Who’s Afraid of Gender? In Conversation with Professor Judith Butler
- Helena de Guise
- Apr 23
- 30 min read
Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the rise of anti-gender ideology and explores the possibilities provided by psychoanalysis, feminist coalitions, the law, language, and art in counteracting this ideology in order to achieve liveability.
This interview was conducted on 15 July 2024. The views and opinions expressed by Judith Butler in this interview are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the interviewer or CJLPA. The interviewer assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the interviewee’s statements.
CJLPA: Who’s Afraid of Gender, as the title suggests, is centred around various fears surrounding gender. The ‘anti-gender’ movement encapsulates multiple fears, whether of a destabilisation of norms, of invasion, inversion, regression, or also progression. Why is it that gender has become the site on which these fears have been projected? And what is it about gender that makes it so potent?
Judith Butler: It’s an excellent question. First, let me say that the anti-gender ideology movement does identify gender as a particularly dangerous and fearsome enemy. This anti-gender movement is largely part of broader right-wing movements, which target critical race theory, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and migration studies as well. The teaching of race, gender, and sexuality tend also to be anti-migrant and/or subscribe to the Great Replacement theory. So, there are racial, sexual, gendered dimensions of this right-wing, psychosocial constellation, and gender can’t be easily or fully extricated from these other matters.
Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that potentially everyone is afraid of gender—that is, gender understood as gender identity or as a set of norms that convey both expectations and possible punishments. Gender and gender identity are, of course, distinct. Gender can be for some a way to establish a place in the world, who experience their body in a certain way, many of whom take gender for granted at the same time that they value its social operation. For some, gender anchors their experience and as such, when certain questions about gender get raised, they feel that anchor loosening, and fear a destabilisation or going adrift in directions that are unknown and possibly frightening.
That’s an abstract way of saying that many people don’t want to hear questions about how others can and do change their sex assignments or how the complexity of gender identity is lived. This fear also attends to the new vocabularies, including new pronouns, that have been developed to recognise that complexity of gender experience, not just among young people, but across generations, and which generally exist alongside political claims for equality and freedom, for protection against violence, and for protection against discrimination and pathologisation.
So, I ultimately think it is destabilising for those who hold the worldview, sometimes a religious view, that male and female are to be taken not only as naturally given or God given (divinely given through natural law) but also given for all time. That is, sex, or binary sex is considered to be an immutable thing we should not be debating—something that should not be subject to change or reinterpretation, something that is what it is for the time of life without alteration.
CJLPA: I wish to expand on the links you mentioned between race, gender, and sexuality a little later. However, prior to this, I wanted to focus more explicitly on some of the book’s terminology. The book ubiquitously refers to gender being construed as a ‘phantasm’ with purported destructive powers and draws on Jean Laplanche’s formulation of the ‘phantasmatic scene’. For the benefit of our readers, could you explain what it means for gender to be a ‘phantasm’ in the context of anti-gender ideology?
JB: One of the regrets I have about this book is that I didn’t spend enough time distinguishing the phantasmatic scene articulated by Laplanche from the adaptation I make of his theory for critical and political purposes—an appropriation that Laplanche himself or his followers would not have appreciated. The phantasmatic is invariably a structured scene where various elements come into a dynamic interplay. It has its own syntax governing the ways that elements can be related to one another. There are fantasies that we have that are more or less conscious. According to Susan Isaacs, ‘Phantasy’ with the ‘ph’ should designate unconscious processes. The phantasmatic is the syntactically organised scene in which phantasy plays out.
I was drawn to thinking about Laplanche’s phantasmatic scene because it gives us a way of understanding the psychosocial elements involved in what Umberto Eco identified as the ‘jumbled character of fascism’. Eco pointed out that those who are drawn to fascist movements are very often enticed by the fact that they don’t have to reconcile certain fears they’re living with. They are not governed by any standard of consistency or non-contradiction.
In other words, the enemy—in this case ‘gender ideology’—can stand for the acceleration of capitalism and hyper-individualism at the same time that it is taken to be a sign of an oncoming totalitarianism or state communism. Alternately, gender could represent the incarnation of the devil in our time, one which will destroy Biblical law and its mandates regarding men, women, and the family: its heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and the specific meanings of feminine and masculine. Is it an excess of freedom, of individualism, or is gender state control, a dogma, a campaign of indoctrination? It is said that gender is a doctrine of radical determinism. It is said that gender supports a totalitarian regime that will take people’s sex assignment away with the consequence that no one will any longer be able to be a man or woman. Supposedly, you will no longer be able to be a mother or a father as well! Gender is going to strip people of established sex identities. Those who fear the phantasm of gender can easily hold all these views at the same time, and land upon a ‘cause’ for their anxiety about what is happening to the world they once knew. And then we also have a different version of problems: gender permits for trans women to enter prisons and take over the place or invade it or do harm.
