Judith Butler is a philosopher and Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Their books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), have been translated into over 25 languages. 

In this interview, Judith discusses their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), which examines how ‘gender’ has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and trans-exclusionary feminists.

All images by: Cayce Clifford
This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

 

Dani Leever: Hi, obviously we are incredibly starstruck in this moment, you are Judith Butler, so please be prepared for us to be a little bit weird until we get into the flow of things. Congratulations on your new book! It’s your first foray back into gender theory and writing for quite some time. Why now?

Judith Butler: Around 2017, I discovered in a personal way that the anti-gender ideology movement, a right-wing movement that has global dimensions, was attacking the idea of ‘gender’ and claiming that gender was a destructive force in society, and that gender studies; people who advocate for gender and policy; people who are working to change their gender or to find a way to live gender differently; were not just criticised, but condemned, and seen as threats to society. 

My name came up in an unfortunate incident in Brazil where I was figured as somehow a leading gender theorist. Many of the people who opposed me quite violently believed that they needed to drive gender from the land, and that I represented this concept of gender.

In their view, something called ‘gender’ was going to destroy their family, their way of life; that they wouldn’t be mothers or fathers anymore; that gender would indoctrinate or seduce their children.

I wasn’t quite sure what gender was at that point. I just thought, Wow, gender’s doing some work here, collecting a lot of fears, operating as a site of projection. Gender was also a hot topic in various social movements, queer movements, reproductive justice, and movements against gender-based violence.

So, gender was collecting feminist progressive issues – struggles against violence and for reproductive justice – as well as lesbian and gay rights to self-definition, to marriage, to parenting.

I saw that this movement was also targeting sex education and education more broadly, when education involved critique and imagining the world otherwise. They want all books out of the schools that suggest you might be able to rethink your gender or live gender differently.

Then I came to see that many leaders in the present world were campaigning on anti-gender rhetoric. Even Rishi Sunak, former British prime minister, has decided to ally with those who think gender is nonsense; that ‘sex is sex’ and it’s assigned at birth and it’s right. Orbán in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Meloni in Italy, Milei in Argentina, and even years ago, this rhetoric surfaced in the Sarközy presidential campaign in France.

Once people get frightened of an idea – that gender is going to hurt their children, mess up their educations, take away their identity, destroy their whole way of orienting toward family and work and life – they do come to fear something called ‘gender’.

I quickly realised that I couldn’t just use good academic arguments to show them that what they think about gender is wrong. I could not just refute that movement theoretically, but had to understand how it was operating, and with what sort of persuasive powers.

So, although I wrote in the field of gender theory 35 years ago – I was not going back to produce a new theory of gender this time. Now I’m tracking this phantasm of gender that has taken hold.

The problem is that the phantasm is not just a result of a bad reading, but a toxic figure that spreads fear and hatred and does destructive political work.

 

Xanthe Dobbie: This actually leads us in perfectly to our next question: 30 years ago, you were writing really dense gender theory.

This book has been called your most accessible book to date. You’ve stated that this is not supposed to be read within an echo chamber. So, who is the book for?

JB: I think that there are a lot of people out there who are confused. I suppose I am writing to them.

They hear about something called ‘gender’ or ‘critical race theory’ – which are very often coupled together because some of the same right-wing actors are producing hysteria about both – and they hear that children are being harmed, indoctrinated or seduced, and they think, Well, children shouldn’t be exposed to this ‘ideology’, or to any book, film or video that makes them feel that being gay, lesbian, queer, gender non-conforming, trans and non-binary are possible ways of life for them.

As you emerge into this world, you should have the freedom and imagination to do so, and you should be able to tell people how you’re feeling and what’s most important to you – whether you’re being bullied, whether your name or your gender is not working for you, that it’s actually very bad, especially if staying with a sex assignment is harming you.

For the folks who are in the middle and aren’t clear where the harm is coming from, I try to lay out what gender has meant, how it’s used, some of the fantasies and untruths said about it – for instance, it has nothing to do with biology, that it has nothing to do with material reality. That it’s a colonial imposition, or so says the Vatican, or that it’s pure freedom or hyper-capitalism – as if none of us are burdened with historical and psychic material that we tend to work out as we’re finding our place inside or outside of gender categories.

