Episode 19: Judith Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender?

is from 1985, right?

He's not arguing.

This is before gender trouble.

He's not arguing with trans people.

He's not arguing about performativity.

He's not even probably arguing with radical feminism.

He's arguing about women priests, is my guess.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Loira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So today, Adrian, we are talking about a book by somebody you may never have heard of.

Are you familiar with the name Judith Butler?

Oh, that rings a bell faintly.

I think I saw them burned in effigy in the country of Brazil.

So yes, I am.

And, you know,

I might also recognize them from pretty much 20% of the bookshelf behind me.

Yeah.

Butler is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

They are famously the author of 1991's Gender Trouble, a frequently cited and I would say somewhat infrequently read book.

Yeah, very influential in shaping gender studies over the course of my lifetime.

And

this is the book that sort of has

dogged and shaped and

one gets the sense rendered somewhat claustrophobic, Judith Butler's career in the ensuing decades, and they are sort of back with a sequel for our 21st century.

So tell me a little bit about who's afraid of gender.

It is in its own way a popularizing sequel to Gender Trouble.

I think you're right to say that.

It picks up on a bunch of themes from that book while being about really about something else.

I think that its biggest sin is not being called, you know, too gender, too trouble.

You know, you have to, you have to adhere to the sequelizing conventions of the Fast and the Furious franchise, I think.

But we don't have that.

We have Who's Afraid of Gender, which one should also note Butler's first book with a trade publisher.

It came out with FSG.

And it, you can tell, it's a book that is written for a mainstream audience, which if you have read Gender Trouble, it's not.

Gender Trouble is not that.

And it kind of seeks to intervene in contemporary politics in a way that I think Butler's work by and large did, but kind of at the end of

long articles or long chapters,

this is Butler at their most interventionist, I would say.

It's also Butler, I think, trying to set the record straight a little bit.

Full disclosure, I did a roundtable on this book for the Chronicle of Higher Education last week.

And there I said it kind of felt like the summa of a career.

It's the most recognizable aspect of any scholar's career that, on the one hand,

they want to speak to a broader audience.

On the other hand, they're kind of still peeved about all the times they were misunderstood.

And so you're getting both of these things.

You get Jules Butler making a pretty ambitious argument about what exactly the category of gender does to right-wing backlash politics and to what they really see as an incipient fascist international

in general.

And then also, it's a book about people who clearly got their work wrong over the years.

And there are a lot of them.

Like, that's fair.

As you indicated, gender trouble has many readers, but probably more misreaders.

So totally understandable.

But it's interesting that

you do see these two warring impulses in this book.

Yeah.

So I would summarize Who's Afraid of Gender as sort of a...

diagnosis of various forms of transphobia that Butler sees emerging on the global right with, you know, it's really ambitious in its scope, but I would say they spend a good deal of their time in the United States and the UK.

So there's sort of a slant towards the Anglophone world here.

And it really sort of vacillates between these two tones of sort of, I would say, like ambitious, like sweeping,

at times almost joyfulness about the, you know, transgender liberatory project.

And then it alternates with this real piddling,

peeved

remediation, right?

And corrections of misapprehensions of gender trouble.

And I think misapprehensions of the gender studies field that have been emerging both sort of sincerely and cynically by its critics over the past 30 years.

Yeah, so this is stuff like, you know, oh, what does it mean for gender to be performative, right?

Clearly, there are versions of that argument that people sort of put in Butler's mouth and they've just had it up to here very clearly with that.

And I have to say, you know, I

think it would be superhuman to demand of Judith Butler not to put that in there and be like, by the way, that's not what I said, you know, just FYI.

But on the other hand, I think you're absolutely right that there is this duality in this book, that like, you know, you're like, oh, wow, now

we're back in.

Professor Butler's course and they're mad at us for not doing the reading, right?

And again, like, I'm right there with with them.

I recognize this impulse, but you're right that as an artifact, the book betrays those kinds of two impulses.

I'm actually a little surprised that you say it's about trans liberation.

I was shocked, and I think in some of the reception of the book, you can tell that some of our trans friends and colleagues and comrades are a little shocked too.

That it ultimately, I think it's a defense of feminism, and they're really arguing this the attack on quote-unquote gender is an attack really on feminism, right?

That trans people are sort of like, I mean, they wouldn't use the word collateral damage, but they're almost saying like, this goes beyond that.

This is really trying to re-establish gendered hierarchies from, you know, that are pre-modern, essentially, which, you know, I think is

a point that I think this podcast would co-sign in many ways, but it does, of course, mean

that some of the, and this is something that a really impressive essay that Andrea Long Chu wrote about this book gets at, that it does tend to gloss over the fact that the main victims of this tend to be trans people and that the main

site of conflict is the question of trans identities.

And you can read, I think, between the lines, or sometimes not even between the lines, in some of the reception

among trans scholars or others who want to foreground trans studies, a hint of annoyance that's saying like, well, gee,

this feels like you're saying, oh, well, this isn't about you, right?

It's like, well, we're the ones dying.

We're the ones having our fundamental rights taken away.

And you're, you're kind of saying, well, it's not really about that.

Yeah, well, it's fair to say that one project of the book is about trying to

affect a revival of a coalition between feminists and queer and trans

people and queer and trans theorists that has been eroded, not just

as they deal with quite prominently by like the emergence of TERFs and the sort of hijacking of the feminist label and the radical feminist label in particular, for these ends to which it has not like historically been used, right?

And which it has to be like very tortured to be used for,

but also, you know,

it's an effort, I think, often in this book to show the commonalities between the trans and cis feminist projects and to try and not exactly reconcile but perhaps minimize the tensions that have arisen between those projects over the past 35 years which i would say have emerged in no small part in response to gender trouble yeah so like maybe it might be useful before we get too into the weeds to give our readers who maybe have sort of seen memes about gender trouble or kind of know what it's about just an overview of what that book said what it did and then how it was misread so that then we can get into what Judith Butler is responding to and what they're trying to correct in Who's Afraid of Gender?

Yeah, I like it.

Easy peasy, let's do it.

So, the subtitle of Gender Trouble is, I believe, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, is that right?

Which I think it's maybe the better descriptor of the book, right?

Butler says at the point that it's meant as a, and I think that's a quote, but don't quote me on that,

a feminist genealogy of the category of woman, right?

To say that

the book understands itself as feminist, but it's worried about, well, about frankly, the kind of position that today we associate with the TERFs.

