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The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Who is afraid of gender? In some sense, all of us are. If we think of gender as a set of norms that communicate expectations about how we should emerge in the world, what bodily form we should take, and how we are to comport ourselves, then there is good reason to worry that one will “fail” at the task required. Who sets the rules, and what freedom is there to change them?
I am Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Who’s Afraid of Gender? published by Allen Lane in the UK.
Gender, conceived as a normative organisation of social reality, is also communicated as a set of demands or expectations with the understanding that certain very painful consequences may follow if one fails to conform. Thus, some might fear gender
as one would fear any set of norms and possible punishments, but there is something intimate about gender: it is a way bodies are organized but also a way they conduct themselves in relation to others. It is this body, after all, material and singular that is at once socially formed and acting with, against, or beyond those norms.
Yet others, doubtless mindful of this intimate terrain, wish for a set structure, one that does not change in time. An identity fixed either by natural or symbolic law, or by the state itself.
They fear the variability of gender, not only the different ways that men and women now act, but the apparent fact that the categories change meaning in time, that those assigned female at birth can become men, that those assigned male at birth can become women, that intersex people are demanding recognition for their embodied lives, and that some people live outside the binary categories of man and woman either in new categories or in the interstices among them.
Those who are unsettled by the variability of gender, its different configurations, are especially vulnerable to those politicians who insist that “gender” is an “ideology” and,
together with other forms of “wokism,” are responsible for the destruction of the family,
civilization, man, or national cultures. The anti-gender political discourse heightens the
ordinary anxiety that people have about gender, associating and conflating that anxiety with a generalized fear about the future of the world itself, its climate, the increasing precarity of work, the intensification of wealth among the very few, the open-ended character of brutal wars, the challenges to the homogeneity of national
and local cultures posed by migration and displacement. There are many reasons to
fear, but gender is not the cause of any of those conditions that have given rise to a
generalized concern about the future of the world.
In my book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I track the history of the anti-gender ideology movement from its inception at Vatican conferences in the 1990s through its appropriation and reformulation in Latin America and Eastern Europe. I respond to
many of the criticisms levelled against gender including those that characterize gender as a made up construct that denies the materiality of the body; as an imperialist concept imposed upon local cultures of the Global South; as a doctrine that has the force to destroy the family, man, civilization, and the natural order; as a form of indoctrination or seduction harmful for children; as a denial of biology or biological
difference. In addition to refuting these charges with arguments and evidence, I propose that gender has become a “phantasm” that collects anxieties,
fears, and desires that are already circulating in the general public about the future of
their way of life, the fate of their children, if they have them, and the general instability of economic and political life. I suggest that people do have reasons to fear: the continuation of war, climate catastrophe, the increasingly destructive character of capitalism; systemic racism; and forcible displacement of many populations. Gender is not the reason for any of these instabilities, which is one reason why the defense of gender as a framework for social analysis, as a field of study, as an essential part of research at all universities, has to provide an analysis of how gender became construed as a demonic power and destructive force. The defense of gender is at
once the defense of open inquiry and the ideal of the university. Like the demonization of migrants and trans people in contemporary politics, gender functions as a phantasm that absorbs contemporary anxieties as it deflects from their true source.
For instance, it is said that gender is a doctrine, like totalitarianism, or that it represents the extremes of capitalism. Inconsistent allegations abound, culminating in the conviction that gender is an “ideology” by which is meant a false and dogmatic set of beliefs. Consider, however, that Gender Studies as a discipline is, by definition, interdisciplinary, drawing from several paradigms. And it is defined by a set of debates and problematics, not by statements of doctrine or settled
truths. Indeed, Gender Studies classrooms are often models of open debate. People
disagree about methods, the status of theory, the need for regional ethnographies, and the relationship of the academy to social movements.
There are, in fact, so many disparate approaches that most courses dedicated to introducing Gender Studies can hardly manage to include all the points of view that constitute the discipline.
I belabor the point only because there are those who would reduce “gender” to a dangerous ideology and thus efface the complexity and richness of the framework and its many conceptual contributions to thinking about nature, society, power, and embodiment. To those who think that gender studies pedagogy is a form of indoctrination, the response must be firm: gender is neither an ideology nor a form
of indoctrination. Indeed, the critique of gender within Gender Studies is productive. If
anything, it is a framework that allows us to ask, among other questions, how is the social world is organized, through what exclusions, and with what potentials? The debates on such questions are open-ended. For those who have learned from the field, that openness is a promising value to be affirmed. For others, social structures should remain unchanging and based on pre-social differences that can be known apart from any interpretive framework or social meanings.
Those who seek to censor books on gender or to close down the teaching of gender studies are themselves imposing a doctrine on research and teaching. In addition, shutting down open debate in public life and open inquiry in the academy does not bode well for democracy. And yet, this is precisely what the anti-gender ideology movement calls for. It is a campaign of falsification and censorship that strengthens repressive state powers. My book seeks to understand how the intensified opposition to gender fits within the emerging of authoritarian regimes that gain support through the fantasy of restoring patriarchal and hetero-normative orders.
The more that “gender ideology” as a phrase is discussed as if it describes something real, this fiction becomes part of a shared and emergent cultural understanding, or what some call a backlash. The complexity of feminism, sexuality and gender studies, as fields, and their potential to describe and understand human embodiment in its complexity, is replaced by a caricature. But that is just one problem to be faced. If the only task were to dispel an increasingly prevalent mischaracterization of a field of study, we could simply demonstrate the different approaches to scholarship and teaching and show why, based on the evidence provided, the caricature fails to grasp the field of study, its institutional forms, and its effects on social policy. The caricature
of “gender ideology” is deployed to incite fear, to identify “gender” as the cause of public anxiety about the future, and to promise a return to a time in which gender binarism and gender hierarchy could be assumed as unchangeable.
Gender does not only characterize identities. It is a framework for understanding a major form of power in society, the way it establishes separate spheres and social inequalities and exclusions. For feminists, gender became an important term in the 1970s through which to describe and criticize social inequalities and the persistence of masculine domination.
They asked about the gendered division of labor, the “gendering” of the public sphere,
and they helped to formulate and institute public policies that seek to oppose discrimination, to establish equal treatment under the law, to expose gender-based violence, to delineate specific health care needs and to inquire into the ways society might be transformed to support greater equality, justice, and freedom – the basic
principles of democracy. Gendered frameworks have proven to be productive in ecological politics, migration studies, and anti-violence policies.
It has been affirmed as part of the history of freedom and equality, not only demonstrating how and why inequalities or exclusions exist, but contesting discourses and polices that keep a range of people from flourishing. It seems important to keep our minds open to all the ways that people can flourish. To do that, however, we
must affirm the complexity of human experience, including biology, rather than accept reductive accounts that take us further away from the truth.