What happened to you in Brazil?
- What happened to you in Brazil?
Editors of Pandemonium spoke with Judith Butler on June 27, 2023.
It was 2017.
I was in São Paulo for a conference, The Ends of Democracy, on the future of democracy and concerns about the emergence of authoritarianism sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, an organization that has been really wonderful in bringing people together and keeping the perspectives really global and also putting race at the center rather than outside of the issues at stake. I took part in this conference as an organizer, not a speaker. Gender was not the principal focus, and I did not expect to be the center of the attention at that conference. This was, in fact, before Bolsonaro was elected as president of Brazil.
I was told in advance that there was a Twitter storm raging, a social media campaign had been organized against me—me personally—demanding that I should not be let into the country, that I should not be allowed to speak.
I understood that the protest was quite large, although it was not clear to me whether the group CitizenGO (an ultraconservative digital-activism group in Spain organized in 2013 by the ultra-Catholic far-right HazteOir) had produced bots to make it seem as if hundreds of thousands of people [End Page 49] opposed me or whether there really were hundreds of thousands of people opposing me. I had no way of knowing. I'm still not sure.
But I arrived there in the midst of all that, and even before I disembarked from the plane, I was told the government of the city had provided security for me. I was whisked off the plane and taken to an area beneath the airport where some kind of government vehicle was waiting for me. And yes, that all felt rather frightening. I was also oddly grateful to the moderate-left city government at the time for providing those security services to protect me.
It wasn't until I arrived at the venue—SESC Pompéia—that I understood what they were telling me. I saw the crowds outside and they appeared large, at least to me. They were calling me the devil and they were waving pictures of me as a demonic figure. The picture was distorted, and my eyes were all red and in one picture I even had horns. And so my first thought was, "Ohhhh, that's antisemitism. And I know what that's about, that's old Nazi propaganda against Jews." So I felt, at first, like, "Oh, I'm being attacked as a Jew." And then it was like, um … no? Or, yes, maybe still yes. But also, no, you're being attacked because of what you stand for, which is something called "gender." But what idea of gender did they have?
I had then to ask, well, what does "gender" mean when these people are attacking me as "representing gender"? First of all, what is their ignorance about—of the history of feminism and gender studies—such that they would make the claim that I originated the concept of gender, which we all know is simply untrue. This idea that I made up this term, "gender," is quite funny, you know. But it is also deadly serious. They credit me with coining the term, when really of course there were many people working on gender and the idea of gender as something different from sex. Wow, what is erased and misunderstood are all those anthropologists working on gender, all that theory coming out of socialist feminism—all long before me! I was reading Rayna Rapp, Gayle Rubin, Juliet Mitchell, and This Bridge Called My Back back then. All that was published or in the works before I wrote Gender Trouble in the late 1980s. But these folks didn't really care about all that. They had found a person to embody and receive their fear and hatred, but also their ignorance.
At first, I wanted to respond: "Oh, hey, you know, you got your history wrong. Let me tell you about the history of gender and gender studies." But then...