It's worried about people who use the category of woman to say, well, you guys don't belong in this project.

They're essentially insisting that

there's real trouble with

wanting to fill

the category of woman with inescapable content.

So I think that's that's the overall project.

What the argument that has made it famous is that, right, feminists had operated, but had frequently operated with the sex-gender distinction, right?

And Butler's claim is, well, sex is gender.

It's us weeding our gendered...

our social distinctions, our social, the way we socially make meaning of our bodies back onto nature, right?

Some of this, I'm guessing even, you know, the most essentialist

exclusionary feminist would grant that when Aristotle looks at the sperm and is like, oh, it's aggressive and penetrative, it's like, no, these are two cells doing a thing.

Come on.

Like this is like you're reading your

cultural meaning making around differently constituted bodies into zygotes, right?

But the panic around kids that are gender non-conforming gives you a sense of just how quickly this project runs up against some real serious cultural resistances where people are like, well, no, I mean, my little baby girl of nine months is like that, right?

And you're like,

I don't know.

It feels pretty blobby to me, got to be honest with you.

But that's the basic contention that the book is famous for.

Any attempt to shore up, and this is a Deridian argument, a deconstructive argument, that any attempt to shore up something natural that we then impose social construction on is illusory.

It may well exist, is what Butler would say, but it's inaccessible to us, right?

It's inaccessible to us scientifically, discursively, politically.

Like you can't base anything on that.

I'm sorry, what may well exist that's inaccessible to us?

What's the opposite?

A bodily soma outside of our social determination.

So you can't interpret your body.

Your body can't be accessible to you without the social meanings that have been assigned to it repeatedly since burst for most of us.

Yeah.

Right.

So this is, this is, it's in some way, we could think of it as a version of the Deridian claim of Igna par de autex.

There's nothing outside of the text.

His point is when we talk about stuff like justice, we're always already in our discourses about justice.

Like there may be such a thing as justice out there, but like we're not going to get to it because what we're getting at it through is cultural presuppositions, long traditions of conceptualizing this stuff.

Our very conceptual apparatus may make certain things visible and invisible.

It's not there for us to really get to, right?

We're dealing to some extent with our own creations, and we're dealing to some extent with our own creation when it comes to gender.

Right.

So, the notion of A, what is called the performativity of gender, which turns out to be a very contested term, and then B, the social construction of sex, are sort of the two items from gender trouble that are both fundamental to the work of that book and also that get like really repeatedly

misread and really like kind of terminally misread in ways that provoke a lot of anger and a lot of like bad thinking from both Butler's, I think, supposed or like professed acolytes and from their critics.

So do you want to give us like a quick rundown of those misreadings?

Would you want to do this one?

Well, I think we can start with sort of the social construction of sex, right?

Because I think Butler is saying is not that the physical body does not exist outside of

the meanings that we attach to it, right?

Like the physical body is a fact that is there and it is like sort of materially obvious.

This is a word that comes up in contention a lot in like who's afraid of gender, right?

Like what is obvious.

And so it's not about a denial of the physical form, it's about our inability to access a separate meaning or essence or truth of that form

beyond these social meanings that we have applied to the sex body.

So I think your Aristotle idea is a good one.

You know, this is something actually like critical nature studies has been really interesting in its interest in the ways that gender has informed our understanding of the natural world, or rather like misinformed our understanding of the natural world, right?

Our ideologies about sex and its meaning not only constrain our knowledge, but also frequently lead us to kinds of wrong thinking and misunderstanding.

So that's the social constructivity of sex.

I don't think it's actually that controversial when you get down to it.

Performativity is a little bit slipperier, right?

So Butler was working from this notion of performativity that she got from like language, like philosophy of language, right?

Which is this idea that it is,

you know, so actions have promises, right?

Or some words are actions.

And one way that Butler is talking about the formation of gender in the, you know, like let's say for simplicity's sake, in the individual, which is that the repeated action of gender and the repeated experience of being acted on in gendered ways is in fact what forms a gendered identity, right?

It is a repetitive, iterative process more than an a priori identity that exists somewhere in the soul.

And that is a much more complex understanding understanding of gender's like quote-unquote performativity than what that word got read as in sort of the vernacular, which is where performativity means like

spontaneous, it can mean volitional,

and it can mean artificial, none of which are really, I think, like justifiable

ascriptions of how gender works in our lived lives, right?

Yeah, right.

They're reversing the thrust that you just described, right?

They're saying

we think of it as gender expression, right?

Meaning, there is a thing called gender that expresses itself through a, let's say, a little girl's love of pink.

I'm just picking a random example that I don't deal with in my everyday life at all.

They're like, no, is it possible that we come to the understanding that someone has a coherent identity that is called little girl

through these performances, through these repeated processes and

social responses to it, right?

That

children receive approbation or disapprobation, that

acts receive meaning through

the society around them, right?

Whether this can be violent, this can be dangerous, this can also just be good for you, little

rascal or something like that, right?

Like it can be very, very tiny things, but basically

the illusion of a stable category from which all this emanates comes actually is actually an upshot of these iterative processes.

yeah and i will just clarify a little bit that you know in these discussions of what is sometimes called gender socialization there tends to be like a pop psychological emphasis on childhood on particularly on the experience of being a little girl and i don't want to you know downplay or dismiss that experience but i think it's important to emphasize that this is an ongoing process

that this is not something where you know we are disciplined into this gendered form by our family as children from which

yeah and then the discipline stops or and we you know can decondition or do or undo what was done to us in childhood it's like childhood is certainly part of it yeah but this is this is something that does not stop once you hit puberty it changes and reifies yeah and forms new like sort of compulsions and and and cultural formate formation throughout a life.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

And I think, especially in senescence, I think you can often tell how these mechanisms work, right?

The same people who are like all like freaked out about hormone therapy, like are obsessed with their like own decreasing testosterone.

It's like, so it feels like

your body isn't doing what you think your gender should be doing.

Yeah.

So like that variance is exactly what that, what, what Butler would talk about.

And so exactly this kind of voluntaristic model that you talk about, this kind of idea that like, oh, we're just going to sort of like make it up as we go along, blah, blah, blah, right?

Like, you know, that's not what they're saying.

What they're describing is a fairly tragic process with some very, very, you know, serious ramifications for people's self-esteem, for people's self-conception, for people's bodily integrity and safety, if they cannot quite conform in the way they're supposed to.

So I think that it's very, very important to sort of note that what came out of it, this kind of carnivalesque model of

you can choose what you want to be, right?

