24/12/2024
Long time socialist writer Colin Wilson writes for left wing portal RS21 about Judith Butler's new book "Who's Afraid of Gender". Colin notes " The American academic and campaigner Judith Butler is one of the people most closely associated with “gender” – to the extent that in 2017 they were burnt in effigy outside a conference in São Paolo, Brazil. As they arrived at the city’s airport people tried to attack them physically, and the first person Butler thanks in the book’s acknowledgements is “the young man with the backpack who threw his body between an attacker and me” and who prevented Butler being hit. Butler is also a campaigner for BDS, has been a member of the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace and was a campaigner as part of the Occupy movement in 2011-12... In 1990, they published the book Gender Trouble, which has become a classic. Back then, one of the most influential currents in feminism, “radical feminism”, argued that to fight women’s oppression it was necessary to understand that humanity was divided into two monolithic blocs, men and women, with different and contradictory interests. Black feminists pointed out that men and women were not monolithic blocs, but divided by race, with major implications for political strategy. Socialist feminists pointed out that some women were members of the ruling class, while most men were workers with little real power in a capitalist society. Gender Trouble also argued against radical feminist ideas. Being a woman or a man, Butler suggested, is not about the social expression of some inner feminine or masculine nature. Rather, we live in a society where people are typically assigned a gender at birth, and then punished for varying from that gender’s norms... As Butler writes in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, assigning a child female or male isn’t just done once, but as part of a series of events – pre-natal scans, at birth, when the child is given a gendered name – and part of that process, inevitably, is those involved imagining the life that child will have in society as a boy or girl, man or woman. That gender is primarily social, not biological, has become clearer as the numbers of trans and non-binary people has increased.... As Butler summarises, the anti-gender movement “is clearly responding to economic formations that have left many people radically insecure about their futures…” We need to respond to this with compelling visions of the world in which we want to live that can undermine “authoritarian structures and fascist passions”. To do this we need to generate new solidarities, to learn to work with others even when it’s difficult. But, facing anti-gender activists who claim to be defending “ordinary people” against powerful capitalist elites, Butler argues that we have to be the ones who combine gender struggles with a “critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones, and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that… provides health care, shelter and food across all regions”. This means we need to “make alliances that… oppose climate destruction and stand for a radical democracy informed by socialist ideals.”
For the full essay by Colin Wilson on Judith Butler's ideas do visit the RS21 website.
https://www.rs21.org.uk/2024/08/16/review-whos-afraid-of-gender/
