Berkeley professor explains gender theory | Judith Butler
Berkeley Professor Judith Butler is renowned for her work and contributions to the theory of gender. In her video, she emphasizes the importance of examining and questioning personal assumptions about gender. Butler stresses that everyone has their own theory about gender, and it is essential to challenge these assumptions.
She discusses the distinction between sex and gender, highlighting the societal constructs and expectations that shape gender identities. Butler powerfully advocates for the freedom to live without discrimination and fear, allowing individuals to breathe, move, and love without persecution.
Butler’s journey and influences are also explored in the video. Growing up during the 1960s, she was immersed in social activism and became politically active in high school. Her passion for justice and equality was further fueled by her understanding of the atrocities committed during the Nazi regime.
The development of gender theory and influences, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Gayle Rubin, are also discussed. Collectively, these contributions have informed Butler’s perspective on gender and have shaped the discourse surrounding gender theory. She emphasizes the need to challenge existing gender norms and advocates for the freedom to define and express one’s identity without judgment.
Butler’s work, particularly her book “Gender Trouble,” has played a pivotal role in rethinking gender and challenging societal norms. She asserts that human bodies and the gender they embody should not be predetermined, advocating for the notion that the sex assigned at birth should not dictate an individual’s lived experience.
Ultimately, Butler’s video serves as an educational and thought-provoking exploration of gender theory, challenging viewers to critically evaluate their understanding of gender and its impact on society. Her advocacy for equality and justice permeates the conversation, empowering individuals to embrace their identity free from societal constraints.
Watch the video by Big Think
– So there are many different theories of gender, and mine is just one. Sometimes, people who really hate gender name me as the one who made this up, but that’s actually not true. You know, in my view, everybody has a theory of gender, and what I mean by that
Is that everybody has certain assumptions going about what gender is or should be. And at a certain point in life, we ask ourselves, “Wow, where’d that assumption come from?” At this point, I’m less concerned about whose theory is right and whose theory is wrong because the assault on gender is also an assault on democracy. We have the power and the freedom to make more livable lives for ourselves, where bodies can be more free to breathe, to move, to love
Without discrimination and without fear of violence. I am Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. I teach literature, philosophy, and critical theory, and I’m most well-known for my two books on gender, “Gender Trouble” and “Bodies That Matter” from the early 1990s.
My work has been translated into more than 27 languages. I insist that what it is to be a woman, or indeed what it is to be a man or any other gender, is an open-ended question. We have a whole range of differences, biological in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they determine who we are in some sort of final way. At the heart of these controversies is the distinction between sex and gender. But what is that distinction? How do we think about it?
Sex is generally a category that is assigned to infants that has importance within medical and legal worlds. Gender is a mix of cultural norms, historical formations, family influence, psychic realities, desires, and wishes. And we have a say in that. My early life was affected by the 1960s
And the social movements that took shape during that time. I grew up on the East side of Cleveland, part of a Jewish community, and by the time I was in high school, I was politically active. But I was also taking university courses in philosophy. In my 20s, I came to see
That it was not just the Jews who were apprehended and extinguished by the Nazi regime. It was queer people, it was gay/lesbian people, it was people with disabilities, people with illnesses, Polish workers, communists. And my sense was that one needed to widen the lens and see
That many people have been subject to genocidal politics and to understand that there are different forms of oppression. I remained convinced that one does need to know history in order to make sure it does not repeat and that one wants justice not just for the group to which one belongs,
But for any group that suffers in a similar way. In the ’70s and ’80s, I was part of a movement of people who were rethinking gender during that time. Queer theory was emerging. It was in a complicated conversation with feminism. Trans issues had not yet surfaced as part of our contemporary reality,
So it was a moment in which we asked questions like, “What has society made of us, and what can we make of ourselves?” There were a number of versions of feminism that I tended to oppose. One of them held that, well, women are fundamentally mothers
And that maternity is the essence of the feminine. And then a second one thought that feminism was about sexual difference, but the way they defined sexual difference was always presumptively heterosexual. And both of them struck me as wrong. I was pretty committed to the idea that people ought not to be discriminated against
On the basis of what they do with their body, who they love, or how they move, or how they look. All I was saying is that the sex you’re assigned at birth and the gender that you are taught to be should not determine how you live your life. Sometimes, people point to “Gender Trouble” as the inception of gender theory, but people were working on gender before me, Gayle Rubin, and Juliet Mitchell, and Simone de Beauvoir herself. Simone de Beauvoir was an existential philosopher and a feminist philosopher who wrote “The Second Sex” in the 1940s.