So, there are many different kinds of phantasmatic elements that are held together in one place or by one people, and that means they’re under no obligation to reconcile them. There’s no consistency mandate. There’s no coherency mandate because this ‘ideology’ collects them all and promises a relief from every point of anxiety or fear. There is something nearly religious in that promise which most fascists make. They’re going to restore order. They’re going to restore society to the way it used to be—in the case of anti-gender fascists, it is often patriarchal order or heteronormativity that needs to be restored. In this way, a promise of the restoration of order tends to also be part of the promise of fascism.
There’s one more point I would like to add. Freud’s interpretation of dreams was important to Laplanche, but also to me in thinking through the appropriation of Laplanche’s theory here. This is because in a dream sequence, as opposed to a logical one or most conscious ones that take a straightforward narrative form, there are elements that hold together different psychic issues—they could include an anxiety, a desire, or a fear. When one looks at how a dream is organised in terms of the characters, the landscape, the transitions, and the ambient feeling, it seems as if the psyche of the dreamer is, in fact, distributed in a certain way across the scene. It is, as we know, sometimes difficult to understand that the dream scene is the scene of one’s own psyche. It may well be informed by a profound residue from everyday life or infantile histories, or impressions from others. It’s never freed of the environment or social interaction—it carries those traces as well.
The phantasmatic scene is a particular way of rearranging those elements that doesn’t necessarily correspond in any mimetic way to reality; rather, it gives us a refraction of reality of a certain kind. I think that this way of thinking about phantasmatic scene helps us with Eco’s idea that here are these apparently disparate issues that are somehow brought together in a scene without having to be reconciled according to conscious, logical measures—criteria that we might usually seek to use.
CJLPA: That’s a very helpful framework. When you referenced Freud in the context of dreams, the first thing that came to me was his idea of Verschiebung (displacement) which brings to mind how gender has been distorted in order to accommodate disparate, often conflicting, elements of anti-gender ideology.
JB: Yes, Freud’s ideas of both displacement and condensation are at play, but so too is externalisation. I continue to think that we can’t do an ideology critique of the critique of gender ‘ideology’ without Freud.
CJLPA: Building on the aforementioned fears surrounding gender, the book also identifies that one of the consequences has been a rise of trans exclusionary feminism. The politics of fear, here, is generally centred around a fear of replacement and/or of violation. How seriously should this fear be taken? Additionally, I wonder whether over-engaging with these concerns risks dominating the discourse, allowing this fear to have primacy over the right to existence for trans women?
JB: Well, first of all, the fear of violation when stated should always be taken seriously. I think we all have a fear of violation. I don’t know anyone who belongs to a vulnerable community—whether that’s gay, lesbian, bisexual people, travestis in Latin America, trans people, or Black and Brown people, especially migrants—who doesn’t fear violation. But how we define who or what is threatening to violate us is a different matter. If we decide that members of other vulnerable communities are the real threat, then we have forgotten to ask what makes any of us vulnerable. The answer to that involves knowing the broader map of power, including extractivism and exploitation, abjection and effacement.
If many of us live in fear of violation, harassment, harm, rape, and murder, then we need to think clearly about the conditions under which those fears are rightly registered, and those in which they are incited and magnified to serve a fully different political purpose. I find it especially hard these days when countries who had earlier signed the Istanbul Convention are now unsigning that convention that did seek, for instance, to protect women against marital rape and gay and lesbian people against discrimination and harm. It mandated various kinds of social policies to help people understand the harm of homophobia and misogyny, and these are mocked and distorted by the political right as totalitarian educational projects.
Indeed, we have leaders now who mock feminist aims or misuse them for their own purposes. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, in their debate preceding the general election, debunked trans claims in ways that I found profoundly disrespectful and politically regressive. And Giorgia Meloni, who now fashions herself as a centrist despite her prior affiliations with fascism, promotes the restriction of reproductive rights, including access to reproductive technology. She also has begun the process of nullifying trans rights and challenging the legitimacy of gay and lesbian parenting rights. There are many people on the loose in positions of power who make us all feel the fear of violation, because it’s not just that we are losing legal protection, but violation is being renamed as something normal, and this discourse gives permission for a certain kind of violation.
