Who's Afraid of Gender?

Abstract

For this installment of Q2, we continue our focus on the upsurge in the political targeting of queer and trans peoples, knowledges, areas of study, and scholars that we began in the previous Q2 section (June 2024, 30.3), which focused on US right-wing attacks on queer of color critique.A conversation between Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam that took place at the Dia Center in New York City on April 6, 2024 discussing the release of Butler's new book Who's Afraid of Gender?, this Q2 discusses the global scope and ambitions of varied right-wing social movements, religious institutions, feminist groups, and liberal thinkers who in different ways oppose and target so-called “gender ideology” and trans and nonbinary political struggle. While at times it is the state that seeks to delegitimate and outlaw transgender and nonbinary lives, as Butler and Halberstam discuss, just as often it is emergent right-wing social movements or established global institutions, like the Catholic church, who advocate for the exclusion and excision of queer and trans studies and formations of thought. Mischaracterizing those formations and founding works in queer studies, like Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), as the source of a postmodern “gender ideology,” these movements often posit queer and trans knowledges as sources that corrupt liberal political efforts, moral systems, national cultures, and family households. As Butler and Halberstam discuss, queer and trans discourses and knowledges are not only so mischaracterized by these reactionary movements and voices as to be nearly unrecognizable, they are often the derided cultural objects around which limits to the very meaning of social democracy is constructed and publicly disseminated. Like our previous Q2, Butler and Halberstam do not limit their discussion to these repressive efforts, discussing as well the indelible transformations trans and nonbinary people, especially the young, have made to contemporary social and political understandings as well as the important alliances out of which radical democracies are possible.

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