Like, that's not, sure, that is a consequence someone could draw from this.

It's not what Butler draws from it at all.

Up until now, we have described Butler's account as, as you said in your terms, really tragic, right?

This is an account that is entirely consistent with the sort of traditional feminist account of gender as a

compulsory, often violent, involuntary process of domination and exploitation, right?

And I don't think Butler is exactly disagreeing with that historical account.

We can get to their treatment of McKinnon later.

And we should say that Butler adopted they-them pronouns a couple of years ago, and I am still used to referring to them

by the pronouns they used before.

And I might fuck up, and you know, maybe we will.

Luckily, this is live, so you can't, I can't edit it out.

Yeah, maybe we'll edit this out.

They gave an interview to the Financial Times where this reporter was like kind of making this like narcissistic big deal about how nervous they were to fuck up Judith Butler's pronouns.

And Judith Butler goes like, oh, you know, don't worry about it.

When it's like a good faith mistake, I don't really care.

You know, I mess up people's pronouns all the time.

And I felt like it was like this blessing from like, you know, when the beam of light comes down and it's God, yeah, it's like, okay,

and like Judith Butler makes the sign of the cross over me.

And now I feel less worried about, you know, that like moment of profound shame when you fuck up somebody's pronouns.

Well, yeah, I mean, like, I I do think that the

idea that fucked up pronouns will lead to immediate cancellation exists only in certain fever swamps and, you know, in the imagination of 18-year-old undergraduates.

So that is, you know, that's like Butler the tragedian, right?

But there's also Butler the optimist who sees in this iterative, repeated formation of gender a lot of

places for subversion and play even in with this even within this sort of like domination system right uh so butler

well not even just potential it's basically it's inevitable

right the point of the the point of gender trouble is gender is always in trouble right like there is because of the iterativity of this whole thing it just produces you know you can't make bodies mean in this way and basically it's not that there are there are just opportunities, but the opportunities are built in.

Like, it's basically no one ever managed to perform

gender as it's socially constructed and imagined.

And therefore, there are all these sites for

contestation.

Right.

And failure, right?

So there's this sort of like volitional sense of subversion.

And then there's also the sort of inevitability of

trying to achieve this impossible, repeated task often with some anxiety and and not getting it because it's not something that can be gotten you know so that's gender trouble is there anything else you want to say about gender trouble much more to say but uh no i think we i think we sort of nailed it i kind of feel like yeah i'm feeling good about it

i feel like for people who have like kind of understood gender trouble or sort of knew what it was about or maybe had like a half you know understanding where they were like is that really what it says because that doesn't sound defensible.

Like, I think we've like cleared it up a little bit.

And we should say that.

So,

when we talk, if we're talking about who's afraid of gender, the interesting thing is, so we've made it kind of sound like it's a reply to the critics of gender trouble.

And it's, it is only to a very, very limited extent, although it is also that, which I think makes it confusing, right?

Like, they also wrote that book already, right?

Isn't that more or less bodies that matter?

Yeah, bodies that matter is basically was the academic version of like kids, like, that's not what I said.

Like, read my damn text.

Yeah, and that was that was a book that butler wrote and i want to say like 1993 yeah it's like gender

is like yeah it's basically

essays being like no no no no no

which would have been a better title no no no no no

quick point of order i do not accept this that's not what i said by judith butler yeah but who's afraid of gender you know it's both a sort of attempt to correct the misreadings of gender trouble, which Butler thinks, and I sort of agree with him on this point, have like influenced gender discourses in the intervening decades to like maybe an unnerving or frustrating degree.

But it's also a confrontation with this sort of revived politics of what I in my writing call gender conservatism and what Butler calls anti-gender.

And so maybe we should walk people through that because like

it's very complicated because for especially for listeners of this podcast, you or readers of Mora's work, you'll know that basically it's always backlash o'clock in feminist world.

Patriarchy is never like, oh yeah, fair point, ladies.

But there is this real change that's taken place, which it revolves really around use of the word gender.

So sometimes when Butler is trying to talk about anti-gender politics, they're clearly thinking about like bad reactions to their work.

At other times, they're really just saying, and I think this is what makes this book actually a little confusing at times, they're just saying who use gender.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's important to note that that's not their fault.

It's basically there are these movements all across the globe that seem to know exactly what they mean when they say gender.

And then you scratch below the surface and you're like, I'm sorry, but what the fuck do you mean?

Yeah.

So, but one thing that I will say makes this, even though it is, you know, but a much easier read than gender trouble.

One thing that doesn't make who's a friend of gender a bit slippery is that the definition of gender keeps changing.

And that is in part because Butler keeps addressing new camps of gender conservatism that use it in different ways, right?

So they're doing this kind of like game good sportsmanship thing where they are using the definition that their opponents are using and trying to like sort of disprove their opponent's arguments on those terms, right?

But those terms are very internally inconsistent and and they are very variable, right?

So it's, you feel like you're writing, I'm making a little waving motion with my hand, you feel like you're on a boat in a storm a little bit in terms of the definition of what gender is.

And part of that is, you know, I think almost pedagogically useful because you do come as a reader to this inescapable realization that this is not a steady concept, right?

It is one that is eternally in flux, which if anything might, you know, know prove Butler's point a little bit.

Just to kind of give folks, and listeners in different countries will recognize different parts of the stories.

This, so, this is not a book of philosophy, this is almost a book of reportage, right?

Like, they're really walking us through how did this happen?

I put it in the roundtable as follows: like, there was a time in 2017 when Judith Butler and their partner, Wendy Brown, were at a conference in Brazil, and they found themselves, I believe, chased through the airport by an incensed mob that was burning

an effigy of Butler, which they had made specifically for this purpose, I guess.

Told it had devil horns and a bikini.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, right, so

that's an unusual place for an academic philosopher to find themselves, is, I think,

being burned in effigy anywhere, let alone an airport.

And in some way,

Butler is kind of asking about the conditions of possibility

for that.

Like, how did this

happen?

Right?

How did people the world over get so incensed about this thing that they thought they understood as gender?

It's very existence, its very teaching, and why is it connected to witchcraft?

Why does it seem to like call up these satanic connotations?

Why is it supposed to be corrosive?

Why is it supposed to be dangerous, et cetera, et cetera?

And that's what the book is trying to do.

And the book kind of tells a story.

You can go back pretty far in this story, but the way Butler tells it is that it really starts sort of on the Catholic right in Latin America, it seems like, and then sort of takes a hold in the Catholic Church.

And then from the Vatican kind of makes its way

into kind of Western European Catholic movements.

I think

I can't quite remember that chapter so well.

It's been a little while, but I'm guessing they're thinking of things like the Manif Protus

in France.

Again, this was against gay marriage.

But

long time listeners of this podcast have heard us talk about this before that a lot of the fight against gay marriage had anti-trans talking points that you would later recognize as anti-trans talking points already wrapped in it right like oh we no longer recognize males and females we no longer recognize fathers and mothers like wait are you talking about two moms or are you talking about like the category of mom losing its purchase right like they're already kind of going in that direction it then very quickly goes to eastern europe specifically countries in which which right-wing soft authoritarians or illiberal parties are ascendant.

So think of Viktor Orbans, Hungary, think of law and justice Poland.

Justice Poland, exactly.

Only from there, and that's the interesting thing, does it really come to the US?

This is a very interesting story that Butler tells, and I think this is correct, that basically

this comes to the US last.

It probably, I mean, they don't make this explicit, but like the same way that

on the one hand, Donald Trump is a homegrown American fascist.

You heard it here first, folks, but Corey Robin's gonna come and hit you over the head with a cartoon mallet.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, shit.

Sorry, sorry.

I'm a big fan of your work, but on this one, I'm gonna, you know, sorry.

The yes, the F question.

But the other thing, of course, he is an importation of sort of European strongman aesthetic.

He models himself on Silvia Berlusconi and on Victor Orban, right?

And part of that.

Very Mussolini, right?

Yeah, sure.

That too.

Yeah.

But I mean, like his, I mean, in terms of like, you know, billionaire who, you know, grabs women and also is not wild about the press.

Like

that's a Silvio Bertosconi joint, right?

And so in some way, there's a kind of particular brand of Euro-authoritarianism or strongmanism being kind of imported here.

In that transfer seems to be where Butler thinks like this.

kind of comes back into the US.

And really what connects these people is just that they yell about gender, right?

They're about like freaked out about gender theory.

Like in Germany, they have this weird, inexplicable panic about what's called gendering, which is basically indicating gender neutrality in how you write or say a word.

And people are losing their fucking minds.

In German, my understanding is that this is a little more grammatically involved, but it parallels the English language freak out over the they them pronoun.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

They basically looked at pronoun freak outs and were like, oh, we can do that.

And it's every bit as stupid as the other freakouts, right?

I mean, I'll just quote from Butler here

for a second from about Orban.

Orban's views sum up some of the main elements of gender ideology in the Eastern Europe context.

It is forced upon nations such as Hungary by international organizations or the European Union.

It is an attack on national and Christian values, which are to him the same.

It harms children children through its teachings.

It attacks the natural family.

This phantasmatic cluster of issues leads to the call for quote-unquote gender ideology to be walled off as migrants are, as the EU and powerful foreign forces must also be, as Soros and George Soros and his institutions must be.

We're left to understand that Soros presumably hates Christianity because he's Jewish, a rank anti-Semitic position, but like other such phantasms, he also represents the threat of capitalism to Hungarian family values.

Soros is characterized as owning nearly everything, and his influence on universities and research is imagined as overwhelming, if not unstoppable.

Well, here we have this parallel of this conspiratorial fear of quote-unquote gender ideology, by which they often seem to mean, you know, the public recognition of gay and trans people, just sort of bleeding very seamlessly into the conspiratorial paranoia of anti-Semitism, right?

Yeah.

And I think Butler makes this connection a little more explicitly later in the book, right?

But there's a sense that there is this ominous, unregulated, malicious force that has uncertain origins and also really expansive destructive power.

Yeah.

And in fact, you might think, oh, this is just another re-description of backlash.

And Butler is very explicit that it is not.

They write, the weaponization of this fearsome phantasm of gender is authoritarian at its core.

Rolling back progressive legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the reactive moment in this scene.

The project of restoring the world to a time before gender promises, in quotation marks, big quotation marks here, promises a return to a patriarchal dream order that may never have existed, but that occupies the place of history or nature, an order that only a strong state can restore.

I think that's a very interesting way of putting it.

The reason they're using phantasm here is they're not saying, oh, these people want to go back to the 1950s.

They're saying they want to go back to never, neverland.

They're going back to a gendered order that never existed like this in the first place, right?

Right.

It's a project about inventing a new future, but it is structured by these fantasies about an imagined idyllic past

in which these hierarchies were uncontested.

Yeah, exactly.

You keep saying the 1950s, but you keep talking about the handmaid's tale, right?

There's not an attempt to bring things back.

There is an attempt to move somewhere.

It's this activist to the core.

You know, if we briefly lost Corey Robin, if he indeed he listens to this show with our invocation of the F-word, we might get him back here because that's his point in his book, The Reactionary Mind, that this isn't about going back to anything.

This is a strikingly dynamic, forward-moving project.

And it just, the place it's moving to is terrifying as shit.

So then Butler moves on from this global scene into the American context.

Do you want to stop over at the Vatican before we do?

Well, let's talk about the Vatican.

I had some interesting thoughts about Butler's account of natural law.

Exactly, which has become kind of a covert obsession of this podcast.

We're getting to a natural law episode any day now.

It's going to be fun.

But yeah, so

there is this point that they make that basically the Vatican definitely thought of gender as part of a challenge to natural law traditions.

And it's it's very noticeable.

There's a very nice passage, which is not sort of, I mean, Butler is quoting another researcher, Mary Ann Case, quoting

a man that may be familiar to many listeners, Joseph Ratzinger, aka Benedict the, what was he?

Well, you're the Catholic, you tell me.

Benedict XV.

16th, okay, sorry.

Off by 10, whatever.

One of the most conservative popes, which is not exactly, you know, a bleeding heart hippie bunch.

No.

So this is Papa Ratzi, Joseph Ratzinger, writing about radical feminists, male, female.

They are questions that for some are now viewed as obsolete, senseless, if not racist.

So you might think, oh, wow.

So Ratzinger has definitely read some cancel culture texts.

This is from 1985, right?

It's really striking.

He's not arguing.

This is before gender trouble.

He's not arguing with trans people.

He's not arguing about performativity.

He's not even probably arguing with radical feminism.

He's arguing about women priests is my guess, right?

Like on second wave feminism.

Yes.

But it anticipates what would become the attack on gender.

