00:00:50.080And, you know, I might also recognize them from pretty much 20% of the bookshelf behind me.
00:00:56.780Yeah, Butler is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. They are famously the author of 1991's Gender Trouble, a frequently cited and I would say somewhat infrequently read book.
00:01:13.940Yeah, very influential in shaping gender studies over the course of my lifetime. And this is the book that sort of has dogged and shaped and one gets the sense rendered somewhat claustrophobic, Judith Butler's career in the ensuing decades. And they are sort of back with a sequel for our 21st century. So tell me a little bit about Who's Afraid of Gender?
00:01:42.400It is in its own way a popularizing sequel to Gender Trouble. I think you're right to say that. It picks up on a bunch of themes from that book while being about really about something else. I think that its biggest sin is not being called, you know, Too Gender, Too Trouble. You know, you have to adhere to the sequelizing conventions of the Fast and the Furious franchise, I think.0.99
00:02:26.940And it kind of seeks to intervene in contemporary politics
00:02:31.400in a way that I think Butler's work by and large did,
00:02:35.240But kind of at the end of long articles or long chapters, this is Butler at their most interventionist, I would say.
00:02:47.360It's also Butler, I think, trying to set the record straight a little bit.
00:02:51.280Full disclosure, I did a roundtable on this book for the Chronicle of Higher Education last week.
00:02:55.880And there I said it kind of felt like the summa of a career.
00:02:58.360It's the most recognizable aspect of any scholar's career that, on the one hand, they want to speak to a broader audience.
00:03:05.260On the other hand, they're kind of still peeved about all the times they were misunderstood.
00:03:08.740And so you're getting both of these things.
00:03:10.080You get Judith Butler making a pretty ambitious argument about what exactly the category of gender does to right-wing backlash politics and to what they really see as a recipient fascist, international, in general.
00:03:22.500And then also, it's a book about people who clearly got their work wrong over the years.0.70
00:03:28.360And there are a lot of them like that's that's fair. As you indicated, Gender Trouble has many readers, but probably more misreaders. So totally understandable. But it's interesting that you do see these two warring impulses in this book.
00:03:43.620Yeah, so I would summarize Who's Afraid of Gender as sort of a diagnosis of various forms of transphobia that Butler sees emerging on the global right with, you know, it's really ambitious in its scope, but I would say they spend a good deal of their time in the United States and the UK.
00:04:05.000So there's sort of a slant towards the Anglophone world here.
00:04:09.520And it really sort of vacillates between these two tones of sort of, I would say, like ambitious, like sweeping, at times almost joyfulness about the, you know, transgender liberatory project.0.98
00:04:26.420And then it alternates with this real piddling, peeved remediation.1.00
00:04:34.340Right. And corrections of misapprehensions of gender trouble and I think misapprehensions of the gender studies field that have been emerging both sort of sincerely and cynically by its critics over the past 30 years.
00:04:52.380yeah so this is stuff like you know oh what what does it mean for gender to be performative right
00:04:57.880clearly there are versions of that argument that people sort of put in butler's mouth and they've
00:05:04.480just had it up to here very clearly with that and i have to say i you know i i think it would be
00:05:09.880superhuman to demand of judith butler not to put that in there and be like by the way that's not
00:05:14.040what i said just fyi but on the other hand i think you're absolutely right that there is this
00:05:19.380duality in this book that like, you know, you're like, oh, wow, now we're in a, now we're back in
00:05:23.280Professor Butler's course and they're mad at us for not doing the reading. Right. And again,
00:05:28.420like I, I, I'm right there with them. I would, I, I recognize this impulse, but you're right that
00:05:33.360as an artifact, the book betrays those kinds of two impulses. I'm actually a little surprised
00:05:39.600that you say it's, it's about trans liberation. I was shocked. And I think in some of the reception
00:05:44.280of the book, you can tell that some of our, our trans friends and colleagues and comrades are
00:05:49.260a little shocked too, that it ultimately, I think it's a defense of feminism. And they're really
00:05:54.020arguing this, the attack on, on quote unquote, gender is an attack really on feminism, right?
00:05:59.980That trans people are sort of like, I mean, they wouldn't use the word collateral damage, but,
00:06:04.980but they're almost saying like, this goes beyond that. This is really trying to reestablish
00:06:11.180gendered hierarchies from, you know, that are pre-modern essentially, which, you know, I think,
00:06:16.860I think is is a point that I think this podcast would cosign in many ways but it does of course
00:06:24.160mean that some of the this is something that a really impressive essay that Andrea Long Chu
00:06:30.860wrote about this book gets at that it does tend to gloss over the fact that the main victims of
00:06:36.540this tend to be trans people and that the main uh you know site of conflict is is is the question
00:06:42.960of trans identities. And you can read, I think, between the lines or sometimes not even between
00:06:47.300the lines in some of the reception among trans scholars or scholars who want to foreground
00:06:53.000trans studies, this hint of annoyance that's saying like, well, gee, this feels like you're
00:06:59.360saying, oh, well, this isn't about you, right? It's like, well, we're the ones dying. We're the
00:07:03.900ones having our fundamental rights taken away. And you're kind of saying, well, it's not really
00:07:08.400about that. Yeah, well, it's fair to say that one project of the book is about trying to
00:07:14.880affect a revival of a coalition between feminists and queer and trans people and queer and trans
00:07:25.000theorists that has been eroded, not just as they deal with quite prominently by like the emergence
00:07:32.580of TERFs and the sort of hijacking of the feminist label and the radical feminist label in particular,
00:07:38.400for these ends to which it has not like historically been used, right? And which has to be like very
00:07:44.820tortured to be used for. But also, you know, it's an effort, I think, often in this book to
00:07:51.640show the commonalities between the trans and cis feminist projects, and to try and not exactly
00:08:00.300reconcile, but perhaps minimize the tensions that have arisen between those projects over the past
00:08:07.66035 years, which I would say have emerged in no small part in response to gender trouble.