The basic point is that one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one, that the body is not a fact. She opened up the possibility of a difference between the sex you’re assigned and the sex you become. Gayle Rubin was an anthropologist, and remains an anthropologist, who wrote an extremely influential article called “The Traffic in Women.” And what she tried to say was that the family was a structure whose task it was to reproduce gender, and one of the aims it had
Was to kind of keep heterosexuality looking really normal. And although it was part of feminist anthropology at the time, it allowed us to start thinking about gender as something that could be reproduced, crafted, cultivated, and that there were systems, frameworks, to which gender belongs. There was one other dimension of Rubin’s work
Which was, interestingly, psychoanalysis. She basically said, “Well, maybe there’s a whole lot of repression going into becoming a man and a whole lot of repression going into becoming a woman,” and that one of the things we have to do to conform with existing gender norms is to rule out all those possibilities
Of being, feeling, doing, loving that don’t line up with the gender norms that are governing our lives. So anthropology, psychoanalysis, they all had their place in that moment way before “Gender Trouble” emerged on the scene. I think at the time that I wrote “Gender Trouble,”
People treated gender as if it was a natural fact or a sociological reality, but they didn’t treat it as something that you could make and remake. Performance is important to this extent that we do enact who we are, and anybody in performance studies actually knows that there are performances
That we do in our lives that are not mere performance, they’re not fake. When performative was first coined as a word, the philosopher J.L. Austin was trying to understand legal utterances. So when a judge says, “I declare you man and wife,” you become man and wife once that declaration has happened.
That’s not fake, that happened. Now, what if we were to say that in enacting our lives as a particular gender, we are actually realizing that gender anew, we are making something real happen. When gay and lesbian people started coming out or when trans people started living openly, something changed in the world.
By appearing, speaking, acting in certain ways, reality changed. And it has changed. We are seeing the changing of terms. We no longer speak about family, woman, man, desire, sex in the same way. Even the Cambridge Dictionary Acknowledges that something has changed. Okay, so when we talk about performative, we’re talking about an act that makes something come into being or an act that has real consequences. We’re talking about the changing of reality. Even among progressive and liberal people I know, there can sometimes be a real resistance
To thinking about trans rights, or lesbian and gay rights, or even women’s rights. They sometimes say that these are secondary issues or it simply makes them uncomfortable. “Why should I have to refer to someone as a he, or a she, or a they?” And yet, at least in the US,
We’ve learned how to talk about Black people differently or we talk about women differently. And sure, it was probably hard to learn how to use new language. Maybe we had to adjust our habits. But stumbling is part of learning and making an error is part of learning, especially when we’re learning something new.
Sometimes, we can all be vitriolic, right? Some certain statements will set me off and I will scream, but if I only were to do that, then I would never be having a conversation with anyone. I think we all want to be the moral center of our universe, like, “That’s right, that’s wrong.”
“You’re canceled, you’re not.” “You’re with me, you’re against me.” But we have to allow ourselves to be challenged and accept the invitation to revise our ways of thinking because that’s the only way of being open to people who are trying to make their claim sometimes for the very first time, to be heard,
To be known, to be acknowledged. Now, I’m less interested in defending a theory of gender. I’m much more concerned with finding creative and effective ways of countering the attack on gender. One problem is that many people who refuse to allow trans people to define themselves is that they feel that their own self-definition is destabilized.
