Hybrid Lecture: Who’s Afraid of Gender? w/ Judith Butler
Wednesday 20 March 2024, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm GMT, online and London, UK
Join us for this event at which Judith Butler will talk about their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
From a global icon, Judith’s book is an account of how a fear of gender is fuelling reactionary politics around the world. Judith Butler, the ground-breaking philosopher whose work has redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on gender that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed ‘anti-gender ideology movements’ dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous threat to families, local cultures, civilization – and even ‘man’ himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to abolish reproductive justice, undermine protections against violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights. But what, exactly, is so disturbing about gender? In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how ‘gender’ has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations and trans-exclusionary feminists, and the concrete ways in which this phantasm works. It is an intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a call to make a broad coalition with all those who struggle for equality and fight injustice.
Meet our speaker and chair
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School and former Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They were the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Program and International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at UC Berkeley. Butler is active in gender and sexual politics, human rights, anti-war politics, and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.
Sumi Madhok (@sumi_madhok) is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at LSE and faculty associate at LSE International Inequalities Institute. Quite unusually, she is a feminist political theorist with an ethnographic sensibility. Her most recent book Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice