Berkeley professor explains gender theory | Judith Butler

- So there are many different theories about

gender

, and mine is just one. Sometimes people who really hate the genre name me as the one who invented this, but that's actually not true. You know, in my opinion, everyone has a

theory

of

gender

, and what I mean by that is that everyone has certain assumptions about what gender is or should be. And at a certain point in life we ​​ask ourselves, "Wow, where does that assumption come from?" (Judith laughs) At this point, I'm less concerned about who is the right

theory

and who is wrong because the attack on gender is also an attack on democracy.

We have the power and freedom to create more livable lives for ourselves, where bodies can have more freedom to breathe, move, and love without discrimination and without fear of violence. I'm Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School of the University of California, Berkeley. I teach literature, philosophy, and critical theory, and am best known for my two books on gender, "Gender Trouble" and "Bodies That Matter," from the early '90s. My work has been translated into more than 27 languages. (thoughtful music) I insist that what it is to be a woman, or even what it is to be a man or any other gender, is an open question. (thoughtful music) We have a whole range of differences, biological in nature, so I don't deny them, but I don't think they determine who we are in any definitive way.

At the center of these controversies is the distinction between sex and gender. But what is that distinction? How do we think about it? Sex is generally a category assigned to babies and has importance within the medical and legal world. Gender is a mix of cultural norms, historical formations, family influence, psychic realities, longings and longings. And we have a say in that. My early life was affected by the 1960s and the social movements that took shape during that time. I grew up on the east side of Cleveland, part of a Jewish community, and when I was in high school, I was politically active.

But I was also taking college philosophy courses. When I was 20, I came to see that it was not just Jews who were rounded up and extinguished by the Nazi regime. It was queer people, gay/lesbian people, people with disabilities, people with illnesses, Polish workers, communists. And my feeling was that it was necessary to broaden the perspective and see that many people have been subject to genocidal policies and understand that there are different forms of oppression. I remained convinced that one needs to know history to ensure that it is not repeated and that one wants justice not only for the group one belongs to, but for any group that suffers similarly.

In the '70s and '80s, I was part of a movement of people who were rethinking gender at that time. Queer theory was emerging. It was in a complicated conversation with feminism. Trans issues had not yet emerged as part of our contemporary reality, so it was a time when we asked questions like: "What has society made of us and what can we make of ourselves?" There were various versions of feminism that I tended to oppose. One of them argued that, well, women are fundamentally mothers and that motherhood is the essence of the feminine. And then a second thought that feminism was about sexual difference, but the way they defined sexual difference was always presumptively heterosexual.

And they both seemed wrong to me. I was pretty committed to the idea that people shouldn't be discriminated against for what they do with their bodies, who they love, how they move or how they look. All I was saying is that the sex you are assigned at birth and the gender you are taught to be should not determine how you live your life. (Movie camera rolling) Sometimes people point to "Gender Trouble" as the beginning of gender theory, but people were already working on gender before me, Gayle Rubin, Juliet Mitchell and Simone de Beauvoir herself. Simone de Beauvoir was an existentialist philosopher and feminist philosopher who wrote "The Second Sex" in the 1940s.

The basic point is that one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one, that the body is not a given. She opened up the possibility of a difference between the sex you are assigned and the sex you become. (thoughtful music) Gayle Rubin was an anthropologist, and still is an anthropologist, and wrote an extremely influential article called "The Traffic in Women." And what she tried to say was that the family was a structure whose task was to reproduce gender, and one of the goals she had was to keep heterosexuality looking really normal. And although she was part of feminist anthropology at that time, she allowed us to start thinking about gender as something that could be reproduced, elaborated, cultivated and that there were systems, frameworks to which gender belongs.

There was another dimension to Rubin's work which, interestingly, was psychoanalysis. He basically said, "Well, maybe there's a lot of repression in becoming a man and a lot of repression in becoming a woman," and that one of the things we have to do to conform to existing gender norms is to rule out all those possibilities of being, feel, do, love that do not align with the gender norms that govern our lives. So, anthropology, psychoanalysis, they all had their place at that time before "Gender Trouble" came on the scene. I think at the time I wrote "Gender Trouble," people treated gender as if it were a natural fact or a sociological reality, but they didn't treat it as something that could be created and remade.

Acting is important to the point that we represent who we are, and anyone in acting studios really knows that there are performances that we do in our lives that are not mere acting, are not fake. When the word performative was first coined, philosopher J.L. Austin was trying to understand legal expressions. So when a judge says, "I pronounce you husband and wife," you become husband and wife once that declaration has occurred. That's not false, that happened. Now, what if we said that by representing our lives as a particular gender, we are actually realizing that gender again, we are making something real happen?

When gays and lesbians started coming out or when trans people started living openly, something changed in the world. By appearing, speaking, acting in certain ways, reality changed. And it has changed. We are seeing the change of terms. We no longer speak in the same way about family, about women, about men, about desire, about sex. Even the Cambridge Dictionary (Judith laughs) acknowledges that something has changed. Okay, so when we talk about performative, we're talking about an act that causes something to come into existence or an act that has real consequences. We are talking about the change of reality.

Even among the progressive and liberal people I know, there can sometimes be a real resistance to thinking about trans rights, lesbian and gay rights, or even women's rights. Sometimes they say that they are secondary issues or it simply bothers them. "Why should I refer to someone as he, she or they?" And yet, at least in America, we have learned to talk about black people differently or talk about women differently. And of course, it was probably difficult to learn to use a new language. Maybe we had to adjust our habits. But stumbling is part of learning and making a mistake is part of learning, especially when we are learning something new.

We can all be snarky sometimes, right? Certain statements will make me angry and I will yell, but if I only did that, I would never have a conversation with anyone. I think we all want to be the moral center of our universe, like, "Okay, that's bad." "You're cancelled, you're not." "You are with me, you are against me." But we have to allow ourselves to be challenged and accept the invitation to revise our ways of thinking because that is the only way to be open to people who are trying, sometimes for the first time, to make their claim, to be heard, to be known. , to be recognized. (uplifting music) Now, I'm less interested in defending a gender theory.

I'm much more concerned with finding creative and effective ways to counter the attack on the genre. One problem is that many people who refuse to allow trans people to define themselves are because they feel their own self-definition is destabilized. The idea that we can change reality, transform reality to be more open, inclusive, simply less violent, carries with it an instability that is very scary for people who want to understand that their genders are fixed. But is someone's gender necessary and universal, or is it a complicated emergence that happens with each of us? Our deepest sense of ourselves also forms over time, and we can't always know in advance what it will be. (uplifting music) Freedom is a struggle because there are many things in our world that tell us not to be free with our bodies.

And if we seek to love freely, live and move freely, we actually have to fight to claim that freedom. When we live in a democracy, we assume that we live according to certain principles (equality, freedom, justice) and yet we are constantly learning what freedom is, what equality is, and what justice can be. And those challenges, right, the anti-slavery movement, the suffrage movement, the LGBTQIA+ rights movement, I mean, each of those struggles involves challenging people's existing ideas of: Who is equal? Who has the right to be free? And how do we define justice? We are constantly fighting to achieve that goal.

We need to take up these notions and show that concerns about racial justice, gender equality, and gender freedom are an integral part of any democratic struggle, especially if we want to rethink who people are and what it means for them to live in freedom. without fear. (uplifting music) - Let's finish with the topic of gender. Unless you want to take a break from the genre, we can get back to that. Do you want to get...? Let me give you the message for the last one... - All my life I have wanted to take a break from the genre.

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