The idea that we can change reality, transform reality to be more open, inclusive, just less violent – there’s an instability in that that’s very frightening to people who want to understand their genders as fixed. But is anybody’s gender necessary and universal, or is it a complicated emergence that happens with each of us?
Our deepest sense of self is also formed in time, and we can’t always know, in advance, what that will be. Freedom is a struggle because there’s so much in our world that’s telling us not to be free with our bodies. And if we are seeking to love in a free way, to live, and move in a free way, we actually have to struggle to claim that freedom. When we live in a democracy,
We assume that we’re living according to certain principles – equality, freedom, justice – and yet we’re constantly learning what freedom is, and what equality is, and what justice can be. And those challenges, right, the anti-slavery movement, the suffrage movement, the movement for LGBTQIA+ rights, I mean, each of those struggles
Involve challenging people’s existing ideas of: Who’s equal? Who has the right to be free? And how do we define justice? We are, all the time, struggling to achieve that goal. We need to reoccupy these notions and show that concerns with racial justice, and gender equality, and gender freedom
Are an integral part of any democratic struggle, especially if we want to rethink who the people are and what it means for them to live in freedom without fear. – [Crew] Let’s just wrap up the gender stuff. Unless you want to take a break from gender, we can go back to that. Do you want to get… Let me give you the prompt for the last- – My whole life, I’ve wanted to take a break from gender.
I can never take a break from gender. – [Announcer] Get smarter faster with videos from the world’s biggest thinkers. To learn even more from the world’s biggest thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.
Author Video Description
Sex, gender, and the debate over identity explained by Berkeley professor Judith Butler.
Subscribe to Big Think on YouTube ► https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvQECJukTDE2i6aCoMnS-Vg?sub_confirmation=1
Up next, Judith Butler: Your behavior creates your Gender ► https://youtu.be/Bo7o2LYATDc
What if gender wasn’t a predetermined reality, but a fluid construct formed by culture, history, and individual identity? This is a question that drives the work of Judith Butler, a gender theorist and distinguished professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
While acknowledging the biological realities of sex, Butler promotes the concept of gender as performative — something that is enacted and shaped through our actions and interactions. This view, although challenging to traditional perspectives, is instrumental in the discourse on queer, trans, and women’s rights. Butler encourages a shift in societal conversation to include diverse gender identities.
This transformation, they believe, allows us to work toward a society where equality, freedom, and justice are at the forefront, reinforcing the foundations of our democratic society.
0:00 What is gender theory?
1:34 Sex and gender: What’s the difference?
2:29 Learning from genocide
3:34 Queer theory in the 1970s & ’80s
4:56 Big ideas in gender theory’s evolution
7:06 Gender is “performative”: What that means
9:04 The resistance to trans rights
10:37 Countering the attack on gender
Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/legends/gender-theory/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
———————————————————————————-
About Judith Butler:
Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. They are most famous for the notion of gender performativity, but their work ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.
They have received countless awards for their teaching and scholarship, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a Rockefeller fellowship, Yale’s Brudner Prize, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.
Their books include “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” “Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex,” “Undoing Gender,” and “Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?”
———————————————————————————-
About Big Think | Smarter Faster™
► Big Think
Our mission is to make you smarter, faster. Watch interviews with the world’s biggest thinkers on science, philosophy, business, and more.
► Big Think+
Looking to ignite a learning culture at your company? Prepare your workforce for the future with educational courses from the world’s biggest thinkers. Trusted by Ford, Marriot, Bank of America, and many more. Learn how Big Think+ can empower your people today: https://bigthink.com/plus/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
———————————————————————————-
Want more Big Think?
► Daily editorial features: https://bigthink.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
► Get the best of Big Think right to your inbox: https://bigthink.com/subscribe/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=youtube_description
► Facebook: https://bigth.ink/facebook/
► Instagram: https://bigth.ink/Instagram/
► Twitter: https://bigth.ink/twitter/
About Big Think
Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content — with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields.
Video “Berkeley professor explains gender theory | Judith Butler” was uploaded on 06/08/2023 to Youtube Channel Big Think