00:08:36.860easy peasy let's let's do it so the the subtitle of gender trouble is i believe1.00
00:08:42.740feminism is a version of identity is that right uh which i think it's maybe the better descriptor0.70
00:08:47.640of the book right butler says at the point that it's meant as a and i think that's a quote
00:08:52.500but don't don't quote me on that uh a feminist genealogy of the category of woman right to say
00:09:00.320The book understands itself as feminist, but it's worried about, well, about, frankly, the kind of position that today we associate with the TERFs. It's worried about people who use the category of woman to say, well, you guys don't belong in this project.
00:09:17.340They're essentially insisting that, yeah, that there's that there's real trouble with, you know, wanting to fill the category of woman with inescapable content.
00:09:31.980So I think that's that's the overall project.0.76
00:09:34.140The argument that has made it famous is that feminists had operated, but frequently operated0.81
00:09:40.600with the sex-gender distinction, right?0.95
00:09:42.580And Butler's claim is, well, sex is gender.
00:09:47.080It's us reading our gendered, our social distinctions, the way we socially make meaning
00:09:54.540of our bodies back onto nature, right?1.00
00:09:58.180Some of this, I'm guessing even the most essentialist exclusionary feminist would grant that when Aristotle looks at the sperm, it's like, oh, it's aggressive and penetrative.
00:10:11.200It's like, no, these are two cells doing a thing.0.99
00:10:14.280Like you're reading your cultural meaning making around differently constituted bodies into zygotes.0.99
00:10:24.240Right. But the panic around kids that are gender nonconforming gives you a sense of just how quickly this this project runs up against some real serious cultural resistances where people are like, well, no, I mean, my little baby girl of nine months is like that.
00:10:39.680right? And you're like, I don't know. If it feels pretty blobby to me, you got to be honest with
00:10:44.540you. But that's the basic contention that the book is famous for. Any attempt to shore up,
00:10:49.220and this is a Deridian argument, this is a deconstructive argument, that any attempt to
00:10:53.680shore up something natural that we then impose social construction on is illusory. It may well
00:11:00.360exist, is what Butler would say, but it's inaccessible to us, right? It's inaccessible to
00:11:05.080us scientifically, discursively, politically. You can't base anything on it.
00:11:10.820I'm sorry, what may well exist that's inaccessible to us? What's the object?
00:11:14.340A bodily soma outside of our social determination.
00:11:18.460So you can't interpret your body. Your body can't be accessible to you without the social
00:11:23.980meanings that have been assigned to it repeatedly since birth for most of us.
00:11:27.900Right. So this is, in some way, we can think of it as a version of the Iridian claim of
00:11:32.600par d'or text. There's nothing outside of the text. His point is when we talk about stuff like
00:11:37.000justice, we're always already in our discourses about justice. There may be such a thing as
00:11:41.920justice out there, but we're not going to get to it because what we're getting at it through is
00:11:46.320cultural presuppositions, long traditions of conceptualizing this stuff. Our very conceptual
00:11:51.720apparatus may make certain things visible and invisible. It's not there for us to really get
00:11:57.560to. We're dealing to some extent with our own creations and we're dealing to some extent with
00:12:01.740our own creation when it comes to gender right so the notion of a what is called the performativity
00:12:08.340of gender which turns out to be a very contested term and then b the social construction of sex
00:12:13.740are sort of the two items from gender trouble that are both fundamental to the work of that book
00:12:21.600and also that get like really repeatedly misunderstood misread and and really uh like
00:12:28.460kind of terminally misread in ways that provoke a lot of anger and a lot of like bad thinking
00:12:34.860from both Butler's I think supposed or like professed acolytes and from their critics so
00:12:40.820do you want to give us like a quick rundown of those misreadings would you want to would you
00:12:43.820want to do this one well I think we can start with sort of the social construction of sex right
00:12:51.040Because I think Butler is saying is not that the physical body does not exist outside of the meanings that we attach to it, right?
00:13:03.260Like the physical body is a fact that is there and it is like sort of materially obvious.
00:13:10.180This is a word that comes up in contention a lot in like who's afraid of gender, right?
00:13:15.900And so it's not about a denial of the physical form.
00:13:17.980It's about our inability to access a separate meaning or essence or truth of that form beyond these social meanings that we have applied to the sex body.
00:13:29.180So I think your Aristotle idea is a good one.
00:13:32.340You know, this is something actually like critical nature studies has been really interesting in its interest in the ways that gender has informed our understanding of the natural world or rather like misinformed our understanding of the natural world, right?
00:13:45.740Our ideologies about sex and its meaning not only constrain our knowledge, but also frequently lead us to kinds of wrong thinking and misunderstanding.
00:13:59.460So that's the social constructivity of sex.
00:14:01.260I don't think it's actually that controversial when you get down to it.
00:14:06.680Performativity is a little bit slipperier, right?
00:14:08.980So Butler was working from this notion of performativity that she got from philosophy of language, which is this idea that some actions have promises, or some words are actions.
00:14:26.780And one way that Butler is talking about the formation of gender in the, you know, like, let's say for simplicity's sake in the individual, which is that the repeated action of gender and the repeated experience of being acted on in gendered ways is in fact what forms a gendered identity, right?
00:14:48.620It is a repetitive, iterative process, more than an a priori identity that exists somewhere in the soul. And that is a much more complex understanding of gender's, like, quote, unquote, performativity than what that word got read as in sort of the vernacular, which is where performativity means, like, spontaneous.