There seems to be no recourse when the laws that are supposed to protect us actually harm us. Protection is itself a problematic notion, since it assumes a ‘protector’ who has power over us, and without whom our safety is put in question. Equally, when the laws that protect us are withdrawn or mocked or rendered inoperative, we are left even more vulnerable, having to find resources and support in extra-legal networks and communities. So, I understand the fear of violation, and I don’t blame any of the trans exclusionary women from voicing the fear of violation, but I do hold them accountable for making trans people, who suffer that same fear, into the paradigmatic abusers. This move is painful, unknowing, and unjust, amplifying prejudice rather than destroying it.
I have suggested several reasons for the fear of violation. These fears are multiplied for Black and Brown women, trans people, non-gender conforming people, and migrants. One question I have is how did it come to be that trans women, who have historically broken with certain notions of manhood to embrace an identity necessary for their lives—an identity that puts them at greater risk of discrimination, harm, and even murder—are now the targets of feminists who understand what it is to be vulnerable and courageous? Why wouldn’t we object to rape, violation, harm, and discrimination against all vulnerable communities? Identifying another vulnerable community as the true enemy, the one with all the power to hurt us, not only breaks solidarity but also misreads the map of power in our times. That is a perilous error and plays into the Right’s plan of action.
Unfortunately, many trans-exclusionary feminists use rhetoric similar to that of the new fascists and neo-authoritarians. I’m not saying they are, therefore, fascists or neo-authoritarians, but it remains remarkable how rarely they have stepped forward to distinguish their criticism of trans people from a right-wing eliminationist discourse. I wish they would, because if they don’t like being called fascists, they should show that they aren’t.
Feminists need to consider what alliances we want to be part of. In Latin American feminism, trans people are at the centre of the battle against fascism and state violence. Even the emerging left in France, although fragmented, shows how quickly people can overcome deep divisions when they see the necessity of opposing right-wing, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic forces. Our alliances need to be as deep or deeper than their hatreds. We make a grave mistake when we become hyper-sectarian or separatist, identifying other vulnerable communities as the true danger to our lives.
CJLPA: This brings up several important points. You pointed out that many people understandably fear violence, and you also mentioned the lack of recourse when protective laws are rescinded. Additionally, you touched on how shifting political landscapes influence this situation. Given this context, how do you view the law’s potential: is it still effective, or is it too closely tied to shifting politics, making its protections inherently unstable and prone to change?
JB: I think the law is really important. I appreciate left legal scholars and organisations—especially those who take on lost cases to make a point. I don’t share the deep suspicion of the law that some people on the left have. However, I believe it would be terrible if legal frameworks became the ultimate political frameworks. We need a larger framework for politics that includes the law and allows it to serve broader political and social aims. The law cannot effectively support goals like freedom, equality, or justice without a political movement and a firmly built vision of politics that provides the aspirations, ideals, and principles guiding our legal activism.
CJLPA: Practically speaking, how can we leverage the law to achieve these desired changes?
JB: Some years ago, I was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and now I am excited to see how they use legal strategies to advance progressive politics. They have an extraordinary way of thinking about the law. There’s also the National Lawyers Guild in the US, and I’m sure there are UK equivalents that I’m not familiar with, which are committed to political aims that drive their decisions about cases to take, how to argue them, and which precedents to establish in order to support our political struggles. This dynamic is happening, and as academics we might need to engage more deeply with these legal organisations to understand how they work and perceive the relationship between law and politics, allowing that to inform our own efforts to distinguish and ally the two.
CJLPA: I now want to turn to the audience of the book. In the work, you describe experiences encountering individuals who are unwilling to engage in debate, some of whom even view your work and ideology as demonic. Moving beyond this group of people, I wonder how you navigate discussing the issues raised in this work with those who are willing to engage but who are outside of academic contexts? I noticed that this book, unlike your previous works, was published by a non-academic publishing house. Is there a deliberate shift in the audience you aim to reach with this book?
JB: There is often a difference between the audience you wish to reach and the one you actually reach. According to Amazon, my work reaches people in gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and those interested in the critique of fascism, which isn’t surprising. There has been some mainstream crossover, which I’m glad about. Even though I conceived this book as a non-academic one and deliberately published it with trade presses, it may still be a bit dense and lengthy for a broader public. Non-academics can get certain things from it, based on my conversations with many readers.
I wasn’t trying to defend my former positions in this book; I didn’t revisit my previous works like Gender Trouble or Bodies That Matter to clarify or defend past ideas. It wasn’t an academic self-defence or clarification. The concept of performativity is mentioned only a few times and in passing, which was deliberate because the book is not about me or my work.
Additionally, I dispute the idea that I have an ideology or that gender is an ideology. For me, self-criticism is important as I embark upon a new project. Often in my scholarship, I end up questioning presumptions from my earlier work. I appreciate the living character of theoretical work, where you can write a book with full conviction and then revise it based on people’s responses that you found persuasive. Academic humility is important. We shouldn’t hold positions over time and defend them against all opposition. Instead, we should listen to those who have good criticisms, or feel excluded or misunderstood by our positions, and be willing to change if we want to be responsive and overcome our own blind spots and unwitting prejudices.
Regarding the performativity of gender, I’m no longer sure how I feel about it. Other issues seem more important to me now. I became interested in talking to people who are unsure about what’s going on with the contemporary discourse on gender. For example, are women in prisons truly threatened by trans women? Or is the real threat from guards, or the prison system itself? The same people who threaten women in prisons often threaten trans people as well. What do we make of that? The violence of the prison system should be a focus, not just individual violent acts, but the harm inflicted by largely unsupervised guards, psychiatric personnel, and sentencing protocols.
Similarly, are women (AFAB) truly threatened by trans women using the same bathroom? Understanding the challenges trans people face when deciding which bathroom to use is crucial. Trans women and trans men face significant vulnerabilities and violence in these situations. For example, I have a friend, a trans man, who was thrown against a wall by police for choosing to use the women’s bathroom because he didn’t feel comfortable or safe in the men’s room. He was trying to avoid a potential scene of harassment by using the women’s bathroom. He figured he could be taken to be a very masculine lesbian butch. Why should such a person be in an imperilled situation no matter which bathroom they used? We should be identifying these vulnerabilities and sharing strategies and forms of resistance in a collective fashion rather than viewing each other as primary enemies, and letting the larger structures of oppressive power fade from view. This also applies to trans people who see feminism as their enemy. What a terrible and unnecessary division! The issue isn’t feminism as a whole but the broader transphobic world, with some feminists engaging in transphobia in horrific ways. Let us keep those larger structures in mind. We are more easily gathered together as a right-wing phantasm than by ourselves, in the interests of solidarity.
CJLPA: I would like to hone in on the importance of listening to those who feel excluded and allowing our own perspectives to be shaped by the lived experiences of others. I also appreciate you sharing your friend’s experience. With this in mind, I’m wondering whether you see a clear distinction between scholarship and activism, and if so, how would you define that distinction?
JB: I think there is a distinction. I think this book tries to show a not fully scholarly audience what scholarship actually does—that the false things that are said about gender can be defeated or debunked in a patient and informed way. For instance, I discuss biology at some length because people often wrongly say that gender denies the materiality of the body. That’s simply not the case. Look at the incredible work in feminist biology and feminist science studies—it is an extraordinarily rich field.
There are different ways to debunk or to oppose the false things that are said about gender. That’s important to do, but I’m also trying to deflate the fears that have become prevalent in the public discourse. People believe that their traditional households will be disrupted or destroyed by some gender ideology that’s let loose into the world. That’s not the case. A trans or queer couple living next to you won’t disrupt your traditional heteronormative marriage with your children and a dog. They won’t come rushing into your home to take your sexed identity away.
Many feel that their sense of being natural, necessary, and universal is profoundly challenged by the existence of queer kinship and trans folks trying to find reproductive technology that works for them. They feel deeply threatened. But are they truly threatened? What is it they’re actually at risk of losing? The only thing a traditionalist who’s afraid of gender ideology is losing is the sense of being superior, exclusive, and universal. My advice to them is to mourn that loss. You still get to have your life. It’s the same thing you’d say to a white supremacist: yes, you’re losing that sense of supremacy. That’s good. You’re going to live in a better world governed by equality, and that loss is necessary to live in that better world.
I don’t expect the most avid proponents of anti-gender ideology to be convinced by me. I suppose I am trying to talk to people who are confused in the political centre or who don’t know how to adjudicate some of the claims that are circulated without support on social media and news outlets. I looked at the Sex Matters internet site, for instance. They take established scientific journals and reject their claims without offering evidence to the contrary. This is bad scholarship and bad journalism. We need to listen carefully and distinguish between informed and ill-informed views.
