Week 6
Gender and Sexuality
SOCI 229
Lecture I: October 7th
A Quick Reminder
Response Memo Deadline
Your fourth response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM today.
A Quick Reminder
Midterm Paper
Midterm Paper Deadline
Once again—your midterm papers are due by 8:00 PM on Friday, October 25th.
A Quick Reminder
Midterm Paper
As you know, guidelines for your midterm paper
can be found online.
A Brief Tangent
A Trip to Florida
A Trip to Florida
The “Stop WOKE Act” Was Enshrined in 2022
Image can be retrieved here
A Trip to Florida
As Was the “Parental Rights in Education” Bill
Image can be retrieved here
A Trip to Florida
Article can be accessed here
A Trip to Florida
A Question
What do some of the recent laws enshrined in Florida say about liberal democracy in the United States?
A Trip to Florida
This Issue Is Not Only Resonant in the U.S.
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
What Is Gender, Anyway?
Some suspect that “gender” is a way of discussing women’s inequality or presume that the word is synonymous with “women.” Others think it is a covert way of referring to “homosexuality.” And some presume that “gender” is another way of talking about “sex,” even though certain feminists have distinguished between the two … At the same time, feminists and other scholars in gender studies disagree among themselves about which definitions and distinctions are right. The myriad, continuing debates about the word show that no one approach to defining, or understanding, gender reigns.
(Butler 2024, 3, EMPHASIS ADDED)
What Is Gender, Anyway?
The “anti-gender ideology movement,” however, treats gender as a monolith, frightening in its power and reach … Quite apart from the mundane and academic ways that it circulates, gender has, in some parts of the world, become a matter of extraordinary alarm. In Russia, it has been called a threat to national security, while the Vatican has said it is a threat to both civilization and to “man” itself.
(Butler 2024, 4, EMPHASIS ADDED)
What Is Gender, Anyway?
It is not easy to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement … [T]hey object to “gender” because it putatively denies biological sex or because it undermines the natural or divine character of the heteronormative family. They fear that men will lose their dominant positions or become fatally diminished if we start thinking along gender lines. They believe that children are being told to change genders, are actively recruited by gay and trans people, or pressured to declare themselves as gay in educational settings where an open discourse about gender is caricatured as a form of indoctrination.
(Butler 2021, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Anti-Gender Movement
Let’s slightly reframe things.
What is the anti-gender movement trying to accomplish?
The Anti-Gender Movement
[T]he principal aim of the movement is to reverse progressive legislation won in the last decades by both LGBTQI and feminist movements. Indeed, in attacking “gender” they oppose reproductive freedom for women and the rights of single parents; they oppose protections for women against rape and domestic violence; and they deny the legal and social rights of trans people along with a full array of legal and institutional safeguards against gender discrimination, forced psychiatric internment, brutal physical harassment and killing.
(Butler 2021, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Anti-Gender Movement
Figure 1 from Velasco, Baral and Tang (2024)
The Anti-Gender Movement
In various parts of the world, gender is figured not only as a threat to children, national security, or heterosexual marriage and the normative family but also as a plot by elites to impose their cultural values on “real people,” a scheme for colonizing the Global South by the urban centers of the Global North. It is portrayed as a set of ideas that are in opposition to either science or religion, or both, or as a danger to civilization, a denial of nature, an attack on masculinity, or the effacement of the differences between the sexes.
(Butler 2024, 4–5, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Anti-Gender Movement
In the United States at least, gender is no longer a mundane box to be checked on official forms, and surely not one of those obscure academic disciplines with no effect in the broader world. On the contrary: it has become a phantasm with destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics.
(Butler 2024, 5, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Gender as a Phantasm
Phantasms and Exclusion
For gender to be identified as a threat to all of life, civilization, society, thought, and the like, it has to gather up a wide range of fears and anxieties—no matter how they contradict one another—package them into a single bundle, and subsume them under a single name. As Freud taught us about dreams, whatever is happening in phantasms such as these involves the condensation of a number of elements, and a displacement from what remains unseen or unnamed.
(Butler 2024, 5–6, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Phantasms and Exclusion
Can we even say how many contemporary fears gather at the site of gender? … When the word “gender” absorbs an array of fears and becomes a catchall phantasm for the contemporary Right, the various conditions that actually give rise to those fears lose their names. “Gender” both collects and incites those fears, keeping us from thinking more clearly about what there is to fear, and how the currently imperiled sense of the world came about in the first place.
