1995 and then again in 2004 as head of the pontifical council on the family in a letter to bishops underscoring the potential of gender to destroy feminine values important to the church and the natural distinction between the two sexes as pope benedict he went further into 2012 maintaining that such ideologies deny the pre-ordained duality of man and woman and thus deny the family meaning the heteronormative family as a reality established by creation because he argued man and woman are created by god those who seek to create themselves deny the creative power of god assume that they are the ones who have divine powers of self-creation and are as a result misled by an atheistic set of beliefs by 2016 pope francis despite his occasionally progressive views continued the line developed by pope benedict but sounded an even stronger alarm and i quote we are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of man as the image of god end quote he specifically included as an instance of this defacement the ideology of gender he was clearly outraged that and i quote today children children are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex and this terrible then he made affirmative reference to benedict the 16th and claimed quote god created man and woman god created the world in a certain way and we are doing the exact opposite end quote it would appear from this perspective this uh vatican perspective that humans have taken over the creative power of the divine pope francis has gone further to argue that proponents of gender are like those who support or deploy nuclear arms and that their target what they seek to destroy is creation itself this suggests that whatever gender is it carries enormous destructive power in the minds of those who oppose it indeed an unfathomable and terrifying destructiveness it is represented as a demonic force of destruction pitted against god's creative powers for the current pope this phantasm called gender is both diabolical and ideological diabolical means that gender comes from the devil it is the devil's work and so does not emerge from the divine and is not then divine creation to the extent that gender is understood by the vatican as a doctrine or belief that claims that one can create a gender one was not assigned at birth the form of creation for which gender stands is a false and deceptive one the divine is the only one who has creative powers and the divine created male and female or so the bible claims if anyone departs from the sex that has been divinely created for them they are stealing and destroying the creative powers that belong solely to god diabolical also means that the vulnerable and susceptible will be influenced and indoctrinated by this ideology that flies in the face of christian doctrine the devil or the demonic more generally works to entice and influence inculcate and groom exploiting the youth and others who are susceptible to believing in the new powers of self-definition provided by something called gender it does not matter whether a trans person claims that their gendered truth is internal even god-given or whether they are hypervoluntarists who believe that gender can be chosen and defend their rights as expressions of personal liberty either way they claim a gender for themselves that was not the one originally assigned at birth thus exercising human powers of self-definition at the expense of a natural sex divinely created they are acting as if they have divine powers or disputing the power of divinity to decide their gender at some points the pope declares that the gender advocates seek to steal the powers of god thus confirming that they work from the devil for the devil always disguises himself in a mesmerizing appearance if gender is such a devil or the devil himself then to argue with him is to fall inside his trap so it is not just that they the opposit the opponents of gender fail to read or refuse to read the problem is that if they were to read they would be touched and transformed by what they read or they could be that it would be possible and that would put that would be to put themselves in the presence of the demonic reading is thus figured as contamination devils and demons can only be expelled or banished burnt in effigy which is why censorship and pathologization become the key strategies for the anti-gender movement oddly gender theorists are not considered to speak reasonably since they are themselves mesmerized or indoctrinated which means that we are the ones in their view who cannot be argued with apparently we speak dangerous nonsense the epistemic break between gender advocates or gender studies practitioners on the one hand and the anti-gender ideology movement on the other remains something like a war unless the phantasmatic enemy can be reduced to its living proportions unless we find a mode of argumentation that addresses the deep-seated dynamics the excitable syntax of the opposition for we can say truthfully that the aim of gender studies is not colonization indoctrination seduction or totalitarianism but our our words will fall flat unless we can engage these phantasms as we counter those false accusations is gender a cultural imposition a form of colonialism an imperialist capture is it another american import export depending on your point of view a cheapening of a local culture by an overwhelmingly commercial culture is it a bit of merchandise for sale or a new kind of market overwhelming and erasing local values the current pope claims that gender is an example of colonization imposed upon poor local communities one problem with this view is that it imagines local cultures as never having been queer or gay or trans it is of no interest that gender complexity and range is found throughout indigenous life worlds and that strong arguments have been made that it was actually colonialism and the kind of capitalism that it spawned that established the binary and heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender for the first time indeed if we consider the work of maria lugones drawing on the work of anabal keano then colonial arrangements are the context and course of a wide range of issues that we think of as belonging to normative gender relations including heteronormativity dimorphic idealism the patriarchal family and the very norms that govern gender appearance lugones describes the process this way and i quote sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what i call the light side of the colonial modern gender system those in the dark side were not necessarily understood dimorphically sexual fears of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the americas as hermaphrodites or intersex with with large penises and breasts with flowing milk but as paula gunn allen and others made clear intersex individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization without assimilation to the sexual binary it is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and in neurocentered global capitalism if the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females it certainly does not follow that such a sexual division is based on biology and quote similarly scholarship on