00:15:12.580it can mean volitional uh and it can mean artificial none of which are really i think
00:15:19.900like justifiable right ascriptions of how gender works in our lived lives right yeah right they're
00:15:28.040reversing the thrust that you just described right they're saying we think of it as gender
00:15:32.440expression right meaning there is a thing called gender that expresses itself through a let's say
00:15:37.440a little girl's love of pink i'm just picking a random example that i don't deal with in my
00:15:42.080everyday life at all. They're like, no, is it possible that we come to the understanding that
00:15:47.220someone has a coherent identity that is called little girl through these performances, these
00:15:53.560repeated processes and social responses to it, right? That children receive approbation or
00:16:01.600disapprobation, that acts receive meaning through the society around them, right? Whether this can
00:16:09.760be violent, this can be dangerous, this can also just be, you know, good for you, little, you know,
00:16:15.540little rascal or something like that, right? Like, it can be very, very tiny things. But basically,
00:16:20.520the illusion of a stable category from which all this emanates comes actually is actually an
00:16:27.180upshot of these iterative processes. Yeah, and I will just clarify a little bit that, you know,
00:16:33.620in these discussions of what is sometimes called gender socialization,
00:16:39.340there tends to be like a pop psychological emphasis on childhood on,
00:16:43.400particularly on the experience of being a little girl.
00:16:46.120And I don't want to, you know, downplay or dismiss that experience,
00:16:50.180but I think it's important to emphasize that this is an ongoing process,
00:16:53.240that this is not something where, you know,
00:16:56.980we are disciplined into this gendered form by our family as children from
00:17:03.620Yeah. And then the discipline stops and we can decondition or do or undo what was done to us in childhood. It's like childhood is certainly part of it. But this is something that does not stop once you hit puberty. It changes and reifies and forms new sort of compulsions and cultural formation throughout a life. Does that make sense?
00:17:51.320So like that variance is exactly what Butler would talk about.
00:17:55.200And so exactly, this kind of voluntaristic model that you talk about, this kind of idea that like, oh, we're just kind of sort of like, make it up as we go along, blah, blah, blah, right? That's not what they're saying. What they're describing is a fairly tragic process with some very, very serious ramifications for people's self-esteem, for people's self-conception, for people's bodily integrity and safety, if they cannot quite conform in the way they're supposed to.
00:18:23.140So I think that it's very, very important to sort of note that what came out of it, this kind of carnivalesque model of you can choose what you want to be, right?
00:18:33.240Like, that's not sure that is a consequence someone could draw from this.
00:18:37.000It's not what Butler draws from it at all.
00:18:53.140up until now we have described butler's account as as you said in your terms really tragic right
00:19:05.140this is an account that is entirely consistent with the sort of traditional feminist account
00:19:14.040of gender as a compulsory, often violent, involuntary process of domination and exploitation,
00:19:25.240And I don't think Butler is exactly disagreeing with that historical account.
00:19:31.300We can get to their treatment of McKinnon later.
00:19:34.260And we should say that Butler adopted they them pronouns a couple of years ago, and I
00:19:40.140am still used to referring to them by the pronouns they used before and i might fuck up and you know
00:19:47.500maybe we will luckily this is live so you can't i can't edit it out maybe we'll edit this house
00:19:51.980they gave a interview to the financial times where this reporter was like kind of making this like
00:19:57.340narcissistic big deal about how nervous they were to fuck up judith butler's pronouns and judith
00:20:02.480butler goes like oh you know don't worry about it when it's like a good faith mistake i don't really0.83
00:20:08.900care you know i mess up people's pronouns all the time and i felt like it was like this blessing
00:20:13.700from like you know when the the beam of light comes down and it's god yeah it's like okay
00:20:19.080makes the sign of the cross over me and now i i feel uh less worried about you know that like
00:20:26.060moment of profound shame when you fuck up somebody's pronouns well yeah i mean like i do
00:20:30.080think that the the idea that fucked up pronouns will lead to immediate cancellation exists only0.94
00:20:37.060in certain fever swamps and, you know, in the imagination of 18-year-old undergraduates.0.83
00:20:43.980So that is, you know, that's like Butler the tragedian, right? But there's also Butler the
00:20:51.760optimist who sees in this iterative, repeated formation of gender, a lot of places for
00:21:02.160subversion and play even in with this even within this sort of like domination system right uh so
00:21:10.020butler well not even just potential it's basically it's inevitable right the point of the the point
00:21:15.880of gender trouble is gender is always in trouble right like there is because of the iterativity of
00:21:22.220this whole thing it just produces you know you can't make bodies mean in this way and basically
00:21:28.020it's not that there are there are just there are opportunities but the opportunities are built in
00:21:32.360like it's basically no one ever managed to perform uh gender as it's socially constructed
00:21:39.500and imagined and therefore there are all these sites for yeah for contestation right and and
00:21:45.420failure right so there's this sort of like volitional sense of subversion and then there's
00:21:50.580also the sort of inevitability of you know trying to achieve this impossible repeated task
00:22:01.660often with some anxiety and and not getting it because it's not something that can be gotten
00:22:07.260you know so that's gender trouble is there anything else you want to say about gender trouble
00:22:11.820much more to say but uh no i think we i think we sort of nailed it i kind of feel like yeah i'm
00:22:17.180feeling good about us i feel like for people who have like kind of understood gender trouble or
00:22:23.680sort of knew what it was about or maybe had like a half you know understanding where they were like
00:22:27.980is that really what it says because that doesn't sound defensible like i think we've like cleared
00:22:32.300it up yeah a little bit we should say that so when we're talking if we're talking about who's
00:22:36.800afraid of gender the interesting thing is so we've made it kind of sound like it's a reply to the
00:22:41.500critics of gender trouble and it it is only to a very very limited extent although it is also that
00:22:46.920which i think makes it confusing right like they also wrote that book already right isn't that
00:22:50.560more or less bodies that matter yeah bodies that matter is basically it was the academic version0.56
00:22:54.020of like kids like that's not what i said like read my damn text yeah that was that was a book
00:23:00.160that butler wrote and i want to say like 1993 yeah it's like two years like yeah it's basically0.81
00:23:05.300a collection of essays being like no no no no which would have been a better title no no no
00:23:11.700no no quick point of order i do not accept this that's not what i said by judith butler yeah
00:23:17.440but who's afraid of gender you know it's both a sort of attempt to correct the misreadings of
00:23:25.540gender trouble which butler thinks and i sort of agree with them on this point have like influenced
00:23:30.880gender discourses in the intervening decades to like maybe an unnerving or frustrating degree
00:23:38.280But it's also a confrontation with this sort of revived politics of what I in my writing call gender conservatism and what Butler calls anti-gender ideology.
