A Counter-Imaginary to Authoritarian Power: Gender, Passion and other Psychosocial Formations

Keynote lecture

4 pm, February 3
Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum

The anti-gender movement and the efforts to restrict curricular offerings and public debate on major issues of our time compel a reflection on the kinds of passions and fantasies that inform right-wing politics today. Fantasies of this sort have both psychic and political dimensions, in that they have galvanized many people to vote for, and continue to affirm, a form of authoritarian power that will destroy democratic institutions and even their own livelihoods. Butler wagers that those who would like to expose and defeat this power have to ask themselves:  For what passionate principles do we stand, and how do we craft, display and circulate them such that people will see in what we offer the kind of world in which they desire to live. This last requires linking democratic political movements with the work of the imagination, and, without engaging in manic forms of denial, collaborating on an imaginary that allows us to think, experimentally and hopefully, about the new coordinates for a world that makes democratic life irresistible. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender?

In their most recent book, Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti–gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization ― and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence. 

Who’s Afraid of Gender? examines how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and trans-exclusionary feminists. Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

About the speaker

Judith Butler taught critical theory, rhetoric and comparative literature in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley for nearly 30 years. Their publications, including the landmark Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and, most recently, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024), have been translated into 27 languages. 

About the Faculty Book Celebration

The publication of a monograph or significant creative work is a milestone in the career of an academic. The Center for the Humanities commemorates this achievement annually during the Faculty Book Celebration. The event recognizes Washington University faculty from the humanities and humanistic social sciences by displaying their recently published works and large-scale creative projects and inviting two campus authors and a guest lecturer to speak at a public gathering.

Panel discussion

Fear and Phantasms

12 pm, February 3
Hillman Hall, Clark-Fox Forum

Keynote speaker Judith Butler joins a conversation with WashU faculty members Marlon Bailey, professor of African and African American studies, and women, gender and sexuality studies; Fannie Bialek, assistant professor of religion and politics; and Tamsin Kimoto, assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies. Moderated by Talia Dan-Cohen, associate professor of sociocultural anthropology and associate director of the Center for the Humanities.

Lunch provided