Name: Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”
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Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”

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,&nbsp;the work she&nbsp;is perhaps best known for,&nbsp;introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture.&nbsp;Gender Trouble&nbsp;was published, the world has changed beyond recognition.&nbsp;In 2014,&nbsp;TIME&nbsp;declared a&nbsp;.&nbsp;Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butler&nbsp;recently exchanged emails with the&nbsp;New Statesman&nbsp;about this issue. The exchange has been edited.&nbsp;RelatedContent from our partnerswe can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.people see as a slur.&nbsp;Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply?&nbsp;Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people&nbsp;who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is.&nbsp;We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?&nbsp;&nbsp;“monstrous”&nbsp;or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised.&nbsp;We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women.&nbsp;Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned.&nbsp;And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way.Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?– or indeed right here in the US.&nbsp;So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it.&nbsp;It&nbsp;&nbsp;do to say that threats against some people are tolerable&nbsp;but against others are intolerable.You weren’t a signatory to the open letter on&nbsp; this summer, but did its&nbsp;arguments resonate with you?&nbsp;. Does the idea of , which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?, and wrote an essay &nbsp;about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?JB: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.&nbsp;*Judith Butler goes by she or theyClose

,&nbsp;the work she&nbsp;is perhaps best known for,&nbsp;introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture.&nbsp;Gender Trouble&nbsp;was published, the world has changed beyond recognition.&nbsp;In 2014,&nbsp;TIME&nbsp;declared a&nbsp;.&nbsp;Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she...

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Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”

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