So, I guess, yeah, that’s my audience. Of course, I’m also trying to give people who are aligned with me some arguments, and some approaches.

XD: You’re equipping us to talk to our conservative families!

JB: I mean, I think there are ways of approaching the right-wing that don’t reduce to: “You’re a bunch of idiots and we have the truth.” Because then we seem arrogant and elitist, and that reconfirms their opinion that we have lost touch with the world.

But we need to counter that and say, “Actually, the world has become a more complex place, and we invite you to live in it with us.” And we ask them to find a way to take up that invitation.

 

DL: Something you speak about a lot is not letting the opponent set the terms of the debate. Why is that technique so important when it comes to responding to the right-wing or responding to fear?

JB: You might think of it as a practice of non-violence in the prose. I saw people wanting me dead, and chasing me in an airport with metal trolleys, and I just thought, Wow.

The way to respond to this, at least for me, is not to chase them back or threaten them or get in a fist fight. Although some people did on that occasion.

I worry that the tone of the debates, especially within the feminist, queer and trans community, can be full of invective, hatred and name-calling – acid tones that really convey absolute enmity.

It’s sad to me because if you look at the way the anti-gender ideology movement is functioning globally, the internal debates between feminists who are trans-exclusionary, and all those who are trans allies or trans, it doesn’t really make sense. 

We should be allied against a right-wing that seeks to undermine feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist movements, to destroy unions and to engage in climate destruction for a profit. We should be allied in our opposition to wars and detention camps, to the decimation of public services, and forcible displacement.

Consider the folks who are gaining power in emergent authoritarian regimes, they’re not making that distinction. They’re against the feminists, and they’re against the gay and lesbian parents, and the human rights people, and the decolonial people – and we’re like, “Oh no, we’re having our fight, we will think about all that later!”

It’s fine, we can have that fight. But we have to be committed to some kind of solidarity, because otherwise those folks are going to take us all down. And they are. Bardella from France is joining the Orbán list; DeSantis in Florida is on that same train.

They are lifting legal protections against gender-based violence, attacks on queer and trans people, not just in domestic spaces but also on the street. They are repealing laws that protect people – women, queers, trans people – in the workplace, or they are deciding who can be a parent.

Meloni in Italy, for instance, is deciding whether a trans person can be a parent, and with whom – I mean, she’s not going to imagine multiple parenting situations. Although she kind of has her own, which is kind of weird. [laughs]

This article appears in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue – buy a copy here.

 

XD: Staying within this field, can you speak to the weaponisation of language that’s occurring globally, in queer communities but also with regards to Palestine and the rampant genocide that is unfolding there, which you’ve been quite vocal about?

JB: You know, they are sort of related in the sense that we can ask ourselves under what conditions does a group of people get stripped of rights? And this is a question that people who study fascist history tend to ask.

Fascism emerges through a series of policies and laws and a corresponding propaganda campaign. For instance, scholars ask: “What were the first laws that were passed against the Jews in Germany, initiating a disenfranchisement that culminated in an extermination campaign? What were the Jewish people prohibited from doing? What rights were lost, and how were they lost?”

They weren’t allowed to be on the streets at certain hours, they had to wear that yellow star. They couldn’t enter educational institutions, or get jobs that would otherwise be given to so-called Aryan folk, the ‘true’ Germans.

What we’re seeing now in many regions are rights-stripping activities that are very emblematic of certain kinds of fascist or political formations.

When whole groups of people are understood to be barbaric, violent, terroristic or incapable of political self-government, they tend to be treated not just in a discriminatory way, but also in a violent way, as we’re clearly seeing in Palestine.

It seems to me that we have to start asking a lot of questions that some people don’t want us to ask as soon as we find a discourse, slogan, or a term that tries to demonise, reduce, and encapsulate who a racialised group of people are.

