Butler on ‘Imagining Alternate Futures’
Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian
In 2021, Judith Butler gave this analysis of the people who claim to oppose “gender ideology” or the concept of “gender” itself. They’re an “anti-gender movement,” Butler calls them.
In Butler’s words, today’s “struggle against fascism” is linked to “struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence,” and in this context we must be “mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.”
A major failing of “the Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers,” as Butler names them, is their adherence to “a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism” while rejecting “important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling).”
This movement that is “seeking to eradicate ‘gender’ as a concept or discourse, a field of study, an approach to social power” is one whose supporters “never actually read any works in gender studies.” Many of them simply reject the topic as difficult, which perhaps shouldn’t surprise us, as “we are living in anti-intellectual times.” But regardless of…