00:23:52.200And so maybe we should walk people through that because like it's very complicated because for especially for listeners of this podcast, you or readers of Maura's work, you'll know that basically it's always backlash o'clock in feminist work.
00:24:06.220patriarchy is never like oh yeah fair point ladies but there is this real change that's
00:24:11.900taken place which which it revolves really around use of the word gender so sometimes
00:24:15.920when butler is trying to talk about anti-gender politics they're clearly thinking about like
00:24:21.280bad reactions to their work at other times they're really just saying and i think this is what makes
00:24:26.440this book actually a little confusing at times they're just saying people who use gender yeah
00:24:32.020right and and it's important to note that that's that that's not their fault it's basically there
00:24:37.240are these movements all across the globe that seem to know exactly what they mean when they0.98
00:24:42.840say gender and then you scratch below the surface and you're like i'm sorry but what the fuck do you0.55
00:24:46.960mean yeah so but one thing that i will say makes this even though it is you know but a much easier0.73
00:24:53.660read than gender trouble one thing that doesn't make who's a friend of gender a bit slippery is
00:24:59.500that the definition of gender keeps changing and that is in part because butler keeps addressing
00:25:06.400new camps of gender conservatism that use it in different ways right so they're doing this kind of
00:25:13.800like game good sportsmanship thing where they are using the definition that their opponents are
00:25:20.840using and trying to like sort of uh disprove their opponents arguments on those terms right
00:25:25.900But those terms are very internally inconsistent and they are very variable, right? So you feel like you're writing – I'm making a little waving motion with my hand. You feel like you're on a boat in a storm a little bit in terms of the definition of what gender is.
00:25:41.720And part of that is, you know, I think, almost pedagogically useful because you do come as a reader to this inescapable realization that this is not a steady concept, right? It is one that is eternally in flux, which if anything might, you know, prove Butler's point a little bit.
00:26:01.700Just to kind of give folks and listeners in different countries will recognize different
00:29:27.880Yeah, sure, that too. Yeah. But, but I mean, like his, I mean, like in terms of like,
00:29:32.160you know, billionaire who, you know, grabs women and also is not wild about the press,
00:29:37.200like that's a Silvia Berlusconi joint, right? And, and so in some way there's a, there's a
00:29:42.600kind of particular brand of Euro authoritarianism or strongmanism being kind of imported here.
00:29:49.800In that transfer seems to be where Butler thinks like this kind of comes back into the US. And
00:29:57.860really what connects these people is just that they yell about gender, right? They're about like
00:30:03.160freaked about gender theory. Like in Germany, they have this weird inexplicable panic about
00:30:08.860what's called gendering which is basically indicating gender neutrality in in how you0.98
00:30:15.380write or say a word and people are losing their fucking minds in german my understanding is that0.84
00:30:22.960this is a little more grammatically involved but it it parallels the english language freak out over0.95
00:30:29.000the they them pronoun yeah exactly yeah it's it's they basically looked at pronoun freakouts and
00:30:34.040we're like, oh, we can do that. And it's every bit as stupid as the other freak out, right?0.99
00:30:39.860I mean, I'll just quote from Butler here for a second from about Orban. Orban's views sum up1.00
00:30:45.380some of the main elements of gender ideology in the Eastern Europe context. It is forced upon
00:30:50.720nations such as Hungary by international organizations or the European Union. It is
00:30:55.860an attack on national and Christian values, which are to him the same. It harms children through its0.99
00:31:00.540teachings. It attacks the natural family. This phantasmatic cluster of issues leads to the call
00:31:06.060for quote-unquote gender ideology to be walled off as migrants are, as the EU and powerful foreign0.58
00:31:12.000forces must also be, as Soros and as George Soros, that is, and his institutions must be. We're left0.93
00:31:17.600to understand that Soros presumably hates Christianity because he's Jewish, a rank0.96
00:31:21.700anti-Semitic position, but like other such phantasms, he also represents the threat of0.54
00:31:26.180capitalism to Hungarian family values. Soros is characterized as owning nearly everything and
00:31:31.580its influence on universities and research is imagined as overwhelming, if not unstoppable.0.63
00:31:37.140Well, here we have this parallel of this conspiratorial fear of quote unquote gender
00:31:43.920ideology, by which they often seem to mean, you know, the public recognition of gay and trans
00:31:49.860people just sort of bleeding very seamlessly into the conspiratorial paranoia of antisemitism.
