Who is Afraid of Gender? Prof. Judith Butler

um I am Judith Butler I teach at the University of California at Berkeley and about thirty years ago I wrote a book on gender called gender trouble which as predicted caused me a great deal of trouble but for a long time that work remained in the academic sphere and then it became part of a queer and gay lesbian movement and then what happened more recently I would say starting in the in the 90s but but becoming more and more explicit and powerful in the last few years is that it became one of several books that were very strongly attacked by what is called the anti gender ideology movement now I know that this is a movement that began with the Catholic Church the Vatican and I'll explain that in a moment it became allied with the Evangelical Church throughout South America and it is of course also alive in the Pentecostal in the Pentecostal movements in Africa and differently throughout Africa but it is of course it is there and so one of the issues I'd like to speak about today is well what is this thing called gender that many people especially religious conservatives but not exclusively religious conservatives are quite upset about so so let me give you a little history I will give you a formal paper for about 20 minutes and then we can open this up for a more general conversation I hope that that suits you the idea of something called gender ideology emerged in the 1990s when the Roman Catholic Family Council warned against the idea of gender as a threat to the family and to biblical authority although one can trace its origins to the family council documents it has travelled in ways that track the political power of the Vatican as well as its newly formed alliance with the Evangelical Church in Latin America one could approach the topic by offering an academic argument that disputes the claims made about gender what they say about gender is false and that is of course important because they do say false things but such an academic task goes only part of the way in trying to understand why gender this concept this category has become so controversial Oh inciting rage and fear across many communities across the globe the reason for that incitement are I think various and sometimes they're rooted in local struggles but they're also linked especially through internet petitions and newsletters that construed gender as a threat to the family and to the distinct values of masculinity and femininity Society destroy Society the church and civilization itself so it appears that the proposition that gender is a social construction that simple proposition leads to the conviction that individuals could radically choose their gender or live in ways that are unconstrained by their biological status at birth heterosexuality and heterosexual marriage so the idea that gender is a social construction is invested with enormous power sometimes it has the capacity to take down civilization as we know it and the Pope our present Pope Francis has said precisely that so at stake here is a notion that the doctrine of social construction when you say that gender is socially constructed you're saying people are free to choose their gender so social construction is reduced to an idea of radical individual liberty and there are many reasons to reject that reduction but I want to suggest that reduction has happened in the popular reception of gender among those who put forth such a view our is is Joseph Scala who published a book in Argentina which was widely read in Catholic communities and then was translated and widely distributed by the evangelical church in Brazil and that book was against gender ideology it warned against voluntarist and destructive potentials carried by the concept of gender which and it was condemned gender was condemned as inimical to both science and religion it's hard to be have both science and religion as your opponents but gender was understood to be an unacceptable by both science and religion in subsequent subsequent years gender became an issue in several major elections in Brazil Costa Rica Colombia France Switzerland and Germany and then more recently in Hungary and even more recently in Poland in all of these contexts gender is understood as an ideology meaning a mystified form of thought that refutes the reality of sexual difference and seeks to appropriate the divine power of creation for those who wish to create their own genders right so gender gives God's capacity to create the world two individuals who are now vested with the capacity to create their own gender so now I give social construction and in that argument is understood as divine creation not personal liberty but divine creation in other reasons in German Germany for instance in other regions like Germany gender ideology or indeed gender studies the academic field is regularly regularly characterized as totalitarian and and it is it suggests that it prescribes or dictates gender rules and suppresses personal liberty rights so in some cases gender is a radical expression of personal liberty in other cases it is the radical suppression of personal liberty and the and a dictatorial mandate by gender academics who will tell you how to live your gender what is the right way what is the wrong way okay so in Brazil the very idea of the nation and of masculinity itself which are linked is is understood as threatened by gender ideology and gender idiot she is characterized as a cultural import from the north further in all of these cases there seems to be no interest in what the actual field of Gender Studies is I know you have a Gender Studies Program there Macari what kinds of debates are held in Gender Studies programs what kinds of works are read what are its regional variants how does it change in different parts of the world but whether it is gender or the term gender ideology or a reference to gender studies as a monolithic field of some kind it is invariably referred to as a kind of phantasm it becomes a very potent phantasm that deflects from the fact that hardly anyone who opposes this matter has actually read texts within the field or considers their arguments so one of the characteristic features of the anti gender ideology movement is that it is not based on a careful reading or examination of the actual claims that are made certain phrases are taken from context and inflamed and made into what I would suggest our fantaz Matic entities for instance in in Switzerland I was once approached by a woman after a lecture and she let me know that she was praying for me and when I asked why why are you praying for me she explained well gender is diabolical it comes from the devil and she hoped I would find redemption for my responsibility in circulating the term or the theory or the phantasm when I asked her whether she had ever read my work she exclaimed that she would never read any book on center it was out of the question she would never read any such a book since it comes from the devil apparently and as I was trying to ask whether she felt fine about dismissing a book she had never read she already moved towards the door okay um the pope's family counsel in the 1990s was then directed by joseph ratzinger who was of course the Pope of Benedict or became the Pope shortly thereafter and he warned that gender theorists were imperiling the family by questioning the notion that appropriately Christian social roles could be derived from biological sex he he argued that it was in the nature of sex of a woman's sex of a man's sex for women to do domestic work for men to undertake action in public life so he derived a sexual division of labor from biology but he also grounded biology in a divine order a Christian order the arguments were of course starkly pre feminist which is perhaps one reason why the first objection on the part of the Catholic Church to the concept of gender was considered odd even amusing by feminists who did not then anticipate the implications of the Opposition Ratzinger 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 and in a letter to bishops underscoring the potential and gender to destroy feminine values important to the church and to destroy the natural distinction between the two sexes as Pope Benedict he went further in 2012 maintaining that such ideologies deny the preordained duality of man and one woman and deny the 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 and are misled by an atheistic set of beliefs by 2016 Pope Francis despite his occasionally progressive views continued the line developed by Pope Benedict and this is what he claimed and I quote we are experiencing a moment of the annihilation of men as the image of God he specifically included as an instance of this defacement the ideology of gender he was clearly outraged that today and I quote today children children are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex and this is terrible then he made affirmative reference to Benedict and claimed God created man and woman God created the world in a certain way and we are doing the exact opposite it would appear from this perspective that humans have taken over the creative power of the divine but Pope Francis went further he argued that proponents of gender are like those who support or deploy nuclear arms now this is his analogy and that their target is creation itself this suggests that whatever gender is it carries enormous destructive power in the minds of those who oppose it indeed it it carries an unfathomable and terrifying destructiveness it's represented as a demonic force of destruction pitted against God's creative powers and this is one reason that gender is understood as exercising demonic powers a diabolical ideology perhaps it was renewed papal support of the fight against gender in 2015 and 16 that encouraged bishops throughout the world to escalate the anti gender ideology campaign into an international project one that crosses hemispheres affecting elections as I mentioned in Colombia Mexico and Costa Rica and recently playing a significant role in the election of right-wing a year bohlson ro as president of Brazil his inaugural speech in early January of 2019 contained a commitment to eradicate gender ideology in the schools and he vowed to resist ideological submission and since being elected he has sought to eradicate sex education and replace it with a curriculum that enforces the idea of binary gender difference and the natural and normative character of heterosexual marriage in October of 2018 Hungary not only eliminated gender studies from the list of approved masters programmes but forced the Central European University known for its international gender programme to relocate to Vienna in part because of its sponsorship of Western academic projects such as feminists and Gender Studies after the successful legal battle for gay marriage in France in 2013 a backlash took place the following year a prominent course curriculum in France called a base a de deux legality offered students a way to think