Irrational Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’

The author of the ground-breaking book Gender Trouble says we should not be surprised when the category of women expands to include trans women

Irrational Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’ 1304

Irrational Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’ 1304

It’s been 31 years since the release of Gender Trouble. What were you aiming to achieve with the book?

It was meant to be a critique of heterosexual assumptions within feminism, but it turned out to be more about gender categories. For instance, what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of “women” to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women. And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of “men”.

Let’s talk about Gender Trouble’s central idea of ‘performativity’. This remains a controversial view of how gender works, so what did you have in mind?

At the time I was interested in a set of debates in the academy about speech acts. “Performative” speech acts are the kind that make something happen or seek to create a new reality. When a judge declares a sentence, for instance, they produce a new reality, and they usually have the authority to make that happen. But do we say that the judge is all-powerful? Or is the judge citing a set of conventions, following a set of procedures? If it is the latter, then the judge is invoking a power that does not belong to them as a person, but as a designated authority. Their act becomes a citation – they repeat an established protocol.

How does that relate to gender?

I suggested more than 30 years ago that people are, consciously or not, citing conventions of gender when they claim to be expressing their own interior reality or even when they say they are creating themselves anew. It seemed to me that none of us totally escape cultural norms.

At the same time, none of us are totally determined by cultural norms. Gender then becomes a negotiation, a struggle, a way of dealing with historical constraints and making new realities. When we are “girled”, we are entered into a realm of girldom that has been built up over a long time – a series of conventions, sometimes conflicting, that establish girlness within society. We don’t just choose it. And it is not just imposed on us. But that social reality can, and does, change.

.https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/07/judith-butler-interview-gender

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Irrational Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’

Irrational Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’

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