00:31:56.180Right. Yeah. And I think Butler makes this connection a little more explicitly later in the book. Right. But there's a sense that there is this ominous, unregulated, malicious force that has uncertain origins and also really expansive, destructive power.
00:32:16.600Yeah. And in fact, you might think, oh, this is just another re-description of backlash. And Butler is very explicit that it is not. They write, the weaponization of this fearsome phantasm of gender is authoritarian at its core. Rolling back progressive legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the reactive moment in this scene.
00:32:36.100the project of restoring the world to a time before gender promises in quotation marks big
00:32:41.680quotation marks here promises a return to a patriarchal dream order that may never have
00:32:46.260existed but that occupies the place of history or nature an order that only a strong state can
00:32:52.700restore i think that's a very interesting way of putting it uh the reason they're using phantasm
00:32:58.020here is they're not saying oh these people want to go back to the 1950s they're saying they want
00:33:03.900to go back to Never Neverland. They're going back to a gendered order that never existed like this
00:33:08.920in the first place, right? Right. It's a project about inventing a new future, but it is structured1.00
00:33:14.600by these fantasies about an imagined idyllic past in which these hierarchies were uncontested.
00:33:22.120Yeah, exactly. You keep saying the 1950s, but you keep talking about The Handmaid's Tale,
00:33:26.500right? There's not an attempt to bring things back. There is an attempt to move somewhere.
00:33:34.900You know, if we briefly lost Corey Robin, if he indeed listens to this show with our invocation of the F word, we might get him back here because that's his point.
00:33:43.040And his book, The Reactionary Mind, that this isn't about going back to anything.
00:33:48.340This is a strikingly dynamic forward moving project.0.98
00:33:51.780And just the place it's moving to is terrifying as shit.0.94
00:33:55.280So then Butler moves on from this global scene into the American context.0.98
00:34:02.160Do you want to stop over at the Vatican before we do?
00:38:48.040but maybe we can move on to butler's account of the united states and how this emerges
00:38:56.740from the sort of vatican and from eastern europe and then gets imported to the u.s
00:39:02.260well one thing i thought i might briefly mention something about like what brings these things
00:39:06.260together right so like one thing that butler keeps talking about again and again is that
00:39:10.000it's a contradictory movement if we think about an anti-gender movement combines the vatican
00:39:14.480And yeah, J.K. Rowling, it combines like militant atheists sometimes, you know, right wing politicians in the U.S. with left wing editors in the U.K., you know, Viktor Orban and, you know, Marine Le Pen.
00:39:28.000I guess that's not that. That's not that big a jump. Yeah. I feel like they already hang out.
00:39:31.720But on the other hand, it's also undeniable that they all draw on each other. Right. Like there is this.
00:39:35.800They're in a group chat. Yeah. It's not wrong to call this a movement.
00:39:38.840The big question, of course, is like, what does that mean?
00:39:42.420And I think Andrea Longchoo, again, in her essay, you know, gets at something really
00:39:48.560This is the cover story of New York Magazine from a couple weeks ago.
00:39:51.200Pointing out that like, maybe just talking about the far right, as Butler mostly does,
00:39:56.720and then sort of looping in the turfs a little bit, is wrong.
00:40:00.220Longchoo, I think, coins this term of the tarl, the transagnostic reactionary liberal.
00:40:05.340and is making the point like you know which first of i love like it's very clever i will say and
00:40:10.360andrea chu is always funny even when i disagree with her she always makes me laugh yeah yeah but
00:40:16.180but the bigger point behind the tarl is of course to say like are we sure this is really a far right
00:40:21.820phenomenon that the problem isn't that like what some people call reactionary centrists have really
00:40:26.080bought into this as like the central thing right like when people are like oh you're not allowed
00:40:30.060to say anything anymore and you're like like what and then like the answer almost 90 percent of the
00:40:34.620time it's transphobia right and you're like oh gee like that's all you like that that's it i'm not
00:40:39.060allowed to say something really bigoted about this trans person yeah so tell me a little bit about
00:40:43.200where because i i instinctively recognized choose definition of the tarl but tell me a little bit
00:40:50.020more about where they recognize this distinct version or maybe a continuous version of transphobia
00:40:56.500in american liberalism and what makes that transphobia distinctly liberal so it's it's
00:41:01.020the one that basically thinks it's defending liberal discourse and free and open discourse
00:41:06.860against this kind of sect of quasi-religious zealots, gender zealots, right? There's this
00:41:13.620interesting kind of projection that goes on that a lot of this Butler, I think, convincingly shows
00:41:18.840is a lot of anti-gender ideology is not so subtly subtended by religiosity, but it projects that
00:41:28.160on the other side like you can't talk with these people they're a cult and that's the kind of
00:41:32.880liberal that i mean they might write in a big uh monthly magazine that might come out of an
00:41:39.860atlantic state i don't know big apple hour what's fits of print on this subject is always a hand
00:41:45.680wringing about norms and a slippage between a rights discourse and a scientific discourse
00:41:53.340Yet another thing that like a 19 year old said about gender, the focus on children as a substitute or sometimes a screen for a broader concern that includes ambivalence towards the rights of trans adults.
00:42:07.540Yeah. And this is, you know, you hint at a couple of these publications that sort of do this. And I'm going to just, you know, I work in this industry and you don't. So I will say that I think we are subtweeting here, the New York Times and the Atlantic Magazine in particular.
00:42:25.280And Jesse Single. I mean, let's just, come on, let's just do this.
00:42:28.100Yeah, personally, Jesse Single. But, you know, there's a sort of genre of this piece, right?