about the difference between biological sex for sex you are born with and cultural gender the sense of gender that you acquire or that emerges for you in the course of living a life and it was rescinded after strong public accusations that gender theory Latino Java was being taught in the primary schools Pope Francis met with one of the organizers of the effort to withdraw the program in Argentina the Pope's country of origin interestingly enough the most progressive laws on gender freedom were passed some just a few years ago in 2014 those laws are gender identity law which is similar to one that exists in South Africa allows any person to choose to change gender without medical authorization and in 2014 in reaction to that progressive gender identity law passed in Argentina Jorge Scala started to circulate his book among Christian communities throughout Latin America and in the Spanish region of Andalucia the ultra-conservative rocks party has recently petitioned the center-right pseudonymous party to combat what they called the jihadism of gender so gender is jihad gender is totalitarian gender is taking the place of God we have three separate fantasies of what gender is um one thing I just like to interject at this moment is that the anti gender ideology movement is what I would call a counter social movement it's like it's a counter movement in other words its aim is to destroy a movement that it sees as gaining power gaining legislative victories gay marriage trans rights to change or legal sex reproductive rights for women it's sexual and economic equality for women anti-discrimination laws that protect gay lesbian non gender conforming people and trans people so as those movements that trans queer gender feminist movements have made and succeeded with legislative victories and new legal reforms this counter movement has emerged to to devalue discount and destroy that social movement in other words it doesn't always have other aims what it seeks to do is restore an order it believes to have been destroyed by these progressive social movements now I would suggest that the aim of this movement the anti gender ideology movement is not simply to eliminate the word gender although there is I mean throughout the world a lot of resistance to the term and we can talk about it it is after all an English term that has come into many languages and many people say no this does not work for us for interesting reasons and it's not even about censoring the academic field of Gender Studies or the theory of gender as they imagine it it's seeking to undermine the justification for a wide range of social movements that have shown themselves to be powerful enough to achieve legislative legal victories in the past 20 years the alliance of right-wing Catholics and evangelicals which has not always been a happy relationship right there now very close in their opposition to gender that Alliance has a clear platform they have post-feminism LGBTQI rights especially gay marriage trans legal and medical rights single mothers rights of single mothers gay parents the rights of adoption and more my wager is that as neoliberal economic policies devastate the work lives and the sense of Futurity for many people who face contingent labor unemployment and unpayable debts the turn against gender is a way of shoring up a traditional sense of place and privilege so that is one thesis I'd like to give you today on how to think about the underlying conditions of this what I'm calling a following Elizabeth Corridor a counter movement now it also of course draws the line between public and private the anti gender ideology movement it wants to redraw the line between public and private the family is private and it's organization should not be intervened upon by any other Authority and it's patriarchal privilege should not be contested because that's what gives the family order and and and in a way we might say that the feta traditional family is shored up or justified against market forces incursions from the north especially from the United States and the euro-atlantic cultural and economic alliance but but also as a way of handling the enormous anxiety that neoliberal economic orders has unleashed throughout the world where austerity and precarity become the norm and unpayable debt becomes a way of life I would suggest that both the Nationalists and the traditionalist investment in prohibiting gay marriage gay lesbian families and their adoption rights trans and travesty rights single parent adoption and access to reproductive technology that that this this investment is focused on this term gender but gender is a fairly empty term what it does is it serves as a kind of umbrella concept under which all these social movements are are included you don't have to know what gender is or even say what it is or very much about it to use it as a as a term that abbreviates and encompasses a whole range of social movements that have to do with bodily self-determination equality and expanded rights for gender and sexual minorities the heteronormative family is now being defended sometimes violently defended as the sole defense against devastating market forces and I believe that this is especially true in a place like Brazil the anti gender ideology movement has taken hold in the wake of gay marriage legislation arguing that religion ought to be the arbiter of marital arrangements and that progressive legislation ought not to undermine the heterosexual family with its distinct natural and hierarchical roles for women and men opposing or reversing inclusive trends in family law and demanding new laws that prohibit forms of procreation or outside the traditional family form as well as changing genders assigned at birth or or affirming the equality between men and women all work to this end so the wager that I'm suggesting here today is that as neoliberal economic policies devastate the work lives and the sense of Futurity for many people who face contingent labor unpayable debt the turn against gender is a way of showing a traditional a traditional sense of place and privilege and we can talk more about that I mean I don't mean to be suggesting simply that there's an economic crisis and that the debate about gender is a cultural debate which is an effect of the economic crisis and can be understood fully that way I think that the interconnection between gender household management household economics and neoliberalism has to be unpacked a bit more carefully to understand but I do think that the defense of traditional family for instance the defense of so-called traditional family in Brazil or in Argentina is to some extent at odds with the sociological fact that many people are living in kinship arrangements that are not not the traditional family so the society has already changed and new kinship arrangements are already accepted and yet in the middle of this complexity the defense of the traditional family emerges and the reasons for all of that new kinship arrangement are not simply the theory of gender there are many sociological and demographic reasons for those shifts in kinship arrangements and yet the defense of the family seeks to restore a notion of the family which may also be a kind of ideal rather than a simple existing historical family extort historical form I want to suggest this becomes that all of this becomes intense political issues especially in countries where state-funded social services to families have been decimated and dependency on churches has actually increased for basic services to those abandoned by the state I say abandoned by the state but in such cases many understand themselves to be saved by the state or saved by the church rather how does that saving to simulate and continue the conditions of economic abandonment although not a model for church interventions cross regionally the Evangelical Church in the United States gained much of its power in the wake of the decimation of state funds for aids for dependent children as the scholar melinda cooper has shown as asset appreciation becomes the source of wealth and massive cuts in wages secured employment and social welfare follow and as unions and their bargaining powers are increasingly subject to destruction criminalization or disregard the heteronormative family assumes or rather reassume 'he's a crucial role and a kind of redemptive role it's not just as melinda cooper argues that the family becomes the central site and mechanism for the transmission of wealth but that family dynasties become popular ideals and family fortunes like the one that is currently running my country become exemplary modes of wealth accumulation the funds the state expended on welfare including securing payments to mothers and children in the u.s. especially in african-american communities became figured by neoconservatives as a drain on the state as an unjust set of claims on the state and an inappropriate intervention to the family form through legal and economic instruments the withdrawal of states of court with the help of Bill Clinton abandoned poor families destroying whatever safety net might once have existed in its place was instated the idea of responsibility that drew upon both individualism and its Christian variance my point is that what I'm calling abandonment is the very phenomenon championed as we know by neoconservatives and neo liberals as sound fiscal policy a policy that regards as appropriate the withdrawal of the state from private moral and social matters which is one reason we have a decimated health care system in the US and we have no way of rationally handling the Koated not coded nineteen pandemic right now in the US and elsewhere the authority of the evangelical churches stepped in not just to give moral order to the family without which the economy cannot function but to aid and abet free-market economics as it intensifies precarity for increasing numbers of people the complex alliance between the spread of evangelist ISM and the support for neoliberal economics is one that I can't explain at length here today Bethany Martin has done some of that and I know that there are also studies in Africa of the relationship between the Pentecostal Pentecostal churches and neoliberal economic / economically induce precarity which is something I would like to know more about some have argued that it was the legal advances of the LGBTQ movement that spurred the anti gender ideology movement especially the right to privacy that struck down anti sodomy laws but also the legalization of gay marriage both have been understood as triumphs of an elite secular and nihilistic set of social movements galvanized in part by college campuses and compliant corporations these new rights are themselves the sign of the destruction of culture humanity sexual difference or religious authority the battles against women's rights trans rights and the rights of LGBTQ I people more generally is regarded as the effort to save civilization as I suggested but it's also very often linked as as