(Butler 2024, 6, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Phantasms and Exclusion
In Butler’s (2024, 12) view, legitimate fears and grievances are—through the indeterminate idea of gender—“bundled into
an inflammatory syntax.”
Phantasms and Exclusion
Building on the work of Laplanche, Butler (2024, 12) identifies two key mechanisms that bring “associations together into a complex unity that compels belief” in the legitimacy of fantasy.
Condensation
Displacement
Phantasms and Exclusion
(1) Condensation
“Condensation names how disparate psychic and social elements are arbitrarily connected with one another and reduced to a single reality.”
(Butler 2024, 12, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Phantasms and Exclusion
(2) Displacement
“Displacement names the way that one or many topics are pushed out of the mind—or externalized—in favor of the one that both stands for them and conceals them.”
(Butler 2024, 12, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Phantasms and Exclusion
Phantasms and Exclusion
The incoherence and impossibility of the case against gender represent contradictory phenomena, and even offer its public a way to collect many of its fears and convictions without ever having to make the bundle coherent: gender represents capitalism, and gender is nothing but Marxism; gender is a libertarian construct, and gender signals the new wave of totalitarianism; gender will corrupt the nation, like unwanted migrants but also like imperialist powers. Which one is it? The contradictory character of the phantasm allows it to contain whatever anxiety or fear that the anti-gender ideology wishes to stoke for its own purposes.
(Butler 2024, 16, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Phantasms and Exclusion
Image can be retrieved here
Group Discussion I
The Gender Phantasm
In groups of 2-3, discuss how the phantasm of gender “works.”
Is it related to populism, nationalism and authoritarianism?
How about fascism?
The Mythic Past
A Past That Never Was
Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti-gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,” resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy. The project is fragile, however, since the patriarchal order it seeks to restore never quite existed in the form they seek to actualize in the present.
(Butler 2024, 15, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Past That Never Was
A Question
Are any of the phenomena we’ve covered thus far also restorative in nature?
A Past That Never Was
Stoking a desire for a restoration of masculine privilege serves many other forms of power, but it constitutes its own social project, namely, to produce an ideal past whose reanimation will target, if not eliminate, sexual and gender minorities. This dream not only seeks to restore a rightful place for patriarchal authority … but also aims at rolling back progressive policies and rights to make marriage exclusively heterosexual, to insist that whatever sex is assigned at birth stays in place, and to restrict abortion because the state knows better what limits should be placed on pregnant peoples bodies. The backlash that we see against “gender” is part of this larger restoration project that seeks to shore up authoritarian regimes.
(Butler 2024, 15, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Past That Never Was
Another Question
Are any of the phenomena we’ve covered thus far also eliminationist in nature?
A Past That Never Was
Fascist politics invokes a pure mythic past tragically destroyed. Depending on how the nation is defined, the mythic past may be religiously pure, racially pure, culturally pure, or all of the above. But there is a common structure to all fascist mythologizing. In all fascist mythic pasts, an extreme version of the patriarchal family reigns supreme, even just a few generations ago. Further back in time, the mythic past was a time of glory of the nation, with wars of conquest led by patriotic generals, its armies filled with its countrymen, able-bodied, loyal warriors whose wives were at home raising the next generation.
(Stanley 2018, 3–4, EMPHASIS ADDED)
A Past That Never Was
In a fascist society, the leader of the nation is analogous to the father in the traditional patriarchal family. The leader is the father of his nation, and his strength and power are the source of his legal authority, just as the strength and power of the father of the family in patriarchy are supposed to be the source of his ultimate moral authority over his children and wife … By representing the nation’s past as one with a patriarchal family structure, fascist politics connects nostalgia to a central organizing hierarchal authoritarian structure.
(Stanley 2018, 6, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Group Discussion II
Gender and Nostalgia
It seems like the “anti-gender” movement is animated by nostalgia. But … why? Discuss in groups of 3-4.
Lecture II: October 9th
Some Reminders, Some Updates
Midterm Paper
Midterm Paper Deadline (Revised)
Your midterm papers are due either—
- 8:00 PM on Friday, October 25th
- 8:00 PM on Friday, November 1st
The choice is yours.