00:42:35.120Yeah, it's pitching itself to a very specific audience, right? Which is college educated, I would say over 40, overwhelmingly, but not exclusively white people who feel that there are illiberal excesses in the trans rights movement that need to be disciplined and managed by the quote unquote adults in the room of which they count themselves, right?
00:43:01.220So there's a sphere of acceptability around trans rights that needs to be constrained.
00:43:06.620We might add, these are people who, if you lump them in with Viktor Orban, would be
00:43:31.220And I think part of the reason is that one thing that these kind of tarl, these kind of, you know, reasonable liberals that think that there's an illiberalism to trans activism, that they will always fall back on this position like, oh, you are the hysterical ones, you're hysterics, you're you can't rationally debate, you have to, you know, make this about make this personal, you have to cancel people and uninvite speakers and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:43:56.160And I think it's very noticeable that Butler, again, there, it kind of takes their bait. And like, this is a performance of reasonableness that feels at times a little to its own detriment, if I can be quite honest. I think that it could, this could have used, Longchu is not encumbered in that way. And that, as it reads, it's just a lot livelier.
00:44:13.700But there's a point that Maura Weigel made in a review of, I believe, of the coddling of the American mind, which is sort of like the Bible of these people, frankly, that there's this kind of liberalism that defines itself only by making everyone who disagree with it unreasonable in one way or the other.
00:44:30.320And that often comes from dudes, I think is sort of the point she makes there. I think it's in The Guardian, actually, that she did this review. And this idea that everyone else is sort of being a little psycho and only this broad-minded liberal thinker can sort of bring everyone back to rationality is a pose that a lot of these anti-gender positions love to take.
00:44:53.360Yeah, and it's not a pose that has been historically adopted by theorists and advocates of transgender rights and identity, right? That is a tradition that has a lot more sarcasm, playfulness. I mean, Chu, if we're sticking with a Chu, Chu is always like a cat playing with a bug before like maiming and killing it in this like very protracted way. It's something I kind of admire about her.
00:45:19.160But Chu has this like arched eyebrow holding up a cigarette in one eyebrow and is just like looking at her opponents with this like miles downward disdain.
00:46:07.140Like treating them as people who have a disease and it's a mental disease and they're a little0.84
00:46:12.660crazy and we need to treat them so that they can be less crazy which Chu identifies I think0.87
00:46:20.340correctly as like a condescending position of charity right in their chapter on turfs which I0.91
00:46:26.320quite like Butler has this address of like J.K. Rowling sort of like opening transphobic statement
00:46:33.180yeah that I think really skillfully dissects the flaws in Rowling's logic the Rowling
00:46:39.020makes this great like really protracted acknowledgement of trans women's vulnerability
00:46:46.600to you know patriarchal male violence right which is like what Rowling cites as a like point of
00:46:53.860commonality but then instead of going where like Catherine McKinnon would go or where like Jack
00:46:59.400Halberstam would go or where I would go would say like actually that vulnerability to violence is
00:47:03.440largely what constitutes the category of woman itself Rowling then like makes this like weird0.56
00:47:08.280sudden gear shift and goes but trans women aren't really women they're really men and they're really
00:47:14.820this like same kind of danger that the cis men are and i think butler sort of skewers this in a
00:47:19.700really elegant way yeah it reminds me of like watching like an old samurai movie where like0.64
00:47:24.340the sword work is figuring you like that and the person like slips apart yeah afterwards right and
00:47:28.700and it's not it's not this hand holding it's quick it's uh merciless it's like a little bit
00:47:34.520contemptuous in a way that I found kind of appropriate. But then Butler does something
00:47:38.340that I found like a borderline unforgivable as an anti-rape feminist, which is where she critiques0.98
00:47:43.600Rowling's epistemic authority on the basis of Rowling's past experience of domestic violence
00:47:48.700and says, this person is traumatized and therefore pathological and therefore not a
00:47:53.640reliable narrator. And that is a position which is, I mean, it's functionally an accusation of
00:47:58.980hysteria. It's not necessary to delegitimize Rowling, which Butler has already done.
00:48:04.200And it is a position that would exclude vast swaths of cis women and, frankly, trans women alike from critiques of male gendered power.
00:48:11.580Yeah, I mean, did we not just have a movement about this?
00:48:14.900The fact that victims of sexual violence are, in fact, quite good guides to how society handles these things.
00:48:22.180I would argue that the emergence of trauma after Me Too has actually been sort of reconstructed in the following years, not to be an explanation of those people's epistemic legitimacy, but an indictment of the epistemic legitimacy.
00:48:37.160And I do argue this in my forthcoming book, Gone Too Far, out from Scribner sometime in the next million years.
00:48:44.120Yeah. But like, this is something that like, this is not a place where Butler feels the need to really sort of like take those Atlantic readers by the hand and assume that they share their antagonist commitments and need to be sort of like gently persuaded, right? This is a place this is this the the gender violence victim is not a reliable narrator is something that they seem to think that their readers will be sympathetic.
00:49:07.060Yeah, yeah. As opposed to, you know, the perfectly reasonable argument one could make, which is to say, why would it matter one way or the other when the rights of trans women are concerned, right? Like, this is, you know, the invocation of it, like, what people objected to at the time was the very invocation of it, right? To say, like, why would it confer legitimacy to your gripes about trans women, right?
00:49:29.660would like you know it's the same way that like right if i'm like i i don't like having neighbors
00:49:34.080of x ethnicity i was mugged once right like well kind of feels like you're saying these people are
00:49:39.780muggers right like there's no need for them to go there at all and and yeah i noticed that too
00:49:44.040frankly it was misogynist or at least i interpreted it as misogynist attack on sort of survivors as
00:49:50.320epistemic authorities uh and it was unnecessary and that's what pissed me off about this book
00:49:55.080uh but you know i thought i think the rest of it was i i was more pissed off by that than by the
00:50:01.400sort of like faintly patronizing reasonableness yeah because that strikes me as like fairly
00:50:07.620standard for an academic writing a trade book right yeah well no no a lot of us have this
00:50:13.000horrible i mean myself included this horrible tendency to then be quippy and like trying to
00:50:16.880be like funny and like that's what makes it so noticeable right that like they're not ingratiating
00:50:21.760themselves in that way but i do think that i mean there is this thing about like the stance of the
00:50:26.060philosopher is supposed to be that and i think there might be you know something gendered to
00:50:30.920that stance right like they're they're kind of taking the you know jonathan height stance and
00:50:36.400and not noticing that it's like quite thoroughly gendered right or or not caring or being like i
00:50:40.880you know strategically i think i have to do this right like i'm i'll put on the jonathan height
00:50:45.560top hat and like donna cain and and see if i can change some hearts and minds basically
00:50:50.620Wait, say more what you mean for our listeners who are not familiar with Jonathan Haidt.
00:50:54.740You know, he is the author of, among other things, of The Coddling of the American Mind.
00:50:58.640And, you know, I'm using him as a shorthand for this kind of writer who, in spite of making apocalyptic warnings that like, you know, were he inhabiting a different body might earn him the charge of hysteria, is always treated as this most reasonable of people who's only sort of raising the fact that like a banh mi controversy at Oberlin might portend the end of the West as such.
00:51:20.620And you're like, I don't know how we're defining hysteria, but that certainly feels like it qualifies, right?
00:51:25.880So you think Butler as a non-binary assigned female at birth person is sort of navigating like a shorter leash of public credibility?0.59
00:51:35.400Exactly. I mean, like the way that, you know, that any public performance of Hillary Clinton, right, like is a study in not allowing herself things that we know she could and might do and that a male politician in the same position could and would do.
00:52:19.560And some of the argumentative style here, almost lawyerly, there was a lot of like, first, I'm going to make the minimalist, you know, technical, reasonable argument. And then I'm going to, you know, sort of in the background, make the bigger argument that undermines the foundations of this whole question entirely. Right? There's a little like, and you see lawyers doing this a lot, like they'll put the little argument before the judge first. And then they put the big argument sort of in the background.
00:52:46.880they're really focusing on the little one yeah so I think one thing I wanted to point to really
00:52:52.380that that's really interesting that that I think they I kept waiting for them to kind of pounce
00:52:56.760on this but they didn't really as far as I could tell is this this thing that become fascinated
00:53:02.420with I mean so you know I I wrote this book on on cancel culture which kind of has a similar fate
00:53:07.120as gender in the sense that it does bring together like frothing at the mouth illiberal0.61
00:53:11.260authoritarians and then sort of the reasonable people like you know and the atlantic these are
00:53:18.560the same people so like i've wondered for a long time like how do people deal with that cognitive
00:53:22.920dissonance right like they think they're defending liberalism and yet everyone who wants to like hit0.99
00:53:27.240liberalism over the head with a shovel loves their shit it's like that's that feels weird right and0.99
00:53:33.760and how do they deal with that and and on one point that butler kind of makes and then doesn't1.00
00:53:40.080pursue i really like is in the is in the turf chapter there is in the fifth chapter where they
00:53:46.700point out and this is going to be a longer point but i i think it's really fascinating because it
00:53:50.840kind of shows like why do orban the atlantic and the vatican fundamentally like why are they
00:53:56.400simpatico like obviously they are not drawing on each other necessarily consciously like and
00:54:00.940they're not they may even be kind of annoyed at right orban is not for whatever else he is he's
00:54:06.000not that Christian, actually. They may not find that much in common, but on this point,
00:54:10.960they're really able to speak a similar language. Well, here's what Butler says. I'm not quoting,
00:54:17.060I'm just going to describe it. So this course is critical of gender, whether it's like TERFs,
00:54:21.160Vatican, or Orban. Think that to turn to gender as an analytic category denies other categories,
00:54:29.000right it denies men and women mothers and fathers uh etc etc it's an illegitimate
00:54:35.560arrogation basically of a definitional power right i get to decide what amber what gender i am
00:54:42.020that's how they think of it right they think oh like these kids are deciding they wake up one
00:54:46.320morning and decide to be a mother or whatever but it is a form it's a form of ownership but
00:54:51.460it's also a form of submission turfs think they claim ownership over gender categories and they0.97
00:54:56.720seem intent on endlessly policing who has a right to them and who doesn't but on the other hand like0.97
00:55:02.960there's also like a immense or surrender to the reality of those categories that's to say
00:55:09.260like there's this immense arrogation of power basically in this move it's basically denying
00:55:15.080this obvious reality that these categories pre-exist us and are never going to fully
00:55:20.020coincide with our own gendered expression we're born under their yoke and live our lives basically
00:55:25.840struggling with them whether we're cis trans or non-binary but these three groups right all are
00:55:31.680both overly deferential to these categories and use them to basically self-arrogate a whole bunch
00:55:36.640of power right a bunch of definitional power and that's what i was trying to get at that's that is
00:55:40.840to me super fascinating they put one version of this at the on the front end and in the back end
00:55:45.500you can sort of hear the other one right like one is like i just submit to biblical authority but
00:55:49.880really what it is is you get to tell other people how to be women uh one is like i i get to decide
00:55:54.620who's a woman mate, but really it's submission to patriarchy, patriarchal structures.
00:55:59.100This is the kind of most glaringly obvious intellectual problem, I mean, among money,
00:56:05.960of the TERFs, is that they are defending this category that is defined in, frankly,
00:56:12.740only misogynist terms. And rather than sort of rejecting that category, they're very rigidly
00:56:18.880policing its boundaries so that they can continue to operate within the sort of like definitional
00:56:25.940pen that that patriarchy has placed them in yeah and that reminds me of that line in the simpsons
00:56:32.680where marge is like they're talking about moving and marge goes yes i don't want to move because
00:56:36.560i've dug myself into a nice little rut here and i don't want to get out yeah exactly yeah this is
00:56:40.520i love that line i knew where you're going with this and i was like that's that's exactly the
00:56:44.600right line it's always a marge line for it but this is the marge line yes and and so part of the
00:56:49.840reason why i got really interested in that idea is so i'm a friend of mine or two friends of mine
00:56:54.460in germany um or rather they teach in switzerland at the university of basel they did this study
00:56:59.740where they basically interviewed a bunch of people who were sort of in far-right protests
00:57:04.040think anti-vax anti-lockdown anti-immigration right like all the all your favorite people
00:57:10.260basically they interviewed these people and what they found was that they said these people are
00:57:14.520they called them libertarian authoritarians right they're like in a very funny way they're like
00:57:20.720willing to submit to one law absolutely but that law they call their own freedom right they're like
00:57:26.080extremely obsessed with freedom but then like that freedom often becomes this kind of very
00:57:32.700sheepy herd mentality you think these two things should be opposed to one another but they're
00:57:37.180absolutely not they're actually the same for these people and then i had to think about that that
00:57:41.120study because that's what puts these three groups together that their freedom is to admission to
00:57:46.560authority and their submission to authority is self-empowerment by these three groups i assume
00:57:50.760you're referring to the like right-wing authoritarians the turfs and the sort of
00:57:54.160atlantic liberals that that she identifies my third my third was the was were catholics was
00:57:59.960the vatican but i think but i but that gesture i think the tarl shares with them that's sort of
00:58:06.600I guess this was my 10-minute attempt to get to that point, that while they wouldn't agree
00:58:11.840on the substance, that stance, this mix of submission to a common sense and this almost
00:58:19.340arrogant invocation of your own independence, the way that these people all think of themselves
00:58:23.620as heterodox while repeating the most bog-standard traditionalism, that to me is like, why wouldn't
01:02:07.740Like, you know, I mean, like you can't choose
01:02:10.400what your child is exposed to in the media
01:02:12.540or in shopping or whatever right like but you can like make sure that at least the state doesn't
01:02:17.580enact violence on people who you know who experience the friction here which is pretty
01:02:22.680much all of us at some point but like what we shouldn't do is like super duper try to invest
01:02:28.000them with meaning and be like oh it was someone's fault that like the ruptures and contradictions
01:02:32.700in this shit we made up and then applied to our own body like is not matching up to reality anymore0.97
01:02:38.100And perhaps never really did. I think this might be a good point to pivot towards the end of the book and Butler's prescription for difficult coalitions.0.99
01:02:50.140Yes. Interesting. Yes. Because, you know, you're just gesturing right now at something that is a sort of a recurring theme in Who's Afraid of Gender, which is that a gender liberationist project, which can meaningfully counter these sort of revanchist gender conservatisms that have emerged in all these different sectors of the global right, will necessarily any coalition that can meaningfully counter this new quote unquote fear of gender will necessarily encompass people who have
01:03:20.020very different experiences of gender and who have very different sort of end goals in mind of what
01:03:25.760a gender liberated future would look like right it's going to encompass you know people who have
01:03:32.180a you know maybe a radical feminist understanding of gender and as as a you know a primarily a
01:03:39.680system of domination and it's going to encompass people who have a more individualist understanding
01:03:44.860of gender as a source of, you know, playfulness and pleasure. Right. And those are, those are
01:03:51.820people who might not always agree as the history of feminism and, and, you know, queer studies0.73
01:03:57.980illustrates all the time, you know, like Butler is shiving several of the people who they aim to
01:04:04.740be in coalition with here. And these are necessarily unruly coalitions, right. As somebody
01:04:10.480who sort of intellectually exists at the corner of a radical feminist tradition that has been0.93
01:04:21.160pretty much abandoned and a queer feminist tradition that does not always make adequate1.00
01:04:27.860room for the coercive experience of womanhood. This is something I am negotiating a lot in my
01:04:35.440own intellectual life right and i think that the renewed or maybe um originated alliance between
01:04:44.440these two ways of thinking is both like very personally important for me and would make my
01:04:51.120life a lot easier but also seems like really politically urgent in the way that i was
01:04:54.680and i think they're also part of a kind of materialist turn i mean not in a not in a sense
01:05:00.300that you know it's about the materiality of gender even though that does come up
01:05:03.480it's really more, they think part of why anti-gender rhetoric succeeds has to do with
01:05:09.680resistance to feminism. Some of it does have to do with international politics. And I think
01:05:14.500that's the other thing that like the coalition extends almost beyond feminists and queer
01:05:19.180feminists and, you know, you know, trans rights advocates, et cetera. Right. There's this very
01:05:25.500kind of moving or just kind of interesting aside when they're talking about like the way people
01:05:30.140like Orban treat gender as this imposed category from the outside, right? And you wouldn't expect
01:05:35.860them to say it, but they kind of say like, well, and it's not totally wrong, right? They're like,
01:05:39.660in the end, this shadows actual power relations on the globe. That is to say, right, the George
01:05:44.740Soros thing is bonkers. But like, the idea that like, you know, US cultural hegemony is real,
01:05:50.040that Western Europe tends to dominate Eastern Europe, like, they're like, that's not wrong,