We see appalling speculations in the wake of the full obliteration of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructures of life, of schools and homes, hospitals and water sources, the full expulsion, terrorisation, or containment of the Palestinian people who have survived.

Israeli officials, but some in the US press as well, ask: “How will the Palestinian people be ‘managed’?” More precisely: “How are ‘we’ going to manage them?” Or: “Who’s going to manage them? What kind of government will ‘we’ impose on them?” As if they are chattel or a commodity or a demographic policy problem, not people who deserve to live in freedom with dignity and political powers to define how they want to live. 

This is the continuation of a colonial domination that now takes form through a management discourse that deprives the people of Palestine the power to define their own future – a basic precept of democracy.

They’re not treated as a people who should be able to govern themselves, even though we would insist that people should have the right to debate and decide the political form by which they are governed.

All people should have that right.

 

XD: We’re here in so-called Australia and we have such a horrific and dense colonial history, with ongoing ramifications. Do you think that such a thing as an actual democratic state or system works? Is that actually present anywhere in the world?

JB: I think successful and failed democracies are a kind of typology that political scientists use. But in my view, I follow Chantal Mouffe or Angela Davis, both of whom say democracy is an ongoing struggle. We do not just live for the triumphs but for the power to renew and expand the struggle.

Even though politics can feel like an impasse, it is not a static state. It is an ongoing struggle. There are places where that struggle is taking place, and there are other places where it’s being stalled or destroyed.

I think we have to think politically, in strategic terms: where is it still possible to realise more democracy, to struggle for more?

What kinds of Indigenous rights issues are still to be confronted and addressed by the state of Australia? Where are the reparation efforts? What is happening with migration at sea? What’s happening in your prisons?

These are the things that we know could make Australia a better democracy, if the rights of all people were honoured or they were treated as equally valuable people within a democracy, and new notions of equality and inclusion became dominant norms.

That’s a struggle. It’s a serious and wide-ranging anti-racist struggle; it’s also an anti-prison struggle.

We’re all involved in that struggle. We’re trying to hold back the dark in the USA, and not quite sure how to do that since we’re all so disillusioned with the existing parties. But I don’t think it’s a static state.

 

XD: With your experience in these spaces of the left activating and creating change, what do you think it looks like to mobilise effectively? Is there some way that we can develop a hierarchy-of-needs approach, because there’s just so much shit going on?

JB: Yeah – there is so much shit going on. I’m in the UK right now and the last thing the feminist, queer, trans community can imagine is actually speaking to their own internal opposition. The trans-exclusionary feminists and the trans allies are in a fight for their lives.

Trans folks and their allies feel, and understandably so, that if the trans-exclusionary feminists win, they would efface the actual existence of trans people. The problem is not just that trans and gender non-conforming people are being systematically misrecognised.

They’re also being vilified, returned to deadnames or first-sex assignments that they have quite deliberately moved away from in order to live in this world as the people they are.

In the USA, some states are trying to pass laws that would criminalise anyone who sought to provide care for a gender non-conforming kid to facilitate transition, or to accept and affirm whatever it is they’re going through in their gender life.

So, these are the moments where anti-trans feminists make an alliance, wittingly or not, with authoritarian crackdowns, giving the State power to decide.

We’ve already seen that in the ridiculous, appalling, and destructive Supreme Court ruling that repealed Roe v. Wade. The justices said the State has an interest in a pregnant person’s body, and that the foetus is a matter of State interest. In other words, State interest in that foetus is more important than the person who is carrying that foetus, more important than their right to either carry to term or not to carry to term.

Undermining those freedoms in the name of State interest in reproductive rights is very similar to depriving kids of gender-affirming healthcare, depriving schools and teachers the right to teach gender and sexuality in ways that allow kids to know about the world and how people actually live.

In local laws, controls are now imposed on what language kids can use, and teachers are monitored for the institutions they’ve built and what books they’ve assigned, and what research they have conducted. 

I think we would be foolish not to see that even if we think we’re in a huge fight among ourselves, we’re also all being targeted. We’re being targeted by authoritarians and sometimes fascist communities that want to drive the devil out.