east africa and uganda has demonstrated that gender inequality was introduced through christian missionaries suggesting that traditional social relations were in some ways more variable and free than those introduced through civilizational missions we could go on and should go on on another occasion to show that a wide way or um the wide range of scholarship that establishes gender relations as one affect heteronormative uh gender relations as one effect of colonial powers related to the establishment of racial categorizations clearly in the service of racism these positions however are distinct from those that the vatican espouses even as it borrows selectively from some of the argumentation let us be clear about the difference the anti-gender position argues that gender is the colonizing force and that getting rid of gender will reverse the course of colonization that it represents and enacts decolonial and anti-colonial perspectives argue that colonization imposed oppressive gender norms and new forms of identity classifications that intensified the subordination of women and the pathologization of non-gender-conforming queer and intersex people who had previously had a form of belonging in their communities so it is one thing to say that gender is a sign of or a vessel for colonization and to mean by gender trans lesbian gay bi queer intersex lives and categories that challenge heteronormativity in that case all the marginal and struggling folks are representing colonial power and its cultural impositions and violations it is another thing to say that colonial power orders gender in patriarchal and heteronormative ways and that the resistance to colonization should be linked with the affirmation of queer trans and intersexed lives lugonis and others have sought to confirm the way in which indigenous communities have made a place for third genders for instance and a wide range of research has discussed two-spirit the term that describes gender non-conforming peoples in many indigenous and first nation communities across the americas the colonial attack on local cultures thus took form in part as the regularization of gender itself the production of the heteronormative binary the anti-gender position wants to heighten those very regulations and so works in the service of the very colonizing process it decries the field of gender studies at its best seeks to understand better how colonization imposed binary gender as an observational imperative this is what you will see you will look out on this field and this is what you will see only two sexes this observational imperative is one that suffused medical and legal regulations on gender and sexual life in colonial worlds and they were linked with racial classification suffused with sexual phantasms and in the past as the new south korean president yuan sukyo tells us women were never unhappy with their subordination their contemporary complaints against violence harassment and unequal pay are also imposed by an outside and elsewhere in his view thereby nullifying a burgeoning korean feminist movement similar reasons are given for the several countries including turkey that have withdrawn from the istanbul convention of course any feminist or queer or transposition has to be anti-colonial and anti-colonial and decolonial feminisms are among the most important feminisms of this time of our time but when the reactionary right starts to accuse gender or gender studies as a um uh as a as a colonizing uh of being a colonizing activity we have every reason to pause and to ask whether there are two distinct senses of colonization at work on the left if we can speak that way a position that cares only about gender freedom and equality without engaging race or colonization or ableism for instance is failing to understand the complex ways in which these vectors of power work together if gender becomes a theoretical construct imposed on the rest of the world by first world elites then yes i am among those who should certainly understand and accept those criticisms but is something else going on when gender is said to be colonizing imperialist even totalitarian by those who ally with the anti-gender ideology movement and who value the kind of gender norms ushered in by colonization itself matters are made all the more confusing because so-called gender-critical feminists also attack gender from a position that they call materialist but their materialism is very close to positivism and so rejects a wide range of materialist positions that inform queer marxism trans marxism the interpretive social sciences science studies feminist philosophy of science contemporary accounts of social reproduction and failed to take account of how altuzer kamshi and a wide range of feminist socialists overcame the base superstructure divide that would equate ideology with falsehood or epiphenomenal expression gender-critical feminists may not wish to be allied with right-wing movements against gender ideology but they are clearly allied in a wide range of their writings about them by critical they mean only that they disagree with the view or that they are negative or that they feel negative about a set of positions but critique names the inquiry into the conditions of possibility of debates such as these critique is an urgent intervention critique implies a way of evaluating norms that have been taken for granted in their constraining and regulatory character opening up possibilities for other ways of thinking about social life and legibilities and other ways of living and the work of gender-critical feminists does not um do any of these as it seeks to de-legitimate gender studies through the same means that neo-fascist and authoritarian right-wing movements do casting out pathologizing criminalizing queer and trans people including the youth who have depended on evolving concepts of gender and their social implications for their lives the idea that gender is a colonial imposition draws upon a more general anxiety about the intrusion of what we might call the foreign sometimes the foreign is figured as a colonizer or a totalitarian as in uh critique in germany but other times the foreign is the migrant or refugee who threatens national unity and monolingualism one problem with this account and here i become argumentative since one cannot not argue is that gender entered english as a kind of translation and that there is no theory of gender no critical use of the term without translation whether or not that translation translation is implicit or explicit translation as i have argued in the recently published volume called why gender is the condition of possibility of gender as a useful category of analysis gender is not a free-floating concept that is variously um translated from english into other languages when the term enters another language it becomes part of a different history of usage and a different practice of translation the term becomes another term or it is partially accepted or rejected it comes along with a set of associations in english but it enters into another connotative history once it arrives in another language where it is renewed and functions in different ways if we