Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler?

In today’s newsletter, meeting at the gender flash point, and then:
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•Sidebar strategies at the Trump trial
•Matriarchy in “Suffs,” “Mary Jane,” and “Mother Play”

The philosopher and gender theorist has been denounced, demonized, even burned in effigy. They have a theory about that.

After a public talkthis past winter in Paris, Judith Butler was accosted by a woman who said that Butler’s ideas were a threat to her children. It was not the first time Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, had been accused of harmful philosophizing. Rather than argue forcefully with their accuser, Butler “tried to go deeper into that place of enormous stuckness and rage, fear, hatred, terror”—and even offered the woman an embrace. Butler mines that same spirit in “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new overview of what they describe as the widespread and well-financed “anti-gender ideology movement.” They consider the book an act of public service, written for a broad audience, to rebut the right-wing takeover of gender theory. As in the Paris incident, in the book Butler strives to keep the tone calm.

“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” is the latest installment in their modus operandi, in which each book can be read, in part, as a response to criticism lobbed at the one that came before. As Parul Sehgal writes inthis intimate portrait of the philosopher, “Butler has never been stinting with amplifications, apologies, adjustments: their career can be read as a long act of deeply engaged self-criticism.” This kind of patient, personal, productive reflection can get lost among the versions of Butler in the popular imagination: “the ‘gender-troubled Judith’ and the ‘anti-Zionist Judith’ and the ‘activist Judith,’\xa0” as Wendy Brown, Butler’s partner and a political theorist, notes. Also lost is the “goofy and sly” side of someone who once considered becoming a professional clown. Here, Sehgal reveals the other sides.

Further Reading:Inthis powerful interviewwith Butler, from 2020, Masha Gessen focusses on Butler’s critique of individualism and what they see as the potential force of nonviolence. Somewhat presciently, the two end their conversation with the subject of Israel and Palestine; Butler says that they have “deep fears” about policies intended to police antisemitism, “as should anyone who cares about state involvement in the suppression of knowledge and the importance of nonviolent forms of advocacy for those who have suffered dispossession, violence, and injustice.”

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What stands outin conversations with young people at Berkeley—other than horror and outrage about what is happening in Gaza—is deepening disillusionment, Jay Caspian Kang notes in his latest column. This fits a larger pattern nationwide: some Jewish students feel stranded by their universities and by progressives who have stood up for other persecuted populations; Palestinian students and their supporters argue that genocide is being ignored and dissent silenced. Both groups find little common cause with the government, the academy, or the press. As Kang puts it, “They don’t trust us anymore.”Read the story »

P.S. “Challengers”is, well, challenging “Call Me by Your Name” for the title of sexiest Luca Guadagnino film. If last weekend’s box-office returns are any indicator, the score is currently 30–love. Nathan Hellerprofiled the directorin 2018, noting that Judith Butler’s “Bodies That Matter” is one of Guadagnino’s favorite books and a key to his work: “His movies are haunted by betrayals of and by the body, and then by their effect on the elaborating and evasive efforts of the mind.”