I had someone come to a talk in San Francisco recently; she was a member of a trans-exclusionary feminist group. She and her cohorts leafleted the event in advance, and some of them came inside and then lined up to speak after the presentation concluded. One of them asked a question, and I thought that was good opportunity to see whether dialogue is possible. That person spoke about her fear of violation, identifying trans women as the threat to her personal safety. My approach was to have provisional empathy with that fear and then to open it up, and to ask if what you say you’re fearing is indeed the source, the reason for your fear. Are there other sources of this feeling that many of us share that something is, in fact, threatening our lives? I said, ‘like you, I fear violation. But unlike you, I understand its sources and instruments differently’. If we had been able to pursue a conversation, that would have been a starting point. It’s important to understand the kind of fear trans exclusionary feminists feel, and to offer them another way of understanding how widely shared that fear is, what might be accounting for it, and to let them know that trans and queer people share that fear. That can lead to a potential solidarity. Maybe we could overcome what I take to be a lamentable division among some feminists—a very minority view within feminists—that is trans exclusionary, creating a division between them and trans and queer allies.
CJLPA: In the book, you propose a form of coalition wherein all those targeted unite effectively, despite their differing viewpoints, leveraging their power in numbers. You note that a coalition, at its best, is not comfortable. However, beyond discomfort what do you think are the primary obstacles standing in the way of achieving this coalition? And how do we go about minimising these?
JB: I think it’s perfectly possible to ally without overcoming obstacles. To accept that there are, at least for now, irresolvable differences, and at the same time, to realise that an alliance is necessary in order to fight off a form of power—whether it’s fascist, neo-fascist, or authoritarian—that is going to strip people of their rights.
Here I am talking about women of all kinds, trans people, gay and lesbian people, queer people, migrants, vulnerable people, especially Black and Brown people, and indigenous people. We really identify and document who is involved in the attacks on such people and what powers are undermining the economic futures of those who are most precarious, including workers whose unions have been weakened or disbanded. We would be very foolish not to see the larger picture.
People ask me, ‘How would we get along? There’s so much vitriolic antagonism. How could we ever make an alliance?’ Ultimately, there are times when that vitriol and antagonism are not resolved but are understood to be secondary when threats are more appropriately identified as coming from fascist or right-wing sources of profit and power, both state and non-state powers. Ecologically speaking, we don’t have time for these internecine conflicts or, if they are necessary, we can accept the unresolved character of those conflicts as we join in the fight against fascism. When the question becomes, ‘How are trans and feminist people going to get along?’, we need to ask: What is the framework in which you’re asking that question? It’s very small and has narrowed into this little fight. What’s the background for that fight? What happens if we open up the frame to understand the background of that fight?
To what extent are we having that fight in order not to see ecological catastrophe, the true damage of hyper-capitalism, whose trace is in fascist discourse, or the true damage of amplified state power, whose trace is also in fascist discourse? What would a left, feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist alliance look like that could identify these issues given all the resources we have from socialist history and theory and from ecological criticism? What could we do if we understood those internal differences as persistent but secondary?
CJLPA: Looking at the bigger picture is clearly essential in the context of this coalition. However, some might be concerned that within a diverse and pluralistic feminist coalition, marginalised voices could risk being overshadowed by more dominant perspectives. What is your view on this potential issue?
JB: The form of coalition that I advance is one that Black feminists have articulated. I think that Black feminism is the future of feminism, and that it should indeed lead the way. Feminism from the Global South that has been building coalitions knows how to do it. These are the most important points of reference for thinking about coalition. It’s from that hard-won understanding that the rest of us need to learn. In that sense, those who emerge fighting from a history of subordination are leading the way.
CJLPA: I fully agree that intersectional feminism is the way forward. This also ties in with a discussion of language, as the book mentions how Eurocentric fictions have organised language into fixed and normative binaries. Therefore, while there is power in putting oneself into discourse (through the use of pronouns, for example), not everyone is given this power. What, then, does a decolonial approach to understanding gender look like, and how do we go about widening the ambits of discourse?
JB: This is one of those moments that Naomi Klein refers to as a ‘doppelgänger issue’. The Vatican claims that gender is an ideology seeking to colonise the Global South, asserting that gender is another imperialist export and will undermine local cultures, especially the culture of the poor. Of course, if you’re on the left, you recognise the left version of this argument: ‘Oh no, we don’t want a feminism that’s imperialistic. We want an anti-colonial feminism. We want a decolonial feminism. We want a feminism that thinks seriously about white supremacy and colonial power and how feminism has been deployed to support those forms of objectionable power’. Of course, we want to deploy feminism against those colonial powers. There’s just no question about that. So, we could be taken aback or even taken in by the Vatican’s claim. But here is where we need to make a distinction.