And this is sort of the long view that Butler takes to say, yes, this is probably also, this is about the fact that a lot of people have a baseline transphobia that's easy to exploit politically, et cetera, et cetera.

But like, it's important to note that this project is really, Ratzinger is not sort of like, well, Betty Froudin was all right, but everything after that was terrible.

He's also anti-Betty Froudin.

It might be interesting at some point, probably not in this podcast but to do a little like hermeneutics of the phrase radical feminism i know which means so many different things so many different people including i think several different things to butler over the course of this book i know and you know has been appropriated for a lot of projects that don't have very much in common with each other but that's uh that's another yeah that's another episode i think yes it's true i mean i have to say that i i think i only fully grasped why we call it why the turfs why that's a good nomer why, right?

They don't always seem very radical in their political outlooks.

If anything, they sound vaguely conservative, right?

But why that is nevertheless a

one apt way of using that word radical.

It only became clear to me while we were taping the Susan Stryker episode.

Oh, say more.

What do you mean?

Well, just that, you know, you come to understand why.

Someone like Janice Raymond or Mary Daly, why for them, a radical feminism is about about an uprooting and destruction of anything androcentric in themselves and in that they include anything that doesn't fit into their, frankly, fairly narrow description of what a woman is.

Yeah, that is radical, right?

Like if you want to change the very way in which you talk, organize the world, et cetera, et cetera, right?

That is by definition radical, except that in the end, as Susan, I think, very aptly demonstrated, in its applications, it was then politically fairly small C conservative.

Right.

They didn't wind up actually changing that much.

They wound up up sort of narrowing their acceptable spoke to something that was already quite consistent with what me, I'd understand as like

another hierarchy of gender.

Yeah.

Something I took from Butler's treatment of the trans-inclusive radical feminists in the chapter on these discourses in the United Kingdom is that a lot of the people who refer to themselves as radical feminists from that camp whose radicalism seems to, you know, be denoted only by their hostility to trans people, those are people who have not done much of the reading.

You know, like perhaps they encountered an excerpt of Janice Raymond on Tumblr, but it does not seem that they are commiserate with Catherine McKinnon, who I think Butler uses to good effect as an example of historical radical feminism's usefulness to the transliberatory project

before they turn around and shive Catherine McKinnon because

that's another leftover grievance from the early 90s.

You live long enough.

You know, I'm getting there.

But maybe we can move on.

to Butler's account of the United States and how this emerges from the sort of Vatican and from Eastern Europe and then gets imported to the US.

Well, one thing I thought I might briefly mention something about like what brings these things together, right?

So like one thing that Butler keeps talking about again and again is that it's a contradictory movement.

If we think about it, an anti-gender movement combines the Vatican and yeah, J.K.

Rowling.

It combines like sort of militant atheists sometimes, you know, right-wing politicians in the US with left-wing editors in the UK.

You know, Victor Orban and you know, you know, Marine Le Pen, I guess that's not that.

That's not that

big a job.

Yeah, I feel like they already hang out.

But on the other hand, it's also undeniable that they all draw on each other, right?

Like there is this.

They're in a group chat.

Yeah.

It's not wrong to call this a movement.

But the big question, of course, is like, what does that mean?

And I think Andrea Long Chu, again,

in her essay, you know, gets at something really interesting, sort of saying, this is the cover story of New York magazine.

New York Magazine, exactly.

Pointing out that like, maybe just talking about the far right, as Butler mostly does, and then sort of looping in the turfs a little bit, is wrong.

Long Chu, I think, coins this term of the tarl, the trans-agnostic reactionary liberal, and is making the point, like, you know, which first of all I love.

It's very clever.

I will say, and Andrea Chu is always funny.

Even when I disagree with her, she always makes me laugh.

Yeah, yeah.

But the bigger point behind the tarl is, of course, to say, like, are we sure that this is really a far-right phenomenon?

That the problem isn't that, like, what some people call reactionary centrists have really bought into this as like the central thing, right?

Like, when people are like, oh, you're not allowed allowed to say anything anymore.

And you're like, like what?

And then like the answer almost 90% of the time is transphobia, right?

And you're like, oh, gee, like that's all you like, that's it.

I'm not allowed to say something really bigoted about this trans person.

Yeah.

So tell me a little bit about where, because I instinctively recognized Chu's definition of the tarl, but tell me a little bit more about where they recognize this distinct version or maybe a continuous version of transphobia in American liberalism and what makes that transphobia distinctly liberal?

So, it's the one that basically thinks it's defending liberal discourse and free and open discourse against this kind of sect of quasi-religious zealots, gender zealots, right?

Like there's this interesting kind of projection that goes on that, like, a lot of this, Butler, I think, convincingly shows, is, you know, a lot of anti-gender ideology is

not so subtly subtended by religiosity, but it projects that religiosity on the other side.

Like, you can't talk with these people, they're a cult.

And that's the kind of liberal that I mean.

They might write in a big monthly magazine that might come out of an Atlantic state.

I don't know.

The Big Apple Hour.

What spits of print on this subject is always a hand-wringing about norms and a slippage between a rights discourse and a scientific discourse.

Yet another thing that, like, a 19-year-old said about gender.

That the focus on children as a substitute or sometimes a screen for a broader concern that includes ambivalence towards the rights of trans adults.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, you hint at a couple of these publications that sort of

do this.

And I'm going to just, you know, I work in this industry and you don't.

So I will say that I think we are sub-tweeting here, the New York Times and the Atlantic magazine in particular.

And Jesse Single.

I mean, let's just, come on, let's just do this.

Yeah, personally, Jesse Single, but you know, there's a, there's a sort of genre of this piece, right?

And Pamela Paul likes this.

Yeah, it's pitching itself to a very specific audience, right?

Which is college-educated, I would say, over 40, overwhelmingly, but not exclusively white,

people who feel that there are illiberal excesses in the trans rights movement that need to be disciplined and managed by, you know, the quote-unquote adults in the room of which they count themselves, right?

So there's a sphere of acceptability around trans rights that needs to be constrained.

And we might add, these are people who, if you lump them in with Victor Orban, would be deadly offended.

And I think genuinely so, right?

They'd be like, this is not what we're doing.

And I think Long Chu makes Long Chu makes a pretty good case.

Like, yeah, you kind of are.

The other thing that we might point out, I don't know if you came away with this, with the Butler book, the tone of the book is reasonable to a fault.

It is not a funny book.

It is all business.