Some Reminders, Some Updates
Midterm Paper
Once again, guidelines for the midterm paper can be found
here.
Some Reminders, Some Updates
Midterm Paper
A Question
Are any of you planning to submit the paper with a colleague?
Some Reminders, Some Updates
Midterm Paper
If so, please let me know.
Remember: groups have to meet with me—
ideally, before and after the deadline.
Some Reminders, Some Updates
Mid-Semester Break
Mid-Semester Break
The mid-semester break is upon us. Ergo, we do not have class on Monday.
Please, do not show up on Monday.
A Global Movement
The Illiberal Rebellion
World polity theory has long emphasized the diffusion of global scripts embodied in specific policies that spread cross-nationally, offering adopters international legitimacy. Indeed, in the case of homosexuality, it predicted nations would reform their laws in line with a world culture that champions the right to sexual self-determination.
(Ferguson 2022, 708, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Illiberal Rebellion
Yet, in the first decades of the 21st century, it appears that a range of illiberal institutions and actors have emerged in
“open rebellion against world culture.”
(Ferguson 2022, 709, EMPHASIS ADDED)
The Illiberal Rebellion
Gender and sexuality are at the heart of this rebellion.
The Illiberal Rebellion
Why?
The Illiberal Rebellion
Let’s consider policies regulating sexuality around the world.
The Illiberal Rebellion
The Illiberal Rebellion
As Velasco (2023) posits, LGBT+ rights serve as an “ideal case” to map liberal-illiberal cleavages for three key reasons:
LGBT+ protections are less institutionalized than other scripts.
Orientations towards LGBT+ rights reflect fundamental differences between liberal and illiberal schemata or cultural models.
Challenges to LGBT+ rights offer early clues about the strategic sophistication of the far right writ large—as well as the transnational character of exclusionary, right-wing movements.
The Illiberal Rebellion
Moreover, in a recent paper, Velasco and colleagues (2024) argue that we should not see LGBTQ+ rights as a downstream consequence of democracy but constitutive of, or inextricably tied to,
liberal democratic ideals.
The Illiberal Rebellion
LGBTQ+ Policies as an Example
Figure 2 from Ferguson (2022)
The Illiberal Rebellion
LGBTQ+ Policies as an Example
Figure 4 from Ferguson (2022)
The Illiberal Rebellion
LGBTQ+ Policies as an Example
No longer entrusting it to extralegal controls of custom or religion, nations are now bringing homosexuality under the purview of rationalized state policies. No longer restricting it purely to criminal sanction, nations are now governing homosexuality through myriad legal areas, from civil and family to administrative and constitutional law. And as more nations reach for the bevy of formal regulatory options at their disposal, from gay marriage and civil unions to antigay propaganda laws, the global social space has become more defined, more articulated, more differentiated by these regulations.
(Ferguson 2022, 684, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Group Discussion III
LGBTQ+ Rights and the Global Arena
Find someone you’ve never “worked” with before during a group exercise—and form a team!
Then, discuss why sexuality is—in your view—increasingly fragmenting the “global social space.”
The Spread of Exclusion
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
Are the anti-LGBTQ+ sensibilities of radical, right-wing movements a (very exclusionary) bastion against Western liberal
hegemony or “cultural imperialism?”
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
This framing glosses over some key developments and contingencies.
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
Despite overtures to cultural particularity, right-wing leaders and entrepreneurs around the world are drawing from the well of American ‘culture war’ discourse—decrying ‘political correctness’, ‘wokeness’, ‘cancel culture’ and the like—and using American cultural figures as signposts to signal their moral convictions and political beliefs.
(Broćić and Karim 2024, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
Putin claims that Russia is being ‘canceled’ by the West, citing the public backlash against JK Rowling’s stance on sex and gender claims as evidence of ‘progressive discrimination’. Allan Bloom’s (1987) Closing of the American Mind is a key influence for Wang Huning, China’s top ideological theorist behind the crackdown on ‘effeminate men’ and LGBT in media (Lyons 2021). French le wokisme and its allotropes in neighboring countries suggest backlash against social justice across Europe is filtered through American vernacular.
(Broćić and Karim 2024, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
Movements challenging the liberal bent of world culture, overall, appear to import culture war discourse from the American context to frame their own concerns. Rather than upending world culture, seen this way, right-wing challenges may exhibit their own patterns of transnationalism, convergence and interpenetration.