think that theoretical work on gender in english gives us pure concepts that do not depend upon the language in which they are formulated then we subscribe to a form of monolingualism that defeats the comparative and transversal character of the field of gender studies gender is always in the course of being translated and it is bound up with translation from the start and it has always changed its usage its meaning by virtue of the translations it undergoes for instance the term gender within feminist queer and trans theory and throughout the social sciences comes to us from other sources both grammatical and sexological thus we are from the very beginning working with a received coinage and we coin it further all the time the shift in u.s academic history in which john money's sexological theories were translated into a feminist framework dispensed with the teleological normative development that money used in his sexological research further the problem of sex assignment that john money considered in sexology gave rise to a series of feminist queer and trans positions that sought to understand the category of sex in both its constructed and material dimensions my point is not only that translating among languages and paradigms characterizes the field of gender studies though i think that is true but the translation is part of theory building the way that terms take on new meanings and functions and new forms of theoretical reflections emerge this is especially true when we consider sex assignment and reassignment that shows that gender is less an identity than the very operation of power that regulates the intelligibility of bodies and subjects let me briefly turn to that issue now through the mid-1950s as jennifer german has shown in gender a genealogy of an idea gender only signified a relation between words but with the publication of john money's harvard dissertation on hermaphrodites in the late 1940s things changed in the subsequent years money used the word gender to describe what a person is giving it an ontological status so the very possibility of asking what gender are you or what gender is this infant was not really a possible question within english until late in the 1950s and more prominently in the following decades it would have been grammatically impossible prior to the 1950s in english as we think about translation we should not presume that gender has an original and stable meaning in english or in some original language and then a derivative and unstable meaning as it passes over into new languages or linguistic contexts the grammatical problem of gender the right usage of the term is something that is that has been both established and contested throughout its history moreover quite contrary to feminist and queer appropriations of the term the original diploma deployment of gender by money and his sexological project was in the service of gender management programs with cruel normative plans money and his colleagues sought to identify and correct people with intersexed conditions understood as mixed primary sexual characteristics that resulted in a non-conformity to gender norms they thought that such infants were would be faced with a serious problem of social adaptation and their job as sexologists was to put them on the course of being a happy or fulfilled person a woman or a man the category of gender was bound up in that in that context with the imagined normativity of a life that which called to be managed was a disturbance in the unexpected developmental history of the child the beginning of that developmental story was supposed to be different that developmental trajectory could not begin with this disturbance at its origin or so they thought so a perceived failure to conform to the expectation of what a sexed infant was supposed to be first instigated the notion of gender developmental expectations were not met or they were confounded a deviant beginning called to be corrected before the future got out of control how did the term gender emerge from such a scene well gender did not emerge at the initial moment when a baby is born and someone asked hey do we know the gender no it was it is not exactly instituted with the exclamations it's a boy or it's a girl an observation is followed by an assignment and so we can rightly ask about the social crafting of observation as well as the social norms governing assignment the act of sex assignment draws on the history of those practices they are all at play at the moment of sex assignment even when that moment takes place through prenatal medical technology in the case of john money's initial research into what he called hermaphroditism gender as a term began with a question it named a problem there seemed to be a mistake or a deviation the failure of a perceived body to conform to existing categories that alone would actualize the developmental norms for becoming a woman and a man it pertained to the initial expectation expectations of parents and doctors who understood themselves as responsible for unfolding in a normative way the life of a man or the life of a woman it was not just that the intersexed body could not be immediately named within the binary frame but that the fixing of the name was urgent if that task was to initiate the developmental trajectory for a so-called normal life the inability to name the sex of the infant signaled a linguistic deficiency but also a failure of existing categories that could have led to a critical inquiry into the available categories are these categories necessary or exhaustive how can they be changed to accommodate and support the life of this infant but no those were not the questions asked money accepted a fixed set of categories under which infants could be identified and when they failed to fit the category they had to be fixed gender assignment thus operated in the service of gender regulation gender did not describe what someone was but rather what someone should be what they should be ideally what they should be ideally according to heteronormative uh ideas of what gender is that normative ideal governed the assignment and gender thus did not actually give actually give us very much information about what a person is but rather what they should be or what they have to be in order to live according to social norms which could not and should not change gender thus names every aspect of this assignment premised on the notion that bodies are not immediately one sex or another but have to be established as such of course i am not saying that there's no material basis on which sex assignments are made i am saying that when materiality is observed and named through social norms there is no easy way to de-link the material body from its social formation indeed an expanded version of materialism would take into account all aspects of this social legal and medical situation i'll compress the next part of my argument because i see that i'm speaking slowly and so taking up more time than i wanted to but i will mention just one position the the theory of catherine clune taylor who argues in favor of the social and material construction of sex sex is socially constructed and materially constructed when we talk about construction we're talking about two dimensions social and material and she cites a host of feminist science studies which show that sex has to be socio-culturally and materially understood that social norms practices knowledges technologies bureaucracies institutions and capacities are implicated in the production and maintenance of sex as binary and natural and indeed even within biology we can see that male and female sex is just is sometimes determined solely on the basis of gamete size where by which members of a species who produce the smaller gametes are identified as males and those who produce the larger gametes are understood as females if we look closer at this kind of distinction the distinction is itself a conventional way of proceeding to distinguish the sexes even though we can find um a variation across gamete production that would call that distinction into question she also looks at neuroscience to show that when we're talking about differences between male and female brains we're always talking about the interaction of brains with their environment and that brains are transformed by their environment even as brains act upon through embodiment through the embodied action of persons the environment um call and she calls for an interactionless interactionist model drawing i believe on the work of alison jagger in the 1980s and and and fausto sterling in the last um several decades and fausto sterling you may remember argued that if you look at bone differences between men and women you will also be looking at um questions of nutrition how are they fed differently in what in what environments through what kinds of exposure to um um to elements uh from the environment um uh what about training uh if we look at muscularity we can't just say that um that hormones alone account for different muscular sizes given that there is a wide range of overlap between testosterone levels in men and women and also that muscular formation in part has to do with training and cultural environment and access to sports facilities don't we need to look at how all of these operations work together i would add to this that a number of recent scholars sally markowitz c riley snorton have argued that the binary opposition between male and female is also linked with the production of racial categories and um that we wouldn't be able to think uh racial categorization or binary sex without understanding the way that the norms of the european man and the european woman have governed biological and sexological research see riley snorton's black on both sides a racial history of trans identity published in 2017 argues that the brutal procedures undertaken by money's gender clinic emerges from a history of gynecological techniques performed on slaves who are deprived of anesthesia and were treated as experiments in the medical offices of dr marian sims these techniques of surgery right to correct bodies to make them more normative to make them conform with ideas of european white normativity that these were devised precisely to achieve white heteronormativity so we cannot actually disarticulate the production of whiteness from the production of heteronormativity it seems to me that if we consult the genealogy of gender in the united states for instance sex assignment seeks to bridge a gap between a perceived body and a social norm assignment is a kind of suturing or fissuring of a gap and that gap re-emerges whenever sex is reassigned or self-assigned i will say my remarks are coming to an end that gender in my view and now i am doing theory gender names the apparatus that comes to bear on the practice of sex assignment which is why sex does not precede gender as some natural surface or site of potential cultural inscription sex is the kind of thing that has to be established again and again it is established through some means and when the means of its establishment and assignment include medical and legal powers social norms and religious requirements that process of establishing sex results it seems from a complex apparatus the term gender does not actually describe a person as it does when we speak about gender identity or gender appearance it describes rather the variable apparatus at work in the very establishment of sex itself that definition is but one of many such definitions and because gender studies is a complex field of study there is no one paradigm because gender studies is not an ideology there are as we should expect many debates about how best to define gender and whether to define it as at all versions that would differ from the one i just suggested include psychoanalytic ones intersectional ones materialist transnational feminist accounts decolonial feminism black feminism socialist feminism postcolonial they will all have something new and different to say which is the way it should be what we know is that there's no one definition which is why there is a field and a set of scholarly works and debates because issues like care housework sexuality violence health law urban and rural space and politics all have gender dimensions when joan scott talked about the gendering of the public sphere she was not talking about the attributes of a person but rather a form or a norm of masculinity that operates throughout that sphere to establish it as a masculine property or prerogative or when we talk about the gendering of war as we should be doing now we are referring to certain established masculinist and able-bodied ideals that are heightened on the battlefield and in the media an extension of the battlefield at the expense of all those who do not or cannot fight or who invariably become the detritus of war the dispensable lives those exposed to violence including sexual violence let me make a final remark as we witness the violent onslaught against the people of ukraine by putin's government and army and the suppression of russian dissidents let us remember how important the idea of traditional values has been to putin and his supporters traditional values is precisely the heteronormative set of ideals that we have been talking about it was written into the 2015 russian national security strategy in paragraph 78 where the rights of the family understood as heteronormative and patriarchal the specific values of maternal home care are established as primary this is part of a nationalist project in his view in putin's view one that rejects norms coming from europe and embodied by the european union according to daria ukula and i quote the appeal to tradition to traditional values in the international arena has allowed russia to position itself as the leader of the global social conservatives conservatism these are already inside the russian discourse on gender these are security goals aims worth fighting for so the expulsion of gender the expulsion of feminism the expulsion of lgbtqia life and rights so when putin likened himself to j.k rowling and compared the cancelling practices of trans activists to the destruction of the spiritual core of russian life he is explaining in part his rationality for war this means oddly that we are asked to think about nato and ukraine as trans activists an