What the Vatican would like to impose on the Global South is a Christian missionary view of the natural family: white, heteronormative, and anti-feminist. This view re-subjugates women and challenges the notion of gay and lesbian marriage or gay and lesbian forms of intimate association or kinship that are not necessarily marital or conjugal. So, we see a different kind of colonial imposition, the one that the Church has always been imposing, acting as if it is the protection against colonial domination. Now that needs to be exposed and analysed in detail. It’s not easy because we do know that there are colonial forms of feminism, and that feminism has been deployed in a pernicious and horrible way to wage wars against Muslim and Arab peoples, for instance. Such ‘feminist’ war tactics fail to recognise both Muslim feminist networks and anti-colonial feminist movements. The US has used feminism to advance war and colonial occupation, as we see in the mainstream coverage of the war against Palestine. But Palestinian women and children have been the ones to suffer most in that war.
So, we do need very strong criticisms of colonial feminism, but we also need to understand how versions of colonialism can be furthered by the right-wing appropriation of left arguments and the creation of a kind of confusion among people who cannot see the difference. It cannot be the case that we conclude, ‘Oh, the anti-colonial thing to do is to accept the Church’s teachings!’ No, that’s to accept a different version of colonialism, or sometimes the same version that the Church says is imposed by the Global North as they themselves impose it (from the Vatican, part of the Global North). I do think the Global North imposes ideas of gay rights, lesbian rights, and feminism that are very often smug, arrogant, and destructive, assuming what forms resistance and liberation should take for all people, imposing local norms as if they are, or should be, universal. That is actually a critique I have made alongside many others, and I continue to make it. Unfortunately, it rhymes with the Vatican view. Here again drawing distinctions is crucial, marking off the critique of colonial feminism and the one that’s being advanced by the Church as a subterfuge for the amplification of its own colonial power. I do try to address that a bit in the book. It’s not a large section, but I point to the scholarship that is doing that and should surely be read.
CJLPA: Who’s Afraid of Gender? also explores ‘monolingual obstinacy’ and the productive potential of translation. Could you explain these concepts briefly, so that those readers who may not have read the book yet have a sense of how this ties in with our discussion.
JB: Well, one way of entering that question is autobiographical. I wrote Gender Trouble in 1987 and 1988. It came out in late 1989. Suddenly that book took off in the US and the UK, Australia as well, and was translated into twenty-something languages in the following years. I was invited to various places, met those translators who were working with my language in Latin America but also in Eastern Europe. Those translators were also scholars. They were, and remain, scholars of the topic and they knew things about gender, sexuality, law, social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis that I didn’t know. I ended up learning from them not only about theory and the problem of translation, but the asymmetry of translation, how English floods non-English markets, how scholarship from an array of languages rarely finds its way into English unless the scholars master academic English. I also had to confront the limits of English, the arrogance of anglophone theory, and the importance of attending to the non-translatable.
Indeed, exposed to other languages through the translations of Gender Trouble actually allowed me to learn different ways in which gender—as a term, a concept—is and is not translatable. Gender produced a disturbance in the so-called ‘target language’—I hate that military word, but that’s how translation theory works. I learned all kinds of things about why it doesn’t work. For instance, many people in South Africa explained to me why the term gender doesn’t work because there are all sorts of local ways in different African languages for designating what we call gender positions in kinship and community. Many people in East Asia explained why it was so hard to translate and the various political debates about translation. Even in Germany, where it seemed like ‘Geschlecht’ was the only thing you could use, it was too biological, related more to ‘species’ than to difference or identity. Maybe we should just say ‘gender’, or in French, could you really say ‘genre’ given the literary traditions that distinguish among them with such enthusiasm? So, I learned a huge amount as a consequence of being translated and actually came to be able to read in Spanish, which I never could do before, even though I live in California—and should have, much earlier. My own first-worldism was appropriately challenged, if not shattered. I became very interested in all the examples of why gender does not work. And I made friends with my translators, many of whom are among my most important interlocutors. My views on the importance of multilingualism to any theory of gender were established only after being translated.