And I think part of the reason is that one thing that these kind of tarle, these kind of

reasonable liberals that think that there's an illiberalism to transactivism, they will always fall back on this position, like, oh, you're the hysterical ones.

You're hysterics.

You can't rationally debate.

You have to, you know, make this about, make this personal.

You have to cancel people and uninvite speakers and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I think it's very noticeable that Butler, again, there, it kind of takes their bait.

And like, this is a performance of reasonableness that feels at times a little to its own detriment, if I can be quite honest.

I think that this could have used

Long Chu is not encumbered in that way.

And that essay reads, it's just a lot livelier.

But there's a point that Maura Weigel made in a review of, I believe, of the coddling of the American mind, which is sort of like the Bible of these people, frankly, that there's this kind of liberalism that defines itself only by making everyone who disagree with it unreasonable in one way or the other, right?

And this that often comes from dudes,

I think it's sort of the point she makes there.

I think it's in The Guardian actually that she did this review.

And this idea that everyone else is sort of being a little psycho and only, you know, this broad-minded liberal thinker can sort of bring everyone back to rationality is a pose that a lot of these anti-gender positions love to take.

Yeah, and it's not a pose that has been historically adopted by theorists and advocates of trans gender rights and identity, right?

That is a tradition that has a lot more sarcasm, playfulness.

I mean, Chu, if we're sticking with a Chu, Chu is always like a cat playing with a bug before like maiming and killing it in this like very protracted way.

It's something I kind of admire about her, but Chu has this like arched eyebrow, holding up a cigarette in one eyebrow, and is just like looking at her opponents with this like miles downward disdain.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

Butler in who's afraid of gender is attending to the anxieties of the people they are imagining are going to buy an FSG book, which are also subscribers to the Atlantic, right?

They feel like you're being cupped by the hand a little bit.

Yeah, that's right.

And there's moments where

it's interesting where they do that and where they don't, right?

Right.

I thought about that too.

Yes.

Because there, like you talk about unreasonableness, like one thing that Chu touches on that butler doesn't really go for is the sort of like epistemic attack that comes in pathologizing and medicalizing trans people right of um like treating them as people who have a disease and it's a mental disease and they're a little crazy and we need to treat them so that they can be less crazy which chu identifies i think correctly as like a condescending position of charity right in their chapter on turfs which i quite like butler has this address of uh like J.K.

Rowling's sort of like opening transphobic statement that I think really skillfully dissects the flaws in Rowling's logic.

Rowling makes this great, like really protracted acknowledgement of trans women's vulnerability to, you know, patriarchal male violence, right?

Which is like what Rowling cites as a like point of commonality, but then instead of going where like Catherine McKinning would go or where like Jack Halbersam would would go or where I would go is say like actually that vulnerability to violence is largely what constitutes the category of woman itself Rowling then like makes this like weird sudden gear shift and goes but trans women aren't really women they're really men and they're really this like same kind of danger that the cis men are and I think butler sort of skewers this in a really elegant way yeah it reminds me of like watching like an old samurai movie where like the sword work is very like fast and the person like slips apart yeah afterwards right and it's and it's not it's not this hand holding.

It's quick, it's uh merciless, it's like a little bit contemptuous in a way that I found kind of appropriate.

Yeah.

But then Butler does something that I found like borderline unforgivable as an anti-rape feminist, which is where she critiques Rowling's epistemic authority on the basis of Rowling's past experience of domestic violence and says this person is traumatized and therefore pathological and therefore not a reliable narrator.

And that is a position which is based, I mean, it's functionally an accusation of hysteria.

It's not necessary to delegitimize rowling, which she is, which Battler has already done.

And it is a position that would exclude vast swaths of cis women and, frankly, trans women alike from critiques of male gendered power.

Yeah, right.

Did we not just have a movement about this?

Yeah.

The fact that victims of sexual violence are in fact quite good guides to how society handles these things.

I would argue that the emergence of trauma after Me Too has actually been sort of reconstructed in the following years, not to be an explanation of those people's epistemic legitimacy, but an indictment of the epistemic legitimacy.

And I do argue this in my forthcoming book, Gone Too Far

out from Scribner sometime in the next million years.

Yeah.

But like, this is something that like, this is not a place

where Butler feels the need to really sort of like take those Atlantic readers by the hand and assume that they share their antagonists' commitments and need to be sort of like gently persuaded, right?

This is a place, this is this,

the gender violence victim is not a reliable narrator, is something that they seem to think that their readers will be sympathetic to.

Yeah, yeah.

As opposed to, you know, the perfectly reasonable argument one could make, which is to say, why would it matter one way or the other when the rights of trans women are concerned, right?

Like, this is, you know, it's the

invocation of it.

Like, what people objected to at the time was the very invocation of it, right?

To say, like, why would it confer legitimacy to your

gripes about trans women, right?

Would like, you know, it's the same way that, like, right, if I'm like, I don't like having neighbors of ex-ethnicity, I was mugged once, right?

Like, well, kind of feels like you're saying these people are muggers, right?

Like, there's no need for them to go there at all.

And yeah, I noticed that too.

Frankly, it was misogynist, or at least I interpreted it as misogynist attack on sort of survivors as epistemic authorities.

And it was unnecessary.

And that's what pissed me off about this book.

But, you know, I thought, I think the rest of it was,

I was more pissed off by that than by the sort of like faintly patronizing reasonableness.

Yeah.

Because that strikes me as like fairly standard for an academic writing a trade book, right?

Yeah.

Well, no, no.

A lot of us have this horrible, I mean, myself included, this horrible tendency to then be quippy and like try to be like funny.

And like, that's what makes it so noticeable, right?

That like they're not ingratiating themselves in that way.

But I do think that, I mean, there is this thing about like the stance of the philosopher is supposed to be that.

And I think there might be, you know, something gendered to that stance, right?

Like, they're kind of taking the Jonathan Haidt stance and not noticing that it's quite thoroughly gendered, right?

Or not caring, or being like, strategically, I think I have to do this, right?

Like,

I'll put on the Jonathan Haidt top hat and like Donna Kane and see if I can change some hearts and minds, basically.

Wait,

say more what you mean for our listeners who are not familiar with Jonathan Haidt.

You know, he is the author of, among other things, of The Coddling of the American Mind.

And, you know, I'm using him as a shorthand for this kind of writer who, in spite of making apocalyptic warnings that, like, you know, were he inhabiting a different body might earn him the charge of hysteria, is always treated as these most reasonable of people who's only sort of raising the fact that like a bun-me controversy at Oberlin might portend the end of the West as such.

