Review | Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Colin Wilson •Colin Wilson reviews Judith Butler’s recent intervention into discussions of gender and its use by the right.
Around the world, the right are mobilising around “gender”. In Britain the main attacks have been against trans people, but in many countries these are part of a wider offensive against LGBTQ people and reproductive rights, and all these initiatives are part of oppositions to “woke” in general. The American academic and campaigner Judith Butler is one of the people most closely associated with “gender” – to the extent that in 2017 they were burnt in effigy outside a conference in São Paolo, Brazil. As they arrived at the city’s airport people tried to attack them physically, and the first person Butler thanks in the book’s acknowledgements is “the young man with the backpack who threw his body between an attacker and me” and who prevented Butler being hit. Butler is also a campaigner for BDS, has been a member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and was a campaigner as part of the Occupy movement in 2011-12.
What has Butler written about gender to cause such outrage? In 1990, they published the book Gender Trouble, which has become a classic. Back then, one of the most influential currents in feminism, “radical feminism”, argued that to fight women’s oppression it was necessary to understand that humanity was divided into two monolithic blocs, men and women, with different and contradictory interests. Men in this view organised together to defend their interests – to maintain the oppression of women – through social systems which radical feminists called “the patriarchy”.
These ideas always met with some disagreement. Black feminists pointed out that men and women were not monolithic blocs, but divided by race, with major implications for political strategy. Socialist feminists pointed out that some women were members of the ruling class, while most men were workers with little real power in a capitalist society. Gender Trouble also argued against radical feminist ideas. Being a woman or a man, Butler suggested, is not about the social expression of some inner feminine or masculine nature. Rather, we live in a society where people are typically assigned a gender at birth, and then punished for varying from that gender’s norms, so that many people end up internalising and identifying with that gender. The material reality of the body was not to be ignored – but bodies are always understood in a social context.
This argument opposes the claim, made by both right-wing “common sense” and radical feminism, that there exist only men and women, simply defined by their biology. As Butler writes in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, assigning a child female or male isn’t just done once, but as part of a series of events – pre-natal scans, at birth, when the child is given a gendered name – and part of that process, inevitably, is those involved imagining the life that child will have in society as a boy or girl, man or woman. That gender is primarily social, not biological, has become clearer as the numbers of trans and non-binary people has increased. Butler cites author Paisley Currah, who points out that different states and state agencies assign gender markers in different ways, so two people with similar bodies may have M or F, or some other marker, on their documents.
It’s clear that people who attack “gender” find all this deeply disturbing. They have a profound investment in being a woman, a man, a mother, a father, and fear that “gender” will take this status away from them. There is a large irrational element to this – in Butler’s terms, anti-gender is a kind of shared fantasy, a “public way of dreaming” which gathers up a wide range of anxieties and isn’t bothered when it contradicts itself. The witch-hunt of the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif illustrates Butler’s point – people like J.K. Rowling, who had argued for years that a woman is a person born with a vagina, claimed that even though Khelif was such a person, her strength or her appearance made her a man.
How do we understand the claims of the anti-gender movement? And if we’re dealing with a kind of shared waking dream, how can we develop our own alternative political vision of the good society? As regards understanding the anti-gender movement, Butler highlights the powerful international networks which have promoted its message. The Vatican and American evangelicals, as well as well-funded international networks like the International Organisation for the Family and the World Congress of Families, have all promoted homophobia and transphobia, and attacked abortion rights. There is the bitter irony of the Catholic Church posing as a defender of children and the family when some 330,000 children in France alone have experienced sexual abuse by priests in the last 70 years. But the ideas of the pro-family religious right are also linked to racism, to preventing migration and denying asylum seekers their rights. Butler quotes Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, speaking at the right-wing CPAC Conference in the US in 2022:
In Hungary we had to build not just a physical wall on our borders and a financial wall around our families, but a legal wall around our children to protect them from the gender ideology that targets them.
The families and children to be protected, then, are ethnically pure, threatened by immigration – Italy’s “post-fascist” Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has made similar claims.
This can seem to make sense in a country like Hungary, where the last thirty years have seen the EU both impose neoliberal austerity and demand formal equality for groups such as LGBTQ people. The influence of churches in countries like Uganda has also grown since they are the only organisations providing education and health care after 1980s cuts in state provision. Neoliberalism creates insecurity which right-wing anti-gender forces can exploit. The fact that neoliberalism is at the heart of the problem, Butler argues, means that we shouldn’t welcome the World Bank threatening to withdraw a $90 million loan to Uganda if it attacked LGBTQ rights – the World Bank and the EU can’t represent gender freedom and equality, and they don’t do so when they use gender as a bargaining chip.
While they do deals with global financial institutions, meanwhile, some African governments aim to gain popular support by claiming that attacks on gender and LGBTQ people are a matter of defending African values. But the truth, Butler responds, is that the gender binary has been imposed on African societies by colonialism. In some African societies, concepts like husband or wife were not necessarily related to biology – in Nigeria before the 20th century, for example, a woman could become another woman’s husband if no son existed to inherit family wealth.
As Butler summarises, the anti-gender movement “is clearly responding to economic formations that have left many people radically insecure about their futures…” We need to respond to this with compelling visions of the world in which we want to live that can undermine “authoritarian structures and fascist passions”. To do this we need to generate new solidarities, to learn to work with others even when it’s difficult. But, facing anti-gender activists who claim to be defending “ordinary people” against powerful capitalist elites, Butler argues that we have to be the ones who combine gender struggles with a “critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones, and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that… provides health care, shelter and food across all regions”. This means we need to “make alliances that… oppose climate destruction and stand for a radical democracy informed by socialist ideals.”
Arguing for socialism is a shift away from the left-liberal politics Butler has espoused till now – we may be seeing here the impact of the people to whom the book is dedicated, “the young people who still teach me”. How likely is it that we can make the alliances Butler recommends? I was struck on two recent Trans Pride marches, in Brighton and London, by how much Palestine was raised as an issue. There is a cohort of people – especially younger people – who go beyond single issues to adopt a politics which incorporates gender, Gaza, climate and anti-racism. The next step – going beyond the issues Butler addresses here – is how those millions of people worldwide can organise, around gender, but also for social and political justice more widely. With fascists in the streets as I write, that issue couldn’t be more urgent.
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