Perhaps one insight I have now is the result of translation: gender sometimes works in ways we don’t anticipate and is sometimes feared in ways that are completely different from what it means in the scholarship or even in law and social policy. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s not the term; sometimes it needs to be forfeited for another vocabulary altogether. Those of us who’ve been working in that framework of gender, or gender studies, need to listen and learn and revise what we think according to what folks who are grappling with the issue of translation tell us.
Even though I haven’t been strictly monolingual as an adult, I still think every English language speaker and writer has to deconstruct their monolingual obstinacy, take apart the assumption that English is the language in which theory takes place or English is the language in which things become most clear. It’s not the case. Theory is not produced in the Global North, or in English, and then applied to the South. For those who work with that unexamined assumption, they operate with an arrogance that has to be undone. Embracing the practice of translation is a knowledge-seeking activity. It is, in fact, one of the main ways to learn about the world, that is, how the world is organised differently. It is also one of the main ways to learn how to speak across languages with greater care and openness, letting another language enter and transform one’s thought. I am a strong supporter of a transnational and multilingual forms of coalition. Those are both enormously important for any global movement that addresses the conditions of destruction, exploitation, extractivism, and domination.
CJLPA: It is crucial to go beyond one’s own perspective, rooted in one’s language, to understand how gender is currently understood by others and how it possibly could be understood looking forward. With this in mind, it is interesting that some feminists or gender theorists advocate for a post-gender world. Yet, your approach emphasises making diverse social embodiments more liveable.
Within the transgender community you acknowledge that while the binary framework works for some to articulate their gender identity, it is unworkable for others. Specifically, for those for whom the binary is unworkable, there is a form of hermeneutical injustice when it comes to the intelligibility of non-normative expressions of gender identity. There seems to be a tension between the flexibility to self-describe and this social intelligibility—I wonder what you make of this tension.
JB: Well, look, there are those who say to me, don’t we want to simply abolish the gender system? And I generally respond, from what position would we, or could we, do that? I accept that we’re historically formed and that we act from a distinct situation. I would not say that we are historically determined in a deterministic sense by all kinds of norms. We can, and do, break with them. But the conditions of that break? How do we understand that historically, as evidence of the open-ended and nondetermined character of history and historical formation? I don’t think we can leap out of history or our own historical formations to simply get rid of gender. We can do that in a play or a film, or maybe a dream, and dreams are important for politics, to be sure. But what precisely is the practice of abolishing gender?
We could start by saying, ‘Okay, hospitals shouldn’t assign sex’—which is a very interesting idea, one that Monique Wittig proposed, and I liked it when I first heard it, but I took it as a thought experiment. If we seized power in hospitals and banned sex assignment, then we would be accused of being those totalitarians who are going to strip people of their sexed identities. Is that what we want? Or are we on the side of freedom, wanting to expand the domain of gender freedom? Of course, that threatens the Right from another side, but so be it. If we want to abolish gender through law, then through what state power would we act? And would we then be aligned with the State, or would we be State powers? Is that what we want?
I think of sex assignment as iterable, meaning it happens not just once, but throughout life. It happens again and again. I suggest that that’s true for people who stay with their original sex assignments, who effectively say ‘I was assigned female. I like being female. Female is great. I’m assigning myself female all the time. I am in my life living out that assignment and repeating it and reproducing it’. No one simply has a sex assignment. It is being renewed all the time, or broken with, recommenced with another category. So we might say there’s an iterable or performative dimension to sex assignment (which does not mean it is fake or an artifice). No, it’s part of the temporality of a life. Sex assignment happens when we rely on observations about what sex someone is. There are chains of such acts, and those chains can be broken by those who actually need to break the chain to live, and to start another sequence as a way of living, if not flourishing.
I think that takes us away from the idea of a punctual and definitive sex assignment, which I don’t think does justice to the way that assignment works in a lifetime over the course of a life—and how it can change.
CJLPA: I find this approach highly compelling. I am also curious to hear what role you think art—especially visual art which transcends language—has in this venture of ‘curating’ one’s self-expression and broadening the remits of how gender is perceived.
JB: I think art is crucial. I think we need a new imaginary or, rather, counter-imaginary. The right wing is filling the world with these phantasms. They appeal to passions like fear and anxiety, longing for a different world, mainly an ideal of a former way of life. And what do we on the Left offer? What passions are ours? And how do we appeal to them imagining a future in a different way—not the imagined future in which patriarchy and racism is restored, but an imagined picture of greater liveability, equality, justice, and freedom?
