USA News Hub

Where Butler’s earlier work focused on the potential for liberation, their new book is more concerned with understanding these fears. A lot of the relief that people feel reading Gender Trouble, for instance, comes from changing the relationship between their body and their identity, and being able to imagine that relationship changing over time. Conversely, the same possibility of change can have the opposite effect on those whose identity and sense of safety are based on adherence to norms. Butler refers, for example, to a speech Meloni gave in 2022, intimating that gender ideology would mean “the disappearance of women and the death of the mother.” Meloni “then called on women and mothers to rise up and fight for their ‘sexed identities.’” “If somebody tells you that your entire way of understanding your sex, your sexuality, your embodied life, is subject to destruction,” Butler has noted, “then you will respond with fear and anxiety at a somatic level.”

Fascists, Butler argues, use gender as a way of gathering up our terrifying shared problems—gaping inequality, precarity, annihilation by climate change, the constant experience or awareness of war—and then allowing us to sublimate the many horrifying structural realities of our time into an emotionally consuming distraction called gender. Butler calls this view of gender a “phantasm” with “destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics.” Naomi Klein recently wrote something similar about the world of online conspiracies, including conspiracies about gender, in her excellent book Doppelganger. Klein uses the term Shadow Lands to refer to the vast world of pain that we keep just outside of consciousness—the world of unregulated factories that make our clothes, meatpacking plants, melting glaciers. We respond with anxiety; but, afraid of facing the real problems, we enter the world of fantasy and abstraction.

These panics have deep emotional pull because they respond to real anxiety but are developed in particular directions by powerful international political and religious institutions with vast sums of money. Butler takes on the Roman Catholic Church throughout this book, blessedly unswayed by trendy paeans to the progressive-for-a-priest politics of Pope Francis. No friend to queers, Francis has decried “gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.” CitizenGO, an advocacy group started by a right-wing Catholic organization in Spain to mobilize citizens against LGBTQ and reproductive rights, has developed digital infrastructure to launch petitions and protests around the world. The entrepreneurial organization now claims to have run anti-abortion campaigns in Malawi, Niger, Tanzania, and Kenya.