(Broćić and Karim 2024, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
Velasco’s (2023) work affirms this basic idea.
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
[G]reater country-level integration into the international community—long used to explain the adoption of liberal norms—enables backlash as well. These acts of backlash then feed into a deinstitutionalization of pro-LGBT+ norms on the world stage by fueling direct challenges and weakening perceptions of legitimacy.
(Velasco 2023, 1383, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
[A] transnational network of anti-LGBT+ actors, anchored across governmental, religious, and civil society actors such as World Congress of Families, Alliance Defending Freedom International, the Vatican, and Putin’s Russia, are similarly utilizing, even co-opting, the structures and mechanisms in the international system to coordinate the transnational diffusion of LGBT+ backlash.
(Velasco 2023, 1383, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
In identifying the global linchpins of the anti-gender movement,
Butler (2024) highlights a similar set of actors—
American College of Pediatricians
CitizenGo
The World Congress of Families
The Vatican
Turkey under Erdoğan
Hungary under Orbán
Etc.
Resisting Liberal Hegemony?
[O]n August 4, 2022, Orbán addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the Republican Party’s political action committee, making clear that the danger of “gender ideology” has to be treated like the threat of unwanted migration: “In Hungary we had to build not just a physical wall on our borders and a financial wall around our families, but a legal wall around our children to protect them from the gender ideology that targets them.”
(Butler 2024, 53, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Group Discussion IV
LGBTQ+ Rights and Far Right Politics
In new groups, discuss whether you believe anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment defines far-right politics in the modern world.
Introducing Complexity
Exclusionary Liberalism
As Brubaker (2017) aptly notes, pro-LGBTQ+ sentiment has also been strategically used by certain far-right actors to advance civilizational discourses—e.g., that highlight the putative moral “failings” of
immigrants from the Muslim world.
Exclusionary Liberalism
Exclusionary Liberalism
In a sense, Simonsen and Bonikowski (2019) detect this phenomonenon in survey data.
Exclusionary Liberalism
[U]sing survey data from 41 European countries … we … show that the relationship between specific conceptions of nationhood and anti-Muslim attitudes is context-dependent: civic nationalism, seen in the literature as broadly inclusive, is associated with particularly strong anti-Muslim sentiments in Northwestern Europe but not in other countries in the sample.
(Simonsen and Bonikowski 2019, 115, EMPHASIS ADDED)
Group Discussion V
Putting It All Together
With the Week 6 lecture behind us, how would you summarize the relationship between the politics of gender and sexuality and
the politics of exclusion?
Discuss in groups of 2-3.
See You Next Wednesday
References
Note: Scroll to access entire bibliography.
Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon; Schuster.
Broćić, Miloš, and Sakeef M. Karim. 2024. “The Global Culture War.” Working Paper.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2017. “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist Moment in Comparative Perspective.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (8): 1191–1226. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1294700.
Butler, Judith. 2021. “Why Is the Idea of ‘Gender’ Provoking Backlash the World Over?” The Guardian, October. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/judith-butler-gender-ideology-backlash.
———. 2024. Who’s Afraid of Gender? First edition. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus; Giroux.
Ferguson, Jason L. 2022. “The Great Refusal: The West, the Rest, and the New Regulations on Homosexuality, 1970–2015.” American Journal of Sociology 128 (3): 680–727. https://doi.org/10.1086/723107.
Lyons, N. S. 2021. “The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning.” https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2013. “Rethinking Homonationalism.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2): 336–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43302999.
———. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv125jg6f.
Simonsen, Kristina Bakkær, and Bart Bonikowski. 2019. “Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive? Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti-Muslim Attitudes in Europe.” European Journal of Political Research 59 (1): 114–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12337.
Stanley, Jason. 2018. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.
Velasco, Kristopher. 2023. “Transnational Backlash and the Deinstitutionalization of Liberal Norms: LGBT+ Rights in a Contested World.” American Journal of Sociology 128 (5): 1381–1429. https://doi.org/10.1086/724724.
Velasco, Kristopher, Siddhartha Baral, and Yun (Nancy) Tang. 2024. “Is Democracy Bad for LGBT+ Rights?” Journal of Democracy 35 (3): 131–45. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/930432.