I do think that liveability has to be included as a goal. It sounds like a very modest goal, but it’s not. It actually includes survival and flourishing. And it assumes equality and universality, since I cannot achieve a liveable life if the conditions for that life are not accessible to everyone else. At the same time, it is not easy to stipulate for everyone what constitutes the ‘liveable’. I published a short book with Frédéric Worms on this.[1] For instance, I’m not going to say from the outset that anybody who stays in the binary gender system is not living a liveable life—who would I be to say that? That’s just wrong. However, if they live in that binary system and say that no one can live outside of it, then I’m going to oppose them. So, I think we need to accept from the outset that people find liveable very different ways of naming and practicing embodiment. Affirming that complexity is important with the caveat that certain ways of practicing sexuality can be coercive and violent and must be categorically opposed.
I understand that Gender Trouble was taken by some readers to license self-expression as a value. Although that is certainly important, I’m less interested in self-expression than in establishing modes of liveability that includes the affirmation of complexity. Once we go back to self-expression as the core of our aesthetic practice—focusing on issues such as self-crafting, we’re also implicitly or explicitly subscribing to individualism. And then we’re forgetting that what we need to do is fight for a world in which liveability is achieved by affirming complexity and difference. So, I want a common, if not collective, vision, and not simply an individualistic one.
CJLPA: Finally, I’m aware that you have put off writing a book on Kafka to write Who’s Afraid of Gender? I’m curious about whether you believe Kafka’s writings offer any insights into countering anti-gender ideology.
JB: I always have—there might even be a brief reference to Kafka in Gender Trouble. I had read Derrida, I’d seen Derrida give a talk on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ as I was writing Gender Trouble, and I’ve been teaching Kafka for many years. I love his humour, and I appreciate his ways of seeking to flee a world that is fundamentally unliveable. There are fundamental questions in Kafka about the ways that legal life confounds human existence, extending key legal concepts like judgment and prison to everyday life. He lets us to see that the promises of law to deliver justice, for instance, are very often broken, or that some legal systems built on property relations and racism, break their promise of justice at the moment of making it. As a result, we have to reconceive our way of understanding law as bound up with that broken promise and the way that promise works in our lives, inspiring the very hope that it tends to destroy.
It is easier to think about the false promises of authoritarian and fascist leaders than the ones we live within democracies governed by the rule of law. Of course, there are false promises that are made by fascist leaders right now, but we would be wrong to think that the fascism at issue is not produced in the midst of democracies that are supposed to be their opposite. The false promise is exciting and blinding, and some people would rather have the promise, regardless of its falsity, than not have it at all. Very often in these cases, the promises of a restoration to a former time are fuelled by a restoration fantasy.
Kafka exposes how that works. In his short fiction, mainly parables, but also the novels, the narrative expectation is established that law will deliver justice, that liberation is at hand, that a way out can be found. And then, in The Trial for instance, it turns out that sentencing and punishment precede the trial that never arrives. This destruction of a narrative expectation relates, for instance, to the work of Ruth First’s 117 Days. That work speaks, of course, to questions of indefinite detention under South African Apartheid, but it also speaks to the scrambled sequences that now govern our lives. So, I would argue that there are temporal and fictive dimensions to fascist passion and fascist promise that would benefit from a reading of Kafka.
CJLPA: What strikes me most about Kafka’s writing is the quintessential narrative manipulation of time and space. To me, it seems that this disfiguration and disorientation from conventional coordinates also prompts readers to reimagine the status quo and to consider different realities which easily extends to gender.
JB: For sure, if you think about developmental narratives—‘oh, you’re born a girl, you’re supposed to become a woman’, many ways of blocking freedom and complexity are taking place. The detour, the error, the ‘failure’ are all constitutive of the scene of gender, as are new beginnings and persistent modes of ambivalence. This temporal elaboration within which we seem to live, almost unconsciously, is generally accompanied by great disturbance, and that is significant. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in forward motion of any kind; I am in favour of forms of hope that can be shared and grounded in workable solidarities. Kafka disturbs the temporal developments that are often assumed or expected in literature, law, and life, so one question is how such expectations inform promises of a political or legal kind, or even religious expectations of fulfilment. That disturbance does open up a different kind of imaginary, one perhaps that we don’t know how to expect, but which will change the course of our political expectations of justice. Or so I hope—see, I do hope.
This interview was conducted by Helena de Guise. Helena graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2022. She remains academically interested and personally engaged in feminism, law, German literature, and postcolonial theory.
[1] Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms, The Liveable and the Unliveable (Fordham University Press 2023).