And you're like, I don't know what we're how we're defining hysteria, but that certainly feels like it qualifies, right?

But but they, but it's fantastic.

Cutler as a

non-binary uh assigned female at birth person is sort of navigating like a shorter leash of public credibility exactly i mean like the the way that you know that that any public performance of hillary clinton right like is a is a study in not allowing herself things that we know she could and might do and that a male politician in the same position could and would do, but that would be read so differently.

And she's fully aware of it.

And so she's like, I'm not giving you squat, you assholes.

And I think that this book is a little bit that.

It's like, I'm not not giving you squat you assholes like you're you will contend with this book on its own on it on my terms as much as i can do that and if i if i'm too elegant if i'm too funny if i'm too quippy if i'm too psychoanalytic if i'm too theoretical if i'm too anything i know you're going to fixate on that and that that's not the engagement i want with this right i did find some of the argumentative style here almost lawyerly.

There was a lot of like, first I'm going to make the minimalist, you know, technical, reasonable argument, And then I'm going to, you know, sort of in the background, make the bigger argument that undermines the foundations of this whole question entirely.

Right.

There's a little like, and you see lawyers doing this a lot, like they'll put the little argument before the judge first.

Yeah.

And then they put the big argument sort of in the background, but they're really focusing on the little one.

So I think one thing I wanted to point to really that's really interesting that I think they I kept waiting for them to kind of pounce on this, but they didn't really, as far as I could tell, is this thing that I've become fascinated with.

I mean, so, you know, I wrote this book on cancel culture, which kind of has a similar fate as gender in the sense that it does bring together like frothing at the mouth, illiberal authoritarians, and then sort of the reasonable people, like, you know, and the Atlantic.

These are the same people.

So, like, I've wondered for a long time, like, how do people deal with that cognitive dissonance, right?

Like, they think they're defending liberalism, and yet everyone who wants to like hit liberalism over the head with a shovel loves their shit.

it's like that's that feels weird right and and how do they deal with that and and on one point that butler kind of makes and then doesn't pursue i really like is in the is in the turf chapter they're it's in the fifth chapter where they point out and this is going to be a longer point but i i think it's really fascinating because it kind of shows like why do orban the atlantic and the vatican fundamentally like why are they sympatico like obviously they are not drawing on each other necessarily consciously like, and they're not, they may even be kind of annoyed at, right?

Orban is not, for whatever else he is, he's not that Christian, actually, right?

Like, they may not find that much in common, but on this point, they're really able to sort of speak with one, they can speak a similar language.

Well, here's what Butler says: I'm not quoting, I'm just going to describe it.

So, this course is critical of gender, whether it's like TERFs, the Vatican, or Orban, think that to turn to gender as an analytic category denies other categories, right?

It denies men and women, mothers and fathers, et cetera, et cetera.

It's an illegitimate arrogation basically of a definitional power, right?

I get to decide

what gender I am.

That's how they think of it, right?

They think, oh, like these kids are deciding, they wake up one morning and decide to be a mother or whatever.

But it is a form, it's a form of ownership, but it's also a form of submission.

TERFs think

they claim ownership over gender categories and they seem intent on endlessly policing who has a right to them and who doesn't.

But on the other hand, like there's also like an immense or surrender to the reality of those categories.

That's to say, like there's this immense arrogation of power, basically, in this move.

It's basically denying this obvious reality that these categories pre-exist us and are never going to fully coincide with our own gendered expression.

We're born under their yoke and live our lives basically struggling with them, whether we're cis, trans or non-binary.

But these three groups, right, all are both overly deferential to these categories and use them to basically self-arrogate a whole bunch of power, right?

A bunch of definitional power.

And that's what I was trying to get at.

That's that is to me super fascinating.

They put one version of this on the front end and then at the back end, you can sort of hear the other one, right?

Like one is like, I just submit to biblical authority, but really what it is, is you get to tell other people how to be women.

One is like, I get to decide who's a woman, mate, but really it's submission to patriarchy, patriarchy, structures.

This is the the like kind of most glaringly obvious intellectual problem i mean among many of the turfs is that they are defending this category that is defined in frankly only misogynist terms and rather than sort of rejecting that category they're very rigidly policing its boundaries so that they can continue to operate within the sort of like definitional pen

that that patriarchy has placed them in.

Yeah.

And that reminds me of that line in The Simpsons where Marge is like, they're talking about moving, and Marge goes, I don't want to move because I've dug myself into a nice little rut here and I don't want to get out.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

I love that line.

I knew where you were going with this.

And I was like, that's exactly the right line.

So it was a marge line for it, but this is the marge line.

Yes.

And so part of the reason why I got really interested in that idea is: so a friend of mine, or two friends of mine in Germany, or rather, they teach in Switzerland at the University of Basel.

They did this study where they basically interviewed a bunch of people who were sort of in far-right protests.

They think anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-immigration, right?

Like all the all your favorite people basically.

They interviewed these people.

And what they found was that they said these people are, they called them libertarian authoritarians, right?

They're like,

in a very funny way, they're like willing to submit to one law absolutely, but that law they call their own freedom, right?

They're like extremely obsessed with freedom, but then like that freedom often becomes this kind of very sheepy herd mentality.

You think these two things should be opposed to one another, but they're absolutely not.

They're actually the same for these people.

And I had to think about that, that study, because that's what puts these three groups together.

Their freedom is admission to authority, and their submission to authority is self-empowerment.

By these three groups, I assume you're referring to the like right-wing authoritarians, the TERFs, and the sort of Atlantic liberals that chew identifying.

No, no, my third was

Catholics, was the Vatican.

But I think, but I, but that gesture, I think, the Tarl shares with them.

That's sort of my, I guess that's my, this was my 10-minute attempt to get to that point, that like, while they wouldn't agree on the substance, that stance, right?

This mix of submission to a common sense and this, this almost arrogant invocation of your own independence, right?

The way that these people all think of themselves as heterodox while like repeating the most bog standard like traditionalism, right?

Like that to me is like, why wouldn't they sense a kinship?

It's the exact same fucking, it's the exact same fucking move.

I am so brave for saying that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, the thing that I was, every one of us was drilled into as literally four years ago.

Exactly, right?

Like I, the, the thing that my, all my friends are uncomfortable with, I will now explain to you why you should be uncomfortable for it, but I am heterodox.

It's like, I don't know, man, it feels like you're the dictaphone of the people around you, you know?