a link to author authoritarianism or indeed to well the anti let's put it this way gender is linked with totalitarianism by those who link anti gender ideology with authoritarianism and the patriarchal privilege that authoritarianism embodies so in some ways that debate between authoritarianism and totalitarianism is at work in the debates about gender the authoritarian strains of the states that adopt the anti gender ideology position are sometimes mixed with fascist trends and I would have to have another paper to explain yeah that but the confusion of discourses is part of what constitutes the fascist structure and appeal of at least some of these movements one can oppose gender as a cultural import from the north at the same time that one can see that very opposition as a social movement against further colonization of the South the result though is not a turn to the left and a fuller critique of colonial cultural imperialism the result is in fact an embrace of ethno-nationalism at least as it gets staged in the anti gender ideology movement a social movement of gender rights and freedoms is itself positioned ambivalently some human rights frameworks are arguably cultural culturally imperialist I would accept that view but some queer and trans movements are clearly part of an anti imperialist struggle on the Left I would accept that view as well when the anti gender ideology advocates see themselves as energized by anti-imperialism as they sometimes do and Pope Francis also uses this language they draw upon the very energies of the progressive social movements that they oppose and that I find interesting and perhaps a little bit pathological so I I would like to make sure we have time for discussion so let me see if I can move to it the last few pages of my more formal presentation I see that Professor mom Donny has joined us I'd like to welcome you I introduced myself it all went beautifully not to worry I would suggest that we understand the historical formulation of neoliberalism and financialization the imperative to increase assets at the expense of securing fair wages not as the cause exactly of the anti gender ideology movement but as part of the complex scene of heightened conflict where nationalism racism and heightened militarism ally with anti gender ideology propaganda the focus on the figure of the father in its familial and political overdetermination the father is the authority of the family the pent up patriarchy is the authority of the nation the line between nation and family is redrawn as one of important patriarchal power that must be instantiated and connected between family and nation the focus on the father is part of this constellation especially in its relation to fascism I would suggest the more fully social services are decimated in favor of private contracts and outsourcing the more that national wealth is determined by movements within global capitalism that culminate in dispossession and precarity the stronger the two churches have become and there are more churches but besides these two churches supplying as it were the moral complement to dispossession as well as its rationale first the precarity the economic and social security is one that the church claims to be able to ameliorate exchanging basic goods for ideological exposure but also perhaps more fundamentally through a process that seeks to mandate and instill a singularly moral character of heterosexual marriage and the destructive character of all other sexual organizations of life that fall outside of heterosexual marriage in other words the strategic abandonment of populations in need at an economic level together with the refusal to guarantee decent wages or working conditions facilitates the role of the state as it licenses and protects the maximization of assets without limit the specific feature of financialization that seems important here is that finance is based on speculation on future outcomes and it always carries the risk if not the if not the certainty of a new crisis right it actually requires crisis it induces crisis that requires crisis and thrives on crisis it may well be as some have suggested that the relation between financialization and crisis is a structural one well under those conditions what sense of future and stability can there possibly be especially for those who have no power to engage in so-called asset appreciation én something is clearly destroying a sense of future for many people from increasing number of people but how we name that something has never mattered more the new alliance of Christianity and fascism proclaims that one main cause of disk chaos this threat to the Futurity itself this threat to civilization and society is something called gender and that is what undermines social structures that is what's undermining the nation it's undermining communities their histories and their futures that is the name of the imposition from the north right well there are many impositions from the earth there are many sources of the destruction of the likelihood of mass numbers of people increasing numbers of people but shall we call the showing called us the one source of that destruction gender or if gender in some sense embodying absorbing these massive economic and social anxieties under contemporary conditions the new alliance of Christianity and fascism proclaims that gender is the threat to Futurity and for conservative Catholics and evangelicals the instability and chaos that must be fended off is that which challenges the normative character of the family but that argument doesn't take into account the abandonment of families by the state when wages cannot be secured the problem is not just that men cannot make the living they require to sustain a family although that is one problem but also that women the young and the old the dependents as were are everywhere subject to increasingly precarious work conditions and are have lost basic social services this has never been made more explicit than under pandemic conditions those who are they are everywhere I would suggest subject to for closed horizons the loss of the future exposed to a moral message that tells them that they are individually responsible for the fact that they cannot predict any viable future for themselves those who are gender minorities gender non-conforming or trans are subject to these precarious conditions even more intensively as is the case for queers of color in Baia Brazil for instance when gender and sexual freedoms are regarded as destabilizing and destructive we have to ask from what perspective does this seem true and what other kinds of destabilization in society are being registered as the fault of gender perhaps gender is an overdetermined site where a host of such fears collect and register in such a discourse in the form of a fearful phantasm is it sexual freedom that has created this perfect a sense of precarity or is it rather that the normative family emerges as the sign and supplement of radical economic abandonment is the tacit understanding that the family must be restored in its traditional sense to absorb the blows of the economy or that any challenge to the necessary and normative structure of the heteronormative family will as a result expose a population to yet more severe precarity is that how it works once the family in its normative version becomes installed as the only possible safeguard against chaos and destruction then it is freedom that is attacked in the name of preserving a social order that is paradoxically under attack by other means by other forces and it is also equality that is attacked in the name of preserving a social order which is traditionally hierarchical and which is under crisis for many other reasons the state requires the church to oppose gender freedoms and section and sexual equality gender equality in order to reinstall and naturalize moods of masculine Authority in the family and the state but it also does this in order to empower the state to follow financialization as if that were the name for a brighter future even as it systematically exposes populations to prepare a tea whose political support it requires condemning them to a life whose sense of Futurity is constantly under threat so that's the end of my my formal remarks I see that it's four minutes after the hour I believe we have some time for questions or for a discussion and I'll leave it to Professor mom Donny to tell us how best to proceed thank you so much professor Butler we have well we have three discussants each of them will have about ten minutes if in their enthusiasm they go beyond it I will I will give them an extra minute or so and then and then we will move on following the discussants you you you may want to to engage with them and then we'll have an open discussion so those who have comments I would like to ask questions I suggest that you use the chat function to just put down your name and your institutional affiliation because those who have gathered here to listen to you are coming from different parts of the world in different institutions and if you don't want to say your question or comment out loud please feel free to put it in full on the chat function and I will just read it out loud so the first discussion is discussant is the aniconic an aquatic is the fifth year doctoral student at mchenry institute of social research the second discussant also a fifth year doctoral student at miser the acronym is miser is dinah Kamara and the third discussant is a postdoctoral fellow at miser a day bangerra Zarko let's begin with a necrotic Anna ten minutes please yes professor thank you am i audible yes your honor Thank You professor amantani and Thank You professor Butler for this extraordinary opportunity to join in this conversation to begin the butler is reading on the backlash against gender ideology predominantly in Europe and parts of Latin America discusses a counter movement orchestrated on the patronage of the Catholic Church and the mantric groups - the social movements in support of gender diversity equality and sexual freedom the rhetoric of the church reads agenda ideology as a deception reality that is divinely ordained in the natural hierarchies between sexes as conceivably hegemonic Hedgehog's a heterosexual and monogamous ID of marriage and family values which in turn came to define the social values for both women and men alone hence one is not assumed to have the freedom to choose a sex with which they were born nor are they allowed to decide of the sexual orientations particularly those which are deviant to the will of God in looking both extensionists our institutional explanations the general sex is socially constructed at code a British Sebata determined by a complex and interacting set of processes historical social and magical Marissa Butler argues that gender ideology is neither destructor indoctrinating before returning the quest of counter movement I wish to begin and engage with the word gender itself professor Butler's work has constantly questioned the rigid dichotomy as a gentle challenging the core assumptions of identical ethics as we know while rigorously interrogating the necessity of fixed immutable gender identities in speaking of the gendered body as performative in the sense to code again first-rate racial norms professor Butler's concept of reputation allows gender to be read to socially imposed or discursive code that is responded to and performed the central role of performers in the construction report a man of gender as a full of social and cultural interaction helps locate the notion of identities as fluid and performative rather than fixed and stable dismantling a homogeneous and universal applicability the binary perception of the masculine and the feminine here professor Butler's were clearly converges with that of a host of post-colonial scholars who have persistently argued against providing a stable items to gender even so the departure in the writings of post-colonial scholars begin with the tracing of genealogy that came with a disruption caused by colonial colonization in its conception of colonial modernity as per the butter did mem mission when most languages in the post-cold countries failed to have vocabulary to differentiate between male and female and man and women the pre-colonial history graph represents him waiting on the objection integration of the body itself oh those deemed to be deviant under the colonial gaze here I would like to bring them example some writings of scholars including if you may or encourage women irrigate the manner to salute me to begin with preface Amanda me who states that in pre-colonial ebo society Nigeria but men and women could be husband daughters could have simple sessions of sons and they did act as husbands to wives they're stating that power in this case isn't assumed in the patriarchal and Mastan norm and the well oh you're on cubism is writing on the Yoruba society again in Nigeria gives the notion of woman is a social category as the body was an essential item to gender social identities of man and women and it was the bad she'd called interpretation through the colonial gaze that created hierarchies of bodies which were otherwise fluid and the last example drawn from the writings of professor memory who puts across the case of the poets of the bhakti movement in India which began the 6th century CE can continued to flourish until the 17th century to could reverse a man miss Dix expressed a kind of desire for God that travels through the body and we configure sit demons to find the body and sexuality by dismantling the codes and conventions that sex the body clearly there are claims that constable fluidity did exist in Indian subcontinent till the mid to late 19th century when the processes of colonial modernity began to alter and discipline the body in an attempt to create the color in subject which unequivocally had to be a gendered subject under the cologne institution forms of power this conceived not just on the binary formation of man and woman but also the ground of the good woman in the bad woman or the and Batman this as in the native man the native woman this meant that in a microseconds fire generations ago women in my family who did not necessarily cover the upper breast upper body were expected to close their bare breasts and enter into a system of heterosexual Monogram as conjugal relation of marriage which was totally unheard of until eighth century in a matriarchal society in the south of India where women enjoyed sacred freedom and right to property which means which also meant that the idea of gendered identity or the gender subjection article ISM also or it was erased by the fact that there's moved to be a dispossession of the female body in terms of the right of property or the right to engage in the sale sale or buying of the property in public place Oh to dismantle the cultural market binary I'd report it with this detail examples on the perception of the body in colonial freaking context but there were invoked to advance the idea that gender in our context especially in the experience of the global south still carries a potential to be considered as a disruption to any kind of emancipation potential towards a true freedom and diversity of bodies in this regard I would like to ask professor Butler if it is possible to repose the question who is afraid of the general was a rough gender to that of who's afraid of the body because as you mentioned and as often I've observed Western Gela discourse as a universalizing tendency the emphasis on gender forecloses patient and poor differences in the colonized time and space divisive drifts caused by cars region ethnicity are equally critical their words to move on to the second point we are currently engaged in the process of writing what we would call or what I would like to call counter his trees in a struggle for decolonization including the decolonization of gender this comforts me to ask how do we understand the convergence between the county histories in the post-colonial role and the counter Moomin backlash in the West in this backdrop the counter movement is a double movement or a double struggle first counting the clean legacy and secondly counting the effects of the existing conservative contaminants in the West especially when we do invoke social movements in our context on gender to pursue legal battles against the fascist populist government's or against the colonial vestiges existing the legal codes that do not give us or the rights to my second minorities of the although gay marriages or to decriminalize consensual gay sex relationships and if that is the case if there is a convergence it also the monolithic conservative Church and the right-wing politics that tend to accelerate one the state itself as a structure the role of international financial institutions transnational organizations and donor countries how do we understand the role of the state itself in the post-colonial context and that internet organizations in the existing struggle between social movements and counter movements when in Uganda has been experiences of a World Bank intervening enlarges World Bank but the donor countries intervening in Uganda's policy and against ganas a policy to bring in law or the bill that is in Parliament right now that enforces very repressive actions against gay sex relations so thank you thank you once again for support of its opportunity and Ghana Dyna Kamara Oh Thank You professor for the presentation speak for myself and I'm very pleased to meet you and so the first thing I would like to talk about is that the reaction of the antigen the movements that gender movements are the bollocky of course if the response to that kind of power is only to attack the power that be the church or they are the right wing's it would also just be pathological will just be caught in this limbo of talking about who has power who doesn't have power the good thing is that you came in and talked about the actual place where all this is coming from the neoliberal reforms and that is where my question comes you do give detailed information on the neoliberal reforms and how it is it has affected the family people livelihoods but then what is the relationship between the world economic order and the church which seems to be the champion of this antigen movement what is what I mean what is the historical relationship and we know in the church why Chuck Church is based on fear you know inflicting fee on the masses so one gender why now you know there are lots of things they could be hanging on to there are lots of things that dialogue Accenture is why gender and why not it is one number two you talk about this relationship between the right wing in the church which elaborates in great detail but somehow I think you give a free pass to the left because you do not problematize it as much as those hoping because if we're looking at the right wing in the church what is the left's position you know you know the left is in the Social Democrats is different from the Marxists maybe left so who's left or who what is the place of the left in gender and sex politics and that being said so what is the relationship between the left gender and sex politics are together are there points of divergence are there places where only gender and sex would be and the left should be now this is a general comment the backlash on gender sounds very much like the backlash on communism you know totalitarian it's a jihad it's a dystopia what from your work how do you draw from other movements that have been anti-capitalist until be realists no to say that a gender and gender insects have been part of these movements but from those movements what do we bring forth as part of data and sex movement against now the agenda movements and now I have another concern is that it is good and celebratory that now gay transgender single parents same-sex parents can adopt children and such because of the legislative and legal battles but this being a normalizing apps being a legal and legislative act isn't itself normalizing and it is so normalizing because of the words that are tied to the basic word gay marriage marriage is very problematic transgender in the military the military complex itself is something to be dismantled adoption is something that is still tied to the question of birth the woman's body so how do we you know how do we maneuver that this normalizing effect that these very buttons can have now I there an other thing is that I feel like from the presentation the heterosexual woman has become the other you know because for the most part how gender used to be eco women sexist become equal all other non heterosexuals my question nice where is the place where heterosexual women and men cannot go for the homosexual and all the others I'm sorry for saying all the others and where is the place of convergence that we all can meet and match together that is the question and my last rounding up observation you say that this does not seek the gender movement has been misunderstood is seeking to your mate or deconstruct it seeks political freedom I don't think anyone in bucks just to deconstruct I don't think and you you did not get back on this journey just to just to the - you know to go against what is the system of power that constructs gender there is something the imagining there's something that we want there's a future that want and just like the church like amazing like terrorism like any other form of movement it seeks to normalize itself it seeks to analyze itself it seeks to you know become the order of course gender is always a part of many other things but my question is freedom that's you envision how is it a form of normalizing how is it a form of not you know and also we're saying we don't want to be dominant but you still have to dominate for something to work I could give the example of you know socialism versus maybe a capitalist state and a socialist state and socialist state is still a state it has forms of violence it has monopoly of violence and the captain's mistake still a state so thank you very much for your time and it's a pleasure thank you my man Thank You Diana our final discussant a banger desire good evening everyone and thank you very much for this discussion thank you butler professor bachelor it's an honor to have you on our platform advisor I'd like to begin with the quick vignettes of my experience with the Catholic Church and its general sense of I remember every Mother's Day celebrated at the Catholic Church in commemoration to martyrs that were killed in the 19th century by King manga and one of the arguments is that they were killed there are multiple possibilities of why they were killed but the priest told us on Mother's Day I think about two three years ago he told us that how would you people martyrs were ready to die to fight against homosexuality but today you are ready to partake in homosexuality and not die so he was chastising congregants and saying shame on you for considering homosexuality whereas in the 19th century people were ready to die for it and then he immediately added and said that it's the scholars who are to blame for it so he he was pointing fingers at the same time so so one of the often the accusation that we tend to hear is that it is foreign NGOs which are sponsoring and teaching homosexuality often denying the agency of the LGBTQ movement movements and accusing them of being an African despite sex being traced in the pre-colonial just as the priests did in the church in front of all of us so how does one then articulate political freedom in terms of gender diversity and sexual complexity when is illegal to do such when the state only recognizes society as its petrol no motive and uses its political muscle to fight away any form of sexual diversity as foreign and as unnatural and also uses it as a tool to mobilize the population and alienate those who do not conform as being what should be avoided and what should be punished by the law so so this paper shows us how gender one way found the study offers as a gateway to political freedom with which should be allowed you should we should be allowed to have such political freedom with a given by choosing it's explained as a given of chosen gender without discrimination and fear so how do we not understand this as a privilege and how do we not first try to understand this in a local and historicize context and to try and expand the power relations so often today when we speak of gender it is used to refer to women when somebody says oh let us add gender to a project immediately it means let's add woman or something but in the 1970s the gender emerges as a political category as studying hierarchical relations of power between men and women so the call for gender equality which comes from feminist movements first spoke of women's about the nation as universal and political commitments liberation and empowerment of women which had great results to a certain extent so morally lobbying for a representation of women in politics the right for women to be recognized as land owners the right to abortion and so in the scholarship gender roles were constructed as based on sexual difference so gender is what is constructed on this naturalized sexual difference localized in a particular contexts so what are the challenges were a movements political movement which mobilized women on the basis of subordination so it is with the third wave movement that disconnected Isis sex gender system and with gender is a social construct which was laid yours truly proof Butler so the experience in the South is that African feminists always often had issues with Western feminism during it as a form of imperialism that it's the white woman's but under 20th century to rescue the African woman from a privat primitive culture so it was a critique of feminism came which focused on the idea of sameness without acknowledging differences regarding class age race and sexuality so when the movement for equality in the fight for equality came to the South it assumed the product was the issue assume that African women were oppressed and that generally this is our woman are represented in the third world so one of the struggle became one of the issues for scholars became in the South would became how do we name this feminism so they they were objecting to this homogenizing of Western feminism so one way was to call it Womanism to reclaim agency and to stay clear of what they viewed as Western feminism and as earlier mentioned by Anna there was the argument for always having a flexible gender system in the pre-colonial with biological sex did not always correspond to an ideological gender which was pushed off by ETI my dear man you know me and the idea that it was during the colonial period that this rigid gender ideologies and strict masculine masculine eyes and feminized role emerged so the one of the responses for African feminists was to either to go to the pre-colonial and also to focus on motherhood as what is center that what is privileged in Africa is motherhood and friendship and that one it's not limited to the biological mother but it can be shades and this was used to refer to woman woman marriage describes by if I met you my way a woman or that a child could marry another woman or partner with a man to produce a child but the men will play no parts in the child's life so how do we acknowledge the different meanings of gender and gender roles when they cannot be in studied in isolation rather as you urge us to study would you urge us to study how women are reproduced and constituted as subjects and how the identity of a gender subject comes to operate in society so harder the fight for diversity recognized the role of culture sexuality ethnicity nationalism the state's what the role they play in all constituting subjects and how do we think of a universal gender equality when the meanings of a big what a man or woman means is contextually defined and especially in a society filled with inequalities and various forms of oppression where family is no longer it's no longer the idea of a traditional husband and wife but is today led by children such as the case of child headed homes oh we men or people living together without being married so that's political freedom it's political freedom possible that's does it allow it sir it's political freedom possible for gender diversity and social sexual diversity in in states where political freedom is generally limited by the states when you are only recognized as if you only behave in a heteronormative fashion we're generally you you there's limited way of of allowing you to act even politically especially when the state tries on antagonizing any form of gender diversity and sexual diversity and so how do we also respond to relations of power among women of different races classes and culture how do we see away from a Eurocentric focus methodology of paradigms of feminism how do we avoid women in the north as chunker mohanty puts it as they are serial subjects they are distinct by which to encode and represent cultural others so what other strategies that incorporate and acknowledge different power relations and multicultural environments histories contexts that encompass not just gender in sex one of our own dr. nina saw me in her book on gender ethnicity and democracy in violence in Kenya she shows us how the feminist woman feminist movement for women's rights obscured women's fight for economic security and power she shows us how the fight for women's rights sorry Human Rights did not take account of the structural dispossession and oppression under neoliberalism so it resulted women by focusing on the fight for rights and human and human rights it resulted in working women working class women being disenfranchised so how does it fight for gender rights and sexual diversity not leads to further alienation and loss for the little that has been gained thank you very much Thank You professor Butler the floor is yours well these are wonderful comments and I'm very grateful you can hear me well thank you Anna Diana and and Haiti all three of you I I think these are you open up huge vistas of thought and many there are many journeys we could take from from this moment in our conversation it's a moment where you you experience the profoundly limit of zoom although how beautiful that I could come and visit you like this this morning your evening but you know if we were able to then have a meal and have a discussion have hours to elaborate many of these extremely important issues that have been raised and I I must say I am sorry that we are unable to to meet more personally to have those discussions and to have a meal which is a very important part of every discussion I think now let me say this well first of all thank you I mean it's interesting in the comments I have a sense of the different projects that are happening at miser and the different ways you are you're thinking about these issues so that's also a gift to me so thank you for that I do think it is baloney let me let me say this first I mean let me talk a little bit about the left and about feminism and what has proven to be very difficult political dynamics between the two and internal to the two as I understand it within a broadly global frame and I must say that the term gender even if it had a life in anthropology in the 70s and early 80's and then became a part of feminism more broadly and queer theory in the late 80s and 90s right you no it has that history it was then taken up in what is generally called gender mainstreaming as foundations and corporations and States sought to identify gender with women okay there was no problem with gender there was no issue of gender except women and and basically insists on inclusion in any project and it had to be it had to include women or it had to include women's concerns um gender mainstreaming was a way of separating the social movements that were concerned with gender from public policy and state regulations that sought to establish and gender as a factor of an analysis in sociological studies as a category of inclusion in foundations and social policy and which didn't destabilize that term right so the destabilizing effects of gender as a category oh what worlds does it open what future does it open what ways of life does it make possible what does it distinct my ties what does it allow us to recover from the pre-colonial era all of these questions are not the questions that gender mainstreaming cares about gender mainstreaming was about setting an agenda which had inclusion and equality as as as the framework where inclusion and equality were very often decided by the Ford Foundation or where state authorities or public health officials or or and very often feminists who entered into governmental policy but that really in some ways was a was a move that was a it was a success in this sense that oh people are caring about gender now within a liberal order but was also a loss of a more radical social movement and I