The Butler Did It

Judith Butler is a famed academic gender theorist, credited by both the left and right for helping to create modern concepts of gender fluidity. For the left, this is because Butler’s credentials lend credibility to modern queer culture. For the right, this is because it’s easier to allege a cultural marxist conspiracy led by a single bogeythem. Butler’s actual work is more complex than such mainstream analyses give her credit for- in Gender Trouble in 1990, Butler argued against the importance of sex in defining womanhood, or even the idea of defining womanhood at all, not out of any notion of trans-allyship (though she is a trans-ally) but because a fixation on such rigid identitarian deas obscures the arbitrary nature of patriarchal power structures.

In Undoing Gender in 2004, Butler claimed that even the idea of gender is inherently performative, and heavily tied to social milleus. And now, with Who’s Afraid of Gender, Butler analyzes the phantasms spawned by the demonization of her work, starting out with an unlikely progenitor to the eerily homogenous international culture war discourse about gender: Pope Francis.

Butler explains the surprise ascension of the seemingly social-justice–oving Jesuit Pope in 2013 by discussing how Pope Francis quickly escalated the Catholic Church’s war against gender. The official position of the Catholic Church is that gender is an artificial human construction. By contrast, sex is ordained by God, defining men and women as essentially complementary. The various official statements by Pope Francis emphasizing this are not part of the popular perception of Pope Francis, but church officials worldwide read it closely.

As Butler tells it, Pope Francis helped to spark a reactionary backlash against the idea of gender ideology through his ecclesiastical influence, aided by the increasingly explicit marriage of convenience between neoliberal politics and woke activism. As NGOs became more explicit in demanding that developing countries officially accede to gender inclusive political values in order to qualify for international aid packages, political actors who had other reasons for opposing such packages, namely the mandatory debt bondage and austerity measures, came to see modern gender ideology as an oppressive, colonializing force much in line with these other policies.

Butler notes with some irony that the ideastrictly binary genders is itself a colonialist imposition. Not all societies have historically organized around strict social roles for the sexes. Nor are papists exclusively responsible for spreading the idea of gender theory as destructive; their version is just one of the more intellectually rigorous ones. The evangelical pastor Scott Lively first came to Uganda in 2002 to help galvanize the sort of homophobic rhetoric for which the world now casually knows the country. The problem is more complex than that soundbite implies–Butler notes that churches became especially important in Uganda in part because they were the communities that remained after centuries of colonialist influence, with further damage inflicted by predatory international economic policy.

The condescension often expressed by anti-racists who often that assume that developing countries are naturally backwards and regressive doesn’t help the case for gender. To them, feminism is the invention of white people–or at least, Americans like Butler. To be fair, Butler did sort of “invent” the idea of gender in that the word doesn’t really exist in many other languages except as a cognate. But that’s not the same thing inherently defining social roles as binary.

When Butler discusses how gender is a construction of society, designed to serve the needs of society, they are also explicitly arguing that sex is largely irrelevant to gender, that societies define the roles of men and women and whoever else in terms of what the society itself wants to do. They impose these definitions to serve the needs of the society. The Catholic Church, and other anti-gender organizations, argue instead we naturally define society around sex and gender, an explanation that fails to explain why so many societies have such radically different gender roles.

This is all very dense, academic material, and in a way this is also Butler’s main weakness. They don’t really grasp how divorced notions of critical theory are from gender, not just to anti-woke activists like Christopher Rufo, but to people Butler assumes are on their own side. A section detailing critical race theory really stands out in that regard. Butler is obviously using the academic definition of critical race theory, because she relates it to indigenous Americans.

But this isn’t the modern popular definition of the term, which derives from the 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah Jones, and identifies the phrase as being solely synonymous with the African-American experience. Jones even dismissed its applicability to indigenous Americans entirely because some of them also owned slaves and were thus oppressors in their own right. While Butler is correct that Christopher Rufo is largely battling with phantasms, it strengthens when the people he’s arguing against are verifiably not engaging in the critical rigor which Butler sees as being critical to establishing academic credibility.

There’s been more direct blowblack than just weakened arguments as seen by third parties. Long before J.K. Rowling became a self-described expert on transgenderism, she bravely claimed that Dumbledore was gay and Hermione was black, and became a progressive hero for speaking these absurd truths to power, a self-image she clearly still holds onto. Rowling’s no more likely to back down on her trans-exclusionary positions than she is to say that she hates gay people and black people. To her, these are all equally self-evident moral positions.

Butler amusingly debunks the absurd and dehumanizing way Rowling reduces the penis to being the sole motivator to abusive behavior. But at the same time, this sort of misandry isn’t exclusive to Rowling and her ilk–it’s a very common surface-level interpretation of feminist theory. And the simple fact of the matter is, practically all the feminist theory we get at this point is surface-level. Barbie discourse was allegedly supposed to start serious conversations, yet no one ever actually seemed to have anything to say except that only bad people didn’t love Barbie.

As Butler notes, the purpose of these discussions isn’t to convince people of anything, but to broaden our own understanding. Reactionary forces battle with phantasms because they’re unwilling to acknowledge potential flaws in their own views. But they don’t do this because they’re reactionary, they do it because they’re arrogant, and this is by no means an attitude exclusive anti-gender political movements.