We have to look up from this in-fighting to see what is happening in the world, to put the internecine struggle into perspective. At the same time, when your position or your workplace is under threat, it is hard to look up.

Unfortunately, we’re gathered more effectively by our enemies than we gather ourselves, and that’s really sad and we’re bound to lose if we let that situation continue.

So then the question becomes, what kind of coalition is possible when you don’t really love each other? When you have persistent and standing conflicts that are not yet resolved? This was the wisdom of the recently deceased Bernice Johnson Reagon who not only taught feminists about the hard road of coalition, but brought us together with song.

I don’t think you have to resolve all your conflicts to move forward in a coalition. You just have to make a commitment: whatever our conflicts are, I don’t drive you out, you don’t drive me out. And we’re committed to equality. We’re committed to freedom. We might differ on what that means, but for everyone to encourage, cultivate, make desirable a coalition based on an equality that everybody wants – not just for themselves, but for each other.

Right now, that’s super hard to do. But I actually think we have to do that because that’s what cohabitation looks like on the Earth, and that’s what solidarity looks like as it expands.

I don’t think we can have a left that is just about class and capitalism and thinks about gender and sexuality as tertiary issues. We have to show how these issues are all interconnected if we’re going to produce the coalition and solidarity we need to fight fascism and authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, the other problem we have on the left is smug patriarchal folks who think gender and sexuality and race aren’t fundamental issues. To them, we need to say, “Look who’s trying to save the Earth. Look who’s doing radical ecological activism. They’re trans people! They’re queer people! The queers against capitalism or the trans folks for racial justice.” We already know that these are interconnected issues.

I think queer people need to show we’re not just over in a corner trying to maintain our own identity at the expense of the rest of the world. You know, our identities are points of passage into a number of social justice movements and we’re in all of them. All of them.

 

XD: You’ve said that in the process of making this book you became a student of gender again. Who were you inspired by and who are you reading now?

JB: First of all, it is true, I turned away from gender after a while because I have other interests – I trained in philosophy, I love literature, I was concerned about war, I wanted to work on non-violence. I didn’t want to get trapped in that part of the academy, because then I would lose other things I love, like teaching literature with students who can’t wait to turn the page. I love that.

I have friends at the London School of Economics and Political Science who have this amazing gender institute that’s committed to global perspectives on gender and sexuality that teaches a lot of innovative work. Their modules are, I think, in some ways, models for teaching in the contemporary field.

I conferred with many of them as well as other scholars and activists around the world in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Serbia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Korea, Japan, Uganda. I read a lot of material on East Asia and Africa about how gender has entered into public debates there.

So, on the one hand, I had to read a lot to figure out what this anti-gender ideology movement is, and how it is working in different ways across regions. But I also had to figure out what the new feminist, queer, and trans perspectives are within a global frame. 

For instance, there’s a lot of African feminist and queer work that says, look, gender doesn’t work for us as a category. That doesn’t translate. It’s like, okay, we need to hear that! If we’re going to say gender is not simply a colonial imposition from the global north, then how do we rework gender politics in light of the post-colonial, decolonial critique? How do we make gender into non-imperialist politics?

C. Riley Snorton’s work on black trans life and the brutal and racist history of gynaecological surgery performed on black women, within slavery and in the aftermath of slavery in the USA, was really important for me to understand. Maria Lugones and her decolonial critique was really important for me to understand.

I’m always influenced by the way that Sara Ahmed approaches a problem and calls into question the presuppositions of what we do, how we live, and how we think. Ahmed has also taught me some things about anger. You know, the Audre Lorde notion that anger can be a source of information – like, that is true, but what do you do with anger?! Can we cultivate it into a forceful non-violent ethics and politics?

So, as I was thinking about this book, and reading Ahmed, which I always do, I saw that she puts her anger into the most lucid sentences. She just cultivates it into incredible lucidity. And I just thought: I’m not sure I can do what she does, but I have my own way of working with anger so I’m not just screaming all the time, although I could be. How do I use my anger to become conceptually useful to people who might benefit from these arguments, or who haven’t yet seen the broader global context in which this anti-gender campaigning is taking place?

 

DL: It’s interesting talking about anger because obviously, as queer people, we looked up your full astrological chart and you’re a Pisces sun but there is a lot of fire in there! A lot of your work comes from a place of talking on really distressing topics in this really calm and measured way. Is there an outlet that you have to help you direct your anger?

JB: I don’t know if it’s anger. I mean, anger is close to life force, right? So if I just scream, I’m not going to be helpful.

XD: Do you ever scream?

JB: Yeah, I scream, are you kidding? My family could tell you. I drink my tea in the morning, I read the news and I just start yelling.

DL: Aries rising!

JB: Correct! And I swim every day. I don’t know if I feel my anger then, but I feel strong, I feel alive, and I get reset, so that I can be helpful.

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves, does the method that we’re using to counter people who we think are just absolutely wrong and destructive in this world also prefigure the world we want to live in?

We should ask about our methods of resistance because they do – or they should – embody the world we want to make together, the one in which we want to live together. This also means fighting for the Earth and against corporate and State actors who profit from its destruction.

I would be happy if people could calm down and deflate these issues. The right-wing has this incredibly exciting, monstrous idea of what gender is, or what race is. Well, what if those phantasms can be deflated? What if you get to have your life, whatever it is, but you just have to commit to living in a world in which all these people are living theirs?

As a first step, that would be good. [laughing] But we’re not in that mode right now. If we look at the wars we’re seeing, or the even the culture wars we’re seeing, the idea is that you have to ‘go after’ me, or ‘do me in’, to live. And that’s the worst possible formulation, in my mind. It licenses destruction in the name of a narrow version of self-defence.

I mean, what do they have to give up, the transphobic and homophobic folks in heteronormative situations? They do have to give up the idea that their heterosexual family form is the only and best way to live, and that will be, I imagine, a loss for them.

They will be angry to learn that their heteronormative organisation of life is just one way of organising life, that there’s no ground for justification for what they’re doing, in nature or culture or law. And that the world is now composed of all sorts of intimate alliances that don’t fit that model.

They’re not going to like that. But they have to go through that. They are losing their sense of supremacy, and this is a great and indispensable form of mourning. The upside is that they get to live in the world with the rest of us.

Nobody is taking their rights away. They get to live freely, in whatever their arrangements are. But they’ll probably have a queer kid. They already have a trans uncle. And it would be better if they acknowledged that, affirmed equality and freedom in deeper ways, and agreed to live on terms of equality with all of us.

 

XD: Final question, we went to the computers, and asked ChatGPT what it would ask Judith Butler. We then asked it to “make it more fun” several times.

This is the question we’ve landed on, courtesy of ChatGPT: “Picture this. You’re the lead character in a sci-fi movie where language has the power to shape reality. What’s the first word you’d utter to transform the world around you?”

JB: Freedom.

DL: Oh, that’s beautiful. One more bonus question, have you seen the movie Love Lies Bleeding, in which Kristen Stewart’s character is depicted reading a copy of Macho Sluts (1988) by Pat Califia?

JB: I’ve planned to see it, but I have not yet. I’m a big fan of Kristen Stewart. Kristen Stewart does her own reading, by the way. I think we can assume she’s been reading all along. I know Annette Bening reads queer theory and you know, these folks are living in the world like the rest of us, it’s kind of funny.

But yes, some queer and trans theory has entered into the everyday lives of people, and that means that the strict divide between academic and non-academic cultural production is not as rigid as it once was. This is excellent news. We still get to decide what we like and agree with and what seems very wrong. 

That debate needs to stay open, though, so we can know our enemies and come together in an ongoing debate, fractious and powerful, that belongs to the resistance against fascism and authoritarianism in our time.

 

This article first appeared in Archer Magazine #20, the RESISTANCE issue.

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Xanthe Dobbie is an Australian artist and filmmaker based in Naarm, Melbourne. Dani Leever is the online editor of Archer Magazine, and moonlights as track-spinning homo DJ Gay Dad.