analogy that shows how substitutable the object of anxiety and fear can be it's a ridiculous uh substitution of course the aim of his analogy was i presume to garner sympathy for his war but it mobilizes a phantasmatic scene in which the forces of destruction are always coming at him from the outside the foreign that will threaten national identity and so by implication justify his horrific and appalling war the problem is not just that gender is a foreign term but that it provokes a fantasy of foreign invasion the kind that apparently takes the traditional family apart by introducing new forms of intimate association gay parents queer and trans kids and also calls into question why the sex assigned at birth should remain the sex assigned throughout one's life in putin's view or within the syntax of his fantasy gender and transgender in particular but also feminism attack the spiritual and national values of russia and russia is thus justified even obligated to wage war on this euro-american import figured as a force of destruction which therefore must be destroyed gender of course is not the reason for this war but it is part of the phantasmatic justification of war gender politics is threaded through new forms of fascism nationalism and war and so we have to learn better how to struggle against the fantasy phantasm before it swallows us and for that we need a transversal collaborative mode of thought that can enter expose and counter the phantasms that threaten to determine the shape and course of historical reality thank you for your patience i'm sorry that i went on um as long as i did i did not mean to take up that much time no worries thank you very much professor butler for these fascinating insights into gender issues and especially the anti-gender movement as well and i open now the pro for questions and comments in fact we received already a lot of questions and i don't want to waste any time so the first one is um i read out loud you've mentioned that under gender actors refuse to read gender stuff this text and therefore to engage with the concept they speak out against making critical discussions impossible yet these actors also complain that the left is excluding them from public discourse on gender by setting boundaries of what societal acceptable discourse is do you think we should try to engage in discussions with anti-gender actors or does their refusal to inform themselves mean that they can be legitimately be excluded um that's an enormously difficult question [Music] i i consider that to be the bind we are in on the one hand i would be willing to have a discussion with any number of conservatives or um people who oppose gender as long as they agree to study or they um they don't just traffic in caricatures of what they think gender studies is the problem with the conversation that happens when they refuse to read is that they they accuse or they they um they offer caricatures um and then one has to fight back but we don't have common ground so the question is could we agree to a common set of readings in other words if i were to enter into that conversation i would say okay fine but let's agree on a set of readings and maybe they have some readings and i have some readings and we both commit ourselves to reading and discussing the literature on the table that would have to be a precondition um i mean if somebody is saying that um if someone has the view that gay people should be pathologized or that they should be put in jail or that trans people should be robbed of their legal rights it would be very hard as a a gay person or a trans person or lesbian to to to have a rational argument with somebody who wants to put you in jail or put you in a psychiatric facility or deny your legal rights that would be a very difficult conversation today to be had because your existence as a person is being denied and undermined by that person or that position so um so that that that would be harder i'm not sure i would engage in that argument i i i think in that case we are in a political fight and we're not having a debate we're actually fighting for our ability to um to live and to uh um to live freely in a in a democratic public space to um to have our our existence decriminalized and depathologized pathologized and to have our legal rights honored i think that's a that's possible that's very possibly a different kind of struggle thank you very much next question um do we have to pose the question parallel to what the reader once did with our gender and talk to and with the spectres respecters of gender in your talk you refer to christian binary worldviews into good and evil or god and devil this resuc resurrects a christian es cathologist with the leader once tried to abolish when he deconstructed the end of history with this concept of ontology also helped today to post the called anti-gender critique does does the spectre of this end of man the end of history return haunt western european societies as gender i'm i'm not sure i fully understand the question i'm sorry about that um but um you know there is of course a critique of humanism there's a critique of the concept of man um that has been important for continental philosophy from heidegger through dereda and beyond um there's no doubt that that has been an important critique and it's opened up a wide range of views that have been useful for um for feminists for ecological perspectives for animal rights for rethinking sociality and the rest but when we're talking about um the destruction of a man as the phrase is used by anti-gender ideology advocates um then they are talking about the destruction of man as specifically masculine um as established um by biblical authority as um understood within a hierarchical uh arrangement in which masculine values are more highly valued than feminine values and fully separate from them not overlapping and that masculine and feminine are both um to be situated within um the framework of marriage and uh sexual reproduction restricted to marriage so it's a it's it's it's not the humanist man exactly it's a it's a biblical man it's it's what we might call heteronormative man um um patriarchal man um you know maybe there are ways to make those discourses converge i'm not sure um it would be a mistake um if if an anti-gender ideology person says oh you feminist you you are responsible for the destruction of man and you have destroyed man with the instrument of gender um our answer should not be oh no i have not destroyed man i affirm man man is my you know man is fine i i have not destroyed man i i love man no no we we don't respond by inverting the argument right um we actually take apart this idea of man we make it bad for them it's true they will not like it um but um we insist that families take different forms that there are forms of association that are not linked by family or marriage we insist that gender um can be established on equal terms whether it's relations between men and women or relations among genders that exceed the binary of of men and women um we we argue against that idea of man um but we also say that we are not destroying the world that we are actually trying to build a better world a more just world a world that embodies freedom um equality and justice in much more substantial uh ways that have been could ever be established under the patriarchal forms of social power that are being defended by the anti-gender ideologists i hope that addresses you i'm not sure it did thank you very much i think so the next question um binary thinking exceeds the distinction between men and women thanks to your critique gender studies started to question binary altogether after 30 years since the publication of gender trouble we seem to be at the critical moment in fact and the gender movement conceived the concept of gender as a threat to their freedom of being simply a woman or a man instead of liberating opinion to not have to be one of both it seems that there are similar mechanisms for other progressive achievements in human rights such as abortion for example how can we make sense of this misconception in short how can freedom be conceived as oppression how can options be understood as combustion compulsions thank you for these pointed and important questions these are all i i take them to be urgent and timely and um uh um important to many of us working in different parts of the world it is as you know um the anti-gender ideology movement is global and it functions through a global uh network um including a highly sophisticated um digital uh uh uh map that it has um um developed and activated i'm not sure we have a similar one to um to counter it and and maybe that is something that we should all be thinking about how do we how do we develop transversal forms of solidarity to fight the anti-gender movement from different locations with sharing our our pool of knowledge i think it's really important by the way to note that the anti-gender ideology movement in hungary for instance works very differently than it does in chile or in brazil and we need to really take into account those differences and i'm sorry i couldn't do all of that today but i take it that there are those of you who are doing that um uh to get back to this question um i i think that um what is very hard for people uh who oppose uh gender or feminist studies what's very hard is for them to live with the fact that well they can live as a man they can live as a woman maybe they were assigned male at birth and are living as a man and they like it that way they're assigned female at birth or living as women they like it that way they want their gender and they want their gender binary and that you know they can live we could say locally provisionally in their own private world within that gender binary they can do that as long as they do not impose that on everyone else the question is why it is that some people who want their gender binary want to live within it feel that everyone must live within it it's like why does everyone have to you can live within it live within it enjoy your life in the gender binaries that is what you want you're a man you love being a man beautiful you're a woman you love being a woman beautiful live enjoy um but do not think that your experience of your gender is the same as everyone else's and do not say that everyone has to have the same one that your own way of life must be universalized and every other way of life must be eradicated or devalued so the question is is there a way to for people who are believing in the binary to co-habit in the world with those who are outside the binary i mean they can still have it as their own but they cannot make it into everyone else's similarly none of us who are outside the binary i consider myself to be problematically outside the br outside and inside the binary um uh we cannot claim everyone else should be outside the binary no we cannot we do not ask that we do not impose that when we do not tell we don't instruct children to live outside the binary or you know this is how you should live or this is the gender you should have or this is the sexuality no i mean what we're saying is that there's there's a spectrum and there's diversity and that co-habitation in this world on the basis of that known and valued diversity is a minimum of what we need in order to achieve a less violent world and a more um equal and open world thank you very much um next question the ability to read critically is something that has to be learned is it an educational it is an educational question what can gender sensitive education look like well um i find it interesting that um [Music] that some ways of approaching education within primary schools is simply to treat it as experimental i mean of course we want to teach young boys not to be violent or to treat women with respect to girls with respect we want to encourage girls to study math and science and you know these are traditional ways that i think certain gender inequalities have been addressed through primary education and and those are enormously important and i'm all in favor of them i think in general we should be we should be teaching um uh in ways that develop an ethical sensibility and um a care a care for each other as as young people um but i also think um that um [Music] that young people are also experimenting they they want to know how different things feel they want to play with different toys they want to play with different people they want to imagine themselves as animals or as um another gender or as another age or coming from another planet i mean there are great experimental worlds that young people inhabit and and that experimentation can be part of an open gender education like you know what do we think men are what do we think women are like what what ideas do you have what do you see on the television what do you see what do you hear in your world and you know i i've talked to young kids um sometimes as young as five or six just to see what their what their initial impressions are of what gender is and um it it's it's funny it can be very confused and very open and some somehow some of that more experimental and imaginative play gets um gets shut down but i think the life of play is is important for understanding gender um because it allows us to take on different perspectives and open our minds in some ways that are crucial for um extending respect and understanding to a wide range of people who may well be living their lives differently than we do thank you very much um we have some questions regarding different movements and i try to to sum it up in one question shortly um feminism and gender studies can go hand in hand but recently developmental strong oppositional tendencies as well the there were examples of the queer theory and also the turf movement how important is it in your eu view to build islands between different grounded positions how dangerous for future societal polarization is it in your view to not actively seek the formation of those alliances right now i think it is extremely important that we develop alliances um regardless of what seemed to be some fairly strong differences between the trans-exclusionary or gender-critical feminists and say trans feminism or um [Music] lgbtqia perspectives of various kinds um i think the the the fascist movements that we're seeing that are supporting authoritarian regimes um almost all take positions against reproductive freedom against abortion uh against access to reproductive technology for women or men outside of heterosexual marriages against gay marriage against trans rights legal medical health related against against conventions that secure rights against gender violence more broadly femicide um and by femicide i'm i'm trying to move closer to the idea of feminist cdo that we see in in latin american countries that include violence against women and other feminized people or other people who are gender non-conforming i mean most of the new fascist movements are attacking all of us right so if we have um we have feminists over here who are working on abortion rights who are angry at the trans activists or we have trans activists who are angry at the queer people because they don't really understand the trans perspective or we have the gender critical people who are fighting um against um uh uh against any number of people who um work within a a constructionist framework you know we're not looking up to ask who is the enemy what is the problem uh who should we be opposing right to be in solidarity with one another does not mean we love each other we don't have to go to dinner we don't have to be lovers we don't even have to be friends but we do have to stand together against an emergent fascism that is targeting all of us and it is also as we know targeting migrants and and involved in in systemic forms of racism including as we know white nationalism throughout europe and um and white supremacy in the u.s the kind of resurrection of a slave-owned owner uh mentality and intense racism as we know against indigenous people throughout latin america the americas more broadly we we need to be able to um [Music] situate our solidarity so that we are not just functioning within the global north but trying to figure out what is happening in the global south what is happening in terms of violence against women um the lack of health care the um [Music] the ways in which um economic destitution has differentially disproportionately affected women and children and the poor so you know we need these very broad solidarities to produce a global left that we can rely on um and so and especially if we don't want the left to be this presumptively masculine um movement in which we operate it as second-class citizens i i think we we should not go back to that um it's really important that we be uh right at the center of of the left as as as the neonaminos movement has established in argentina and throughout latin america in my view um we are being targeted by emergent fascism which means that we should be front and center in the anti-fascist movement to do that we need to uh we need to really um if not set aside our differences find ways of handling differences that can seem very intense at the moment um but actually are not as important as they seem to us um if they become too important it's because we're not looking up to see where the true enemy is there's nothing more important than establishing strong anti-fascist and anti-patriarchal solidarities at this time thanks and there are some questions and comments um about quality analysis in fact the first one is a comment and then i read afterwards the question from someone else because it fits very well in hindu society for thousands of years there has been a recognized non-binary gender known as the third gender they here are for example are often born males but look and dress feminine but there are other examples of non-binary gender they were threatened with both fear and respect and they challenged western ideas british colonizers for example made life difficult for them as you can imagine the british were shocked by this unchristian tradition it kind of fits with your examples of how they both perceive gender and now the question which fits you well kind of interaction between the powerful white western societies and the underprivileged global south be non-colonialistic and how since we still live in a racist world and global unequalities are still reality is the debate about gender and other topics between the powerful and the powerless still potentially called colonial well yes the short answer is that it is um it is always it is always a risk that um [Music] um that feminism or um gl gay lesbian bisexual trans queer movements that they um are formed within the global north they are circulated within the global north we we know um how publications work we know how translations work there's so much um there's so much scholarship that is well publicized within the global north and there's always that risk um that it looks like theory is being generated in the north and examples are being drawn from the south right but in fact in in the last decades we see that the global south has produced a wide range of theories including decolonial feminism and decolonial politics there's anti-apartheid politics in theory there's black studies coming out of the global south there's extraordinary work on the um [Music] on the indigenous life worlds and the destruction of biodiversity within um africa and south america um we um [Music] i think that we are we're living in it with that in a changing map of of knowledge so that um we have to ask uh about various epistemological and political positions that are emerging from the south sometimes in relationship to um oceanic geographies or histories or different histories of slavery or different histories of colonization and the resistance to colonization i think decolonial feminism is enormously important i know there are some debates about what's post-colonial what's anti-colonial and what's decolonial but these are living debates that we should all be part of in order to make sure that we are not reproducing colonial powers within our own practices a few things could be more important at this time thank you very much as a polish person a lot of the talk felt quite close to what my activism is about as a lot of the anti-gender discourse is so popular in poland these days what i found perhaps most interesting about the talk was the part about fantasy which seems up at contradiction in terms gender emerges as both constructed and natural at the same time in the discourse it seems could you please explore how you deal with the contradiction or perhaps the point is that we just have to accept that a lot of the anti-gender discourse is contradictory and strive to point that out um well you know in this i mean it's a it's a very difficult situation because the anti-gender ideology movement claims that gender is a single ideology right it and it it has certain [Music] features and that's it and one argument that we have to make against it is to show that we're actually a very complex field we have different methodologies we have open debates we we have decades of gender studies programs with different kinds of focus it's different when we're talking about public health and education and when we're talking about literature and art um we could go on and on to show that it's a complex field and we can't be caricatured as some single construct but similarly the anti-gender ideology movement