think we also saw that play out in the realm of of human rights discourse in human rights discourse that not just the feminist agenda excuse me not just the feminist agenda but the gay and lesbian agenda and I'm going to say gay lesbian rather than queer because there is a distinction here was also to a large extent if not fully developed within the North American or euro-atlantic framework and did very often impose cultural norms in the names of U of Human Rights so with Ian gay studies the lesbian studies queer studies feminism there was a critique of the imperialism of the category of gender there's a critique of the human rights agenda that doesn't really care what the regional local situation is because it has a universal concept of what gender is or should be or what sexual freedom is and should be and that was in large part imposed in certain ways now you know I'll give you sort of two examples of my illuminate my kind of two views on this issue on the one hand because I worked in on Palestinian freedom struggles for some time and I met with Palestinian activists in who were queer and who are anti occupation and who were anti-capitalist it became clear to me that the models of Gay Liberation the models of a feminist liberation were not once that were communicated through certain human rights doctrines were not ones that would easily be taken on and they were disruptive and they were even sometimes very dangerous because they exposed people to dangers that were not acceptable they didn't want hyper visibility as a norm they wanted me they were not only to be part of an identity movement right just I'm queer and that's all I am that's all I care about that was not also anti occupation anti-imperialism an anti-capitalist and they it was very clear that that those struggles were interlinked and the human rights doctrine kind of came in asking them to identify only as gay or lesbian and to accept a certain model of emancipation which they were not interested in they wanted to network they wanted to stay below hyper visibility they wanted ways of negotiating the problem of visibility that that when they were not allowed by certain euro-atlantic norms and and of course the disco incited with with some of the very intense is Islamophobic and anti-migrant discourses that were emerging in europe and which often you know in the case of amsterdam say allied with gay rights right we're gonna protect our gay people against migrants from North Africa from Turkey from the Middle East etc so you know it became very frightening to see how those kinds of agendas could be taken up for for massively racist imperialist purposes and and it became all the more imperative for for work on queer trans feminist issues to be to be allied with and to be analytically combined with a movement to oppose occupation continuing colonialism post-colonial reverberations with with with the critique of capitalism with the with the with various demands for political self-determination and equality so you know that that's very very clear on the other hand I've been working with a feminist movement in South America where the opposition to torture and the ability to name torture and violence against women and violence against trans people femicide feminists see do all of these social movements require the human rights framework to come and interrupt the local cultures where homicide was accepted as a way of life right so they wanted the interruption they have the critique of cultural imperialism but they also want that interruption and they had they saw how the human rights framework to some extent when it was politically mobilized in the right way could bring torturers to accountability right so I actually have two views here like on the one hand that the human rights of gay and lesbian peoples of trans people's and the gender mainstreaming can be part of a very very unacceptable political formations and they can get co-opted assimilated and and instrumentalized in ways that are really horrible we see that in the State of Israel among other places but on the on the other hand there are some there are some some some movements that have needed they needed a human rights framework in order to establish as criminal but the wanton killing of women the want and killing of trans people or travesty of that but this is not an acceptable way of life it is a crime and and those who do it should be held accountable now there's a lot to be said about this but I I do think that it makes the case for contextualization and it also makes the case that human rights say or gender politics per se they don't stand on their own they are always contextualized in local and regional situations in power dynamics and in alliances which can which can make them in fact complicitous with repressive regimes or a part of emancipatory projects that are imagining a different future and are laying claim to the right to to realize that that that different future which which involves substantial equality and substantial freedom rather than freedom is personal liberty or equality as you know exhilaration to existing neoliberal orders I was also very mindful of the fact that that for a long time you know applications from North Africa to the Ford Foundation would not be considered unless unless unless it was about outline clitoridectomy it was the only thing that they were really defined it's like if you had a literacy project like know if you had a social equality budget no the only thing they wanted to do was establish a kind of backward or barbaric Africa and that they were coming in as the saviors who would bring Africa into civilizational norms and that it was an explicitly imperial project and it also was not attentive to a responsive to what the actual you know needs of an organization may be and I've seen foundations through that in Palestine as well like where they make fun projects that normalize a problem inclusion like Palestinians have to be included and and and separate the Human Rights Project from a more radical social movement so that's where I stand on those issues I mean that's that's my basic view is that one always has to be thinking about that I I also think that throughout my travels I have many people have said you know this word gender doesn't work for me it's it's an imposition and in in China they have four different ways of expressing gender in in in Japanese you know gender is an inflection of a verb it's not a substance you don't have a gender so there are some colonial dimensions of gender theory that have imposed a kind of syntax and grammar and way of thinking on languages and cultures that don't but don't have that it and it is like you know I mean the right in France the reactionary right treated gender theory as if it was this horrible American import and and I and it was it was as it was as if it were like another McDonald's you know coming set being set up in the shows a lazy or something like this so you know I I get it gender does not always work as as a category in fact what I think is most important right now is that gender become a problem for translation let's just treat it as a problem you know it doesn't mean it obviously it doesn't mean one thing anymore and it's become a public discourse that's highly contested what's happening at the site of gender oh where is it translated well where is it not translatable what does it mean when gender doesn't translate into a language well that shows you that it's got a provincial or local character that has been masquerading as universal or generalizable when it's not so I think we should not accept gender as a universal theory and we should not let it be appropriated to the universalizing tendency of feminism I think that we we we we understand gender as a contested site and as a problem for translation and that that opens up the local Norwegian 'el and the vernacular in a way that otherwise is is is suppressed or violated so there there is a critique of gender as a kesa as a colonial import that is important to have what is strange and perhaps uncanny and paradoxical about the right-wing appropriation is that they call it an import from the north and they call it a colonial import but the response to it is ethno-nationalism right it's like let's go back to the nation let's go back to ethnicity let's cleanse ourselves of all global elements that's become closed down and and and indeed to the degree that it comes to stand for all Western incursions including financial ones we get this very problematic reactionary formation where the suppression of gender freedom sexual freedoms feminism is is precisely what what seems to hold out the possibility of renewal or security uh let me see we don't have a lot of time left but I and there were so many incredibly interesting questions that you asked me I don't think gender is the only term for thinking about a the question of how our sexual lives are organized or how our kinship relations are organized or what's the connection between feminism and LGBTQI movements it doesn't have to be that term may be gender dies as a term may be some other set of terms more important or more capacious and more responsive so I'm not you know it would be tempting to just oh I'm going to defend gender against its attackers but I think that it's more important to analyze the attack and also see the weaknesses on the part of the left so I appreciated that you you asked me to do that I mean unfortunately there's also a version of the left that thinks that all of these issues gender sexuality family formation reproductive rights parenting options that all of these are secondary and that we should be focusing on more basic issues and that brings back the specter of primary and secondary oppressions and and that's that's a that's a major problem because in fact gender is involved in the conception of the public sphere gender is involved in the conception of politics genders involved in the conception of economics it's not as if it can be disarticulated put into the private and understood as secondary or even Oh once we get rid of capitalism then gender inequalities will fall away that's not true even that notion of primary and secondary is a gendered hierarchy right we're we're all big we're all serious minded politicians if we are looking just at the economy and then we are doing secondary work if we're looking at sexuality and the household the household has always been part of the family it has always been part of the economy household labor how we how we think or imagine the family how care is organized these are at once economic and social issues economic functions are culturally articulated they're never disarticulated so you know that's one of the issues that I would really fight for that we not go back to a primary and secondary which is why I think we have to think carefully about how the notion of economic precarity is affecting is affecting populations all over the world and and affecting them in a way that goes in to the question of gender and sexuality and family formation in law I I also I guess I would also say that in a you know in a larger project I'd like to think more about what the deep cultural presumptions have been of gender theory and to work through the problem of gender as a trans translation and that this is linked to the kind of work that I've presented to you today I'm sorry that I wasn't able to go more deeply into all your wonderful questions and comments but it's great I don't know Candis back to a professor mom Donny at this point thank you thank you so much professor butt looks so I have a number of messages from a number of persons saying how much they have appreciated the this talk but that they are having technical problems hearing and so they can't really ask a question but we have we have individuals who have registered to ask questions so I'm going to recognize the three persons first comment question comes from Professor Joseph in Nigeria who is the principal of the college of humanities and Social Sciences here at Meharry the second question comes from David Gander Shinda David is has just finished his ph.d its advisor and the third question comes from dr. Sarah sorry dr. Sarah sorry is the head of the School for Women and Gender Studies at McCarran a university Josefin please go ahead it will change the order Sarah can you go ahead hello hello Sarah please please go ahead yes I did raise a number of questions but mainly I was asking how the we all know that for a long time the church has the church has framed Oh has been shipped economic engagements so why now I will focusing on neoliberalism other and looking at that relationship between religion and capitalism in a very historical and contextual mana Thank You Josephine are you back no David please go ahead what people extended the field of representation of Simone de Beauvoir one is not born a woman one becomes one - something like one is not always born male or female but what one becomes one so my question to you is what could what could be constructive Oh be constructive about that possibility okay thank you very much it's not that yeah do you want to to engage with these professor Butler as we wait for Josephine always there enough to - or nor yes of course there's more than enough and we can go back to some other topics as well well first of all thank you very much I mean I think that Sarah is is is right - to think that perhaps this could this whole issue could be approached through a consideration of religion and capitalism I think I think that's that's right I I fear that many of the frameworks we have for thinking about religion and capitalism tend to understand religion as offering an ideological expression and justification for capitalism so the work on on on capitalism in the Protestant ethic or ways in which we think about religious fundamentalism as expressing prior economic relations I mean this is this is very it's very helpful I think there are many different histories to be told I I think that it's important to realize that the church is also an economic power of enormous proportion and that the Vatican as you know has a huge amount of money and it helps to sustain and finance many of the church networks around the world it also has access to the media and it has access to small communities so it can work at very global levels and it could also work in very local ways and and it's also a real estate owner it I mean it's enormous land that and we can we can think about it in in many ways for sure I I don't mean to say that contemporary precarity as I've been describing it is something that couldn't be situated in terms of a history of a poverty or a history of the abandonment of populations in a you know through various bio political policies and strategies I think I think that's possible but it's very interesting to me you know that Pope Francis for instance he was originally part of liberation theology in Argentina and according to that view the the Bible should be read through the perspective of the poor and it was an emancipatory movement in in some extremely important ways both in Argentina and Brazil and and some of that language appears again in his more contemporary analysis so for instance he worries that local cultures the poor in particular are being subject to this colonial construct called gender but what he has effectively done is to face the fact that indigenous peoples throughout the Americas but also in Africa for sure indigenous peoples local cultures have had much more complex ways much more complex vocabularies for describing gender for describing third spirits for describing household arrangements that are non normative so what he does is he defends the poor against this imperialist construct at the same time that he faces the local cultures that he's actually seeking to defend and that's that's quite a strategy I think and it also tells us something about how Liberation Theology has been displaced by the new the new conservative agendas both within the Catholic Church and the evangelical church that have this anti gender ideology focus I mean it's not just anti gender it's also a time migrant it's also anti-socialist it's also a time Marxist it's and it and it understands gender to be part of that left which would bring back totalitarian power and it also shows up and a notion of authoritarian power which is fundamentally patriarchal and instantiated in family structure and government alike so unfortunately it's the many churches in in Latin America where liberation theology was the dominant theology have now are now or have now replaced liberation theology with anti gender ideology and and the renewal of patriarchal ISM and that's a that's a very worrisome shift and Pope Francis does represent that shift in some fundamental ways david's o remark is of course a really important one because of the the fact that intersex infants infants who are born with with no clearly demarcated sexual difference or who have a combination of characteristics intersex infants are are not born male or female so so it is the case that one is not always born male or female we cannot assume that every infant emerges in the world and is male or female in fact the way in which a doctor looks the way which the law frame sex is right there this scheme of observation belonging to the medical establishment the legal regime that to some degree controls or infiltrates the medical observation decides what's what's female what's male and and don't worry I'm not saying that there aren't some observable differences there are but observation becomes complicated when bodies are intersexed and in fact intersex is a continuum so there are there are often questions how do we name this how do we name the sex of this infant and the term gender I mean let's be clear about it it was it emerged first in this grammatical form with the work of John money who was assessing treating intersexed infants he referred to them all as hermaphrodites and he also stopped so to correct them so that they would be brought into society as either girls or boys and and it was a pathologizing discourse Anna normalizing discourse but when he asked what gender is this infant he was saying something's wrong here we don't know so the term gender emerges first it from a state of confusion about how to classify sex like how to observe it how to name it and then gets taken up in a non normative way by feminist anthropologists and then becomes part of queer theory much later so I actually come in on the third wave of gender discourse that said one is not always born male or female but one can become whole and one can become one not because of one's personal choice personal choice might have some play in this but sometimes it's what categories come to bear on you what social institutions name you what family and community norms come to interpolate you and to offer you recognition in terms of those existing categories I don't believe one is radically free to choose one's gender I don't think that we exercise person Liberty in ways that that defy all cultural norms that's actually not my position although it is sometimes attributed to me I think we are we're born into cultural categories were born into we are named and and and and we take our bearings within that practice and we find our way and the ways we negotiate that is what we might call choice or we might call agency or our own personal power but you know it's it's not as if we leap out of our cultural settings and become something radically new I don't think I don't think that's what happens um I would like to bring this conversation to a close not take undue advantage of professor Butler's presence Mizer seminars are normally three hours long which usually seminars in North American universities are two hours long at least the formal seminar so um so I'd like to bring it to an end with the last round of questions professor ITA although she's not here did send us a question on on con chat I'll just read it out she says this is a great conversation I would like but as a butler to address herself to the nested nature of this fear of gender and the hidden power of motherhood and further is this connivance of religion and fascist and further is this connivance of religion and fascism new in any way or should not the issue be how we deal with this renewed alliance at the level of theory and social movement practice the second question coming from Everest Kabira no it's also on the question of the Catholic Church and Everest really wants to know he says you mainly focus on the position of the Catholic Church and mainly the ideas of Pope Francis who seeks to protect the family it is obvious that the church has constantly preserved the conservative stance upon these issues but it is also observable that Pope Francis has expressed some liberal ideas for instance his views on divorce in case of abusive marriages could you have any sense if there are some positive elements we could learn from the church and the final the third question is is from Yosef jamberry who is a fourth year doctoral student advisor and yourself we'll ask it he is in the audience yourself please go ahead yourself can you hear me I'm just going to send you a chatter can you yes please go ahead okay so I would like to ask on this so one of the essays you sent us for for this presentation by exhibit corridor if I pronounce her name correctly she speaks of the dialectical relation between social movements and counter movements so the question I wanted to ask is do you also this do you also see this relationship as a dialectical relation in behavior and sense and if so do we in a way need counter movements to constantly reinvent our struggle do they have independent existence thank you mr. Butler please go ahead well thank you again I do think that there is there's an interesting question that Sarah raised about the power of motherhood I believe first and whether that is a power that anyone actually owns whether it's a power that is a property that can be owned within the set of property relations two men own it - two husbands owned it as the state owned it two women owned it and one one fear I have is that is that when we think of that power within property relations that we tend to misunderstand or miss describe that power I do think there is a it's interesting that mmm when that the power of giving giving birth for instance which is different from the power of caretaking are two different powers and very offense someone gives birth and some other group of people take care the mother is perhaps not always a single figure maybe the mother is a field our maternal function is distributed in many ways but the very fact that it's labile and that it can't always be controlled could be understood as a source of anxiety and when you think about the colonial efforts to establish normative family structures are to impose them upon pre-colonial organizations that would be a very interesting way to think is something about the suppression of that shared or distributed power being being targeted it's also a bringing women back into the home and singular izing the idea of the maternal so that that power is was contained and indeed often understood as owned the denial of reproductive freedom including abortion rights is a clear attack on the idea that women could or should choose whether or not to give birth or that women can separate their sexual lives from their procreative lives or that there are ways to procreate that don't necessarily evolved heterosexual reproduction and that that separation works to the advantage of some people so the disarticulation of motherhood procreation family this is it's a chaos in a frightening one for those who oppose family formations whether old or new that that move outside women as property that can test women as property and their their birthing power as as a as one that could be owned or or or contained but i also think that there we have to have vocabularies outside of property for describing what we mean by that power i think as well that what is paradoxical may be a kind of negative dialectic is that the family is is burdened as social services are destroyed and the only support for the family is churches and their communities and the social services they provide which then allow for the state to continue to withdraw those certain social services as public goods and to the degree that the family and the church have to be reconciled ated and reconnected for this particular economic system to work and for the state to be increasingly relieved of its economic burdens and and its obligation to care for the poor and the precarious we see a very particular coordination of religion state and capitalism that I do think belongs to the present moment it would be great to have that history but but contemporary precarity is linked to the anti gender ideology and also lead to the increase in authoritarianism and the the the abandonment of populations through financialization I think that's a very specific kind of abandonment and I don't think it can be assimilated easily to prior formations of capitalism it would obviously take me a longer period of time to explain that but I do think that is maybe specifically new and the the more radical claim would be there would be no anti gender ideology movement without financialization and and the production of radical precarity for an increasing number of people that's the framework that I write that one allowed me to say this is a new version of an old problem I do think that look Pope Francis has met I'm not against Pope Francis you know this is not the point I'm against us or lying that the church has taken starting with Benedict and through Francis and it was a deep disappointment to me that Pope Francis took this view that gender is a diabolical ideology it was it was shocking to me because he came in he cared about the poor he was more open to homosexuality he seemed less punitive he seemed in more open to divorce he seemed open to let him priests possibly get married he you know there are many issues where he's been quite commendable but the Family Council is the the church vehicle through which this particular position has been elaborated now for 30 years and and there's no way he's going against that and unfortunately he he saw this as as something that was a position that he wanted to take and he and he did do so so it's not about Pope Francis himself in fact you know I've often thought that there must be people in Argentina who knew him when or could talk to him and and indeed their groups within the Catholic Church very many progressive groups including gay lesbian groups and and progressive anti-poverty groups within the within the Catholic Church that have tried to reach him and try to have some some some effect so they you know the Catholic Church as such is not a single monolith it's it's a it's surely a contested sight as well well about the idea of a counter movement I mean counter movements of the sort that Elizabeth Corridor describes our are somewhat weak because they don't have an independent agenda but their agenda is to defeat a social movement and I think you know we could argue well maybe we should just call them social movements but they're not quite social movements they're not trying to achieve you know freedoms or powers or visibility for a social group they are in fact trying to discredit and stroy sometimes through threats of violence and actual acts of violence social movements that they consider to be dangerous for all the reasons we talked about today I don't think we need counter movements to reinvent ourselves I think what we need is for various movements on the left to allow their conflicts to come into productive antagonism and to reinvent ourselves as we see the exclusionary or the or the problematic character of our of our different movements right I mean like the the gay human rights effort which is Islamophobic that doesn't work you can't you can't fight the discrimination of one people by engaging in the discrimination against another buddhist violence against the people of Myanmar I mean we might we might we might want to defend Buddhism for any number of reasons but we will not accept the commission of violent crimes in the name of an ostensibly nonviolent religion right this is a contradiction and it's one that can't happen so we reinvent ourselves and we see the limits of our framework and and that can happen on the left and it does happen on the left I have seen that happen so I'm not sure it's strictly dialectical although look dialectical analysis can be really important I mean I think one of the worst things that ever happened to the feminist movement and maybe the gay lesbian trans queer movement as well as that multinational corporations decided to adopt policies in defense of gender equality and debris gos policies into the various areas of the world where they dominate and exploit and then many of the people who are exploited by those multi look and see that the multinationals are allied with gender you know so gender if it's to exist or be part of a left social movement has to make clear its critique of the multinationals it has to it has to be bound up with struggles that are anti-capitalist of that understand the specific form of corporate and financial power and are part of that struggle that's the only way in the same way that a gay human rights agenda can only work now if it's part of a struggle that's anti-racist and anti-colonial and defends the rights of migrants these these cannot be just articulated but those alliances are rough because not all those people want to stand next to each other or or be part of the same group and and those conflicts are generative so maybe what we can take from dialectics is the idea that conflict can generate a new scheme or a larger scheme or one where the internal differences are able to exist in a dynamic and sometimes conflictual relationship to one another I think we have to get used to conflict as part of unity and and I suppose another part of my work is to say that conflict doesn't have to be violent to be generative thank you thank you so much I'd like to say a word about our own work here before before we close our work is is informed by two engagements one is a very local engagement with the power under which we must function and the Society of which we are a part and the second is a more global engagement with scholarship the world of scholars debates that tried that world works like your own work just a word about the local context we have a McCreary is a public university the the the government shapes some of its policies and and this is a government which has a very contradictory relationship to the question of gender on the one hand it it claims to and not just claims to but actually does stand for gender inclusion in the way in which you've described it special seats for for women in Parliament representation of women at different levels it is it it's almost an ideal representative in the region for what Janet Janet Holley is called governance feminism and on the other hand it seeks to constantly marginalize and undercut what is new about to undercut the radical potential of gender as part of a larger endeavor to undercut the radical potential of the humanities so we have statements constantly public statements not constantly but periodically and and so that we've come to expect these statements demeaning why do we have humanities why do we have studies of women gender we have these statements from the head of the state actually they they tend to close public discussion rather than open it up your talk today put in this context you've clarified a number of existing concerns for us but you also opened up new vistas we we will know it too we'll have a better sense of it as discussion unfolds in the coming days and weeks and months but I want to thank you very much one of the amazing things about this this discovered 19 distance learning is that it is so inexpensive in a way I mean we've had to pay Internet bundles for the students but we didn't have to pay a ticket for you or hotel or anything you know and and we have this global audience in the sense but notwithstanding that I do want to give you an open invitation toast call it 19 please come to my Canada Institute of Social Research let's sit eat drink relax talk converse get to know one another thank you so much okay thank you thank you so much I really appreciate all the questions and all the thoughtfulness and thank you for your generosity and this has been a great pleasure for me we overcome our confinement in a provisional way to connect with one another and that's that's enough lifting thing for all of us during these days thank you thank you so much hi everybody we'll meet next week we'll make the announcement on on email

Channel: Makerere Institute of Social Research MISR

Views: 44,422

Keywords: Judith Butler, MISR, Gender, Mamdani, Social Mobilization, Church

Id: cqc3uCold08

Length: 128min 0sec (7680 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020