Submitted by Y.I.I. Frankfurth on Fri, 17/03/2023 - 00:00
Prof Judith Butler is coming to Cambridge to give a lecture on, 'Who is Afraid of Gender' at 5pm GMT on Wed 26 April.
Tickets are going fast! To register: https://bit.ly/3LuttR2 The event will be recorded & available to view on the following Twitter Channcels, @lgbtQcam, @CamSociology, @CambridgeGender websites.
Who is Afraid of Gender?
Professor Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
This event will be recorded and available to view on the lgbtQ+@cam, Department of Sociology and University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies websites.
In recent years, the attack on “gender” as if it were an ideology has heightened among right-wing movements, nationalist governments, and new fascist formations. At the same time, some feminists have advanced a “critical” position on gender, seeking a return to “facts” or “biology” in their efforts to undermine trans rights. Although the fascist and feminist movements are not the same, they end up, perhaps paradoxically, advocating similar concerns with ideas of social construction, suggesting that new gender politics is engaged in propagating falsehoods and destroying some or all of the following: sex, family, nation, God, and civilization. Both movements characterize gender as a frightening power, one that can, or will, take over educational curricula, destroy the binary understanding of sex, and propagate false and dangerous forms of knowledge. In this lecture, I will ask why, and how, gender has become such a fearsome phantasm, and consider what a psychosocial understanding of the phantasmatic domain might illuminate about these new public discourses and their political positions.