sometimes it it it doesn't uh it it it takes different forms in different parts of the world but also it is willing to advanced contradictory ideas so for instance um [Music] if anti-gender ideology people say that we gender theorists think everything's constructed and don't accept sex as a fact we might expect them to be positivists who establish facts as the basis of any form of knowledge and then we would want to know oh how are you establishing your facts and and what what are those facts um but it turns out that the facts um that they point to are actually the expression of a certain idea of natural law that emerges i think around the 17th century and which is part of the of their one part of the history of christianity right so it's a religious doctrine and a legal doctrine that um that that says this is the way things are or this is the way things should be and very outdated so not positivism at all so one question i mean if we were to be kind of intellectually rigorous is how do you anti-gender people reconcile your positivism with your natural law commitments okay i mean we could take them apart intellectually and it would be easy to do and we could laugh as intellectuals at the ridiculousness of the claims but they're politically powerful they're having successes um they're persuading people um of the legitimacy of their claims they're frightening parents they're um they're able to censor what's happening in schools as we see in the state of florida they're able to propose legislation in poland to restrict the upper you know to restrict uh certain spaces uh where lgbtq people can can uh be public right i mean we are this is a very powerful movement so we we need to take it seriously and also see that sometimes um they don't care whether they're contradicting themselves because they're not trying to put forward a rational argument they're trying to achieve certain ends and they also know as um as many fascist discourses know that um contradictory discourses can be very exciting for the public right it's this it's that it's the other thing it's all of it at once right it becomes chaotic it becomes oh they're totalitarians they're unwanted migrants they're commercial they're capitalists they're corporate you know which one of those things are we well we are we can't be all of them or maybe we are some of them when they are involved in one tactic and then we're others when they're involved in a different tactic or maybe some tactics work locally in some places that don't work well in others so we shouldn't be surprised that it's a contradictory movement and that it builds on its contradictoryness because it wants to achieve certain aims it's not trying to be a rational or internally coherent position very interesting thank you at this point it's a half bus too i would like to ask you if you would like to continue answering some questions or we can also stop here you exceeded already um i'm happy to go for another five minutes if that's okay with you okay so the last question um [Music] can you think of any positive examples or best practices of countries or regions where this fear of gender has mostly been absent or also has been overcome and when you think about our everyday life how would you imagine it is in a desirable future how should we structure everyday life in working life in private life in terms of care work as well thank you that's that's a really important um set of questions actually um i i will say um um and these are this is just anecdotal so i can't i can't give you a good study or empirical research to back up my my point of view here um but i have been in conversation as you can imagine with many people on this topic and um i i what i find uh most moving is um progressive christians um confronting uh reactionary christians or coming together with them to discuss these issues um and i i've seen that happen in brazil i've seen that happen in mexico [Music] so interfaith and intra-faith dialogues have been quite important since there are as we know many christian communities that are open to gay and lesbian people and open to trans people and for whom christian love is all about extending hospitality and affirmation to people regardless of sexual orientation or sex assignment and i've also seen i think families change their point of view because someone in the family comes out or a cousin turns out to be trans or um some some some woman in their family either a sister or a mother has been discriminated against or has been um subject to violence on the street or in the home and they see that feminist networks came into the situation and provided care and support and legal assistance during that time so you know there are ways when we're talking about the family and the church or we're talking about uh mosques or we're talking about synagogues or we're talking um uh even within um um hindu structures of um of a worship and community um that internal fissures emerge and sometimes those conversations are the ones that are most important because people get transformed most profoundly when those they care about have their lives imperiled or their well-being imperiled or suffered discrimination violence for um because of um because of um masculine violence or um patriarchal power or forms of gender violence or discrimination so i think working within institutions and grasping what the internal differences are and getting people to take into account the fact that it's in their own community that these differences are emerging not just an imposition from the outside um it's it's been a part of the community for a very long time it's been part of local cultures it's it and this breaking down the idea that oh non-binary gender or trans or feminism is all coming from the west the outside world it's not true of russia it's not true or poet um uh and yet time and again it gets cast as if it's coming from the outside and it's a foreign imposition so and i think we have to we have to think about that in terms of anti-migrant politics um there's a kind of fear of the foreign contaminating but the migrant is already inside right the uh the queer and the feminists or the trans person they're already inside so it's a way of purifying the nation of its own internal complexity and making it seem as if the threat is external that's part of what needs to be undone thanks so much professor butler for your fascinating speech and also for taking so much time to answering many questions behind the scenes um i received so much positive feedback and compliments for your presentation and i would like to give that also to you uh i think it was certainly a blast for all of us thank you so much

Channel: Center for Advanced Studies - Eurac Research

Views: 18,605

Keywords: Center for Advanced Studies, Eurac Research, Judith Butler, Doing Gender, Gender, Doing global gender, poststructuralism, critical theory, genderfluid, queer studies, gender equality, gender studies, gender inclusivity, reglobalization, globalization, webinar, global economy, globalization week, society, transformation, equality, equal opportunities

Id: fvlHKNvb6rI

Length: 96min 55sec (5815 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022