And it takes exactly Zippo courage to say that and and yet like it's it's experienced as this form of like of bold truth telling right like and rebellion yeah and rebellion yeah because the free song and the pleasure of transgression yeah i mean like just look at and please don't look at bill maher i i have

that's a shtick i like i i cannot i cannot but like that's a shtick right he's like he's like i'm just telling it how it is like you're telling it how people have always been telling it i don't understand like if i if i needed you know if i needed racist uncle here i would just ask racist uncle at least we're related i don't need like i don't need i don't need i don't even fucking like get an hbo subscription for that

yeah the confusion of of a hegemonic stance that conforms with all the organs of authority for rebellion rebellious one that challenges yeah yeah but so i think that's that to me was like a really interesting kind of under the radar moment in this in this book because ultimately i think the the punchline of the book is to say gender is about freedom right like the the the reason why they freak out is because they genuinely think that people are waking up one day and they're like, oh, I'm going to change my gender.

They're like, but what if you could?

Yeah.

We wouldn't want to live in that world.

And Butler's like, aha.

Yeah, that's

now we agree.

Yes, yes, I can see why you'd be terrified by that, you know, and this is why I'm calling you the F-word.

Yeah.

And, you know,

this is about a, but, but that's in essence the world that second-wave feminism promised, I think, is what Butler would say.

That's that's the hope.

Yeah, that would be nice.

Yeah, where this, the sex body really is divorced of its meaning in this way that Butler has sort of gestured at as impossible.

What if it became possible?

And what if it is becoming more possible by the proliferation of trans identities?

Yeah.

I mean, just to give Butler, let Butler get their two cents in here edge-wise, because I just kind of like ventriloquized a bunch of what they said.

I actually think it's also a nice way.

This is a critique of the TERFs.

It's on page 137, 138 in the book that I think does also a nice job thinking about how Butler thinks of gender category.

So they say: in denying the reality of trans lives, TERFs claim proprietary rights to gender categories, especially the category of women.

Yet gender categories are not property and they cannot be owned.

Gender categories precede and exceed our individual lives.

Categories have social and historical lives that are not the same as ours as living creatures.

I think that's a very nice sort of way of

creating that juxtaposition to say

the most basic this disagreement is about whether or not there is anything to be gotten with

remythologizing with meaning these categories that we're starting to slowly bit by bit recognize are just not the same as us as living creatures right like we're

they will always be an ill-fitting kind of thing we drape over it And what that means, of course, is

politically is another question, right?

Like whether that means like, oh, we should undo gender or, you know, I think they would just say, well, probably we shouldn't attach the possibility of violence to them as much as humanly possible, right?

Like, you know, I mean, like, you can't choose what your child is exposed to in the media or in shopping or whatever, right?

Like, but you can like make sure that at least the state doesn't enact violence on people who, you know, who experience the friction here, which is pretty much all of us at some point.

But like, what we shouldn't do is like super duper try to invest them with meaning and be like, oh, it was someone's someone's fault that like the ruptures and contradictions and the shit we made up and then applied to our own body like is not matching up to reality anymore.

And perhaps never really did.

Yeah.

I think this might be a good point to like pivot towards the end of the book and Butler's prescription for difficult coalitions.

Yes, interesting.

Yes, same thing.

Because, you know, you're just gesturing right now at something that is a sort of a recurring theme in Who's Afraid of Gender, which is that a gender liberationist project, which can meaningfully counter these sort of revanchist gender conservatisms that have emerged in all these different sectors of the global right, will necessarily, any coalition that can meaningly, meaningfully counter this new quote-unquote fear of gender, will necessarily encompass people who have very different experiences of gender and who have very different sort of end goals in mind of what a gender liberated future would look like, right?

It's going to encompass, you know, people

who have a,

you know, maybe a radical feminist understanding of gender and

as a, you know, primarily a system of domination.

And it's going to encompass people who have a more individualist understanding of gender as a source of, you know, playfulness and pleasure, right?

And those are, those are people who might not always agree, as the history of feminism and,

you know, queer studies

illustrates all the time.

Butler is shivving several of the people who they aim to be in coalition with here.

And these are necessarily unruly coalitions, right?

As somebody who sort of intellectually exists at the corner of a radical

feminist tradition that has been pretty much abandoned and a queer feminist tradition that does not always

make adequate room for the coercive experience of womanhood.

This is something I am negotiating a lot in my own intellectual life.

And I think that the renewed or maybe

originated alliance between these two ways of thinking is both like very personally important for me and would make my life a lot easier, but also seems like really politically urgent in this way that I was refreshing.

And I think they're also part of a kind of materialist turn.

I mean, not in a sense that, you know, it's about the materiality of gender, even though that does come up.

It's really more, they think part of why anti-gender rhetoric succeeds has to do with resistance to feminism.

Some of it does have to do with international politics.

And I think that's the other thing that like the coalition extends almost beyond feminists and queer feminists and, you know, trans rights advocates, et cetera.

There's this very kind of moving or just kind of interesting aside when they're talking about like the way people people like Orban treat gender as this imposed category from the outside, right?

And you wouldn't expect them to say it, but they kind of say like, well, and it's not totally wrong, right?

They're like, in the end, this, this shadows actual power relations on the globe.

That is to say, right, the George Soros thing is bonkers, but like the idea that like, you know, U.S.

cultural hegemony is real, that Western Europe tends to dominate Eastern Europe, like they're like, that's not, that's not wrong, right?

That does happen.

This is a very interesting indictment of the World Bank and their non-discrimination policies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they say here, sometimes it was treated as a cultural imposition, even an imperialist one, attracting a host of anxiety.

And then here comes the aside, including legitimate concerns about U.S.

cultural and economic influence, right?

Or in some places, Western European influence.

And I think that that little aside kind of gives you a sense of where they want to go as well to say it probably also, right?

It's a sign that we have organized our global politics wrong, that probably U.S.

power and Western European power on the economic front, let's say, could stand some weakening.

In some way, this is neoliberalism's boomerang, right?

Like this is neoliberal governance that sort of comes back to haunt us in this shape.

It was capitalism all along.

I know, as they say.

We would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for Judith Butler.

That meddling Judith Butler.

Is that a good place to stop?

There we go.

I think we did good.

I hope.

All right.

Thank you so much for your for being you for being a friend a pal and a confidant and thank you dear listener for listening to in bed with the right the the golden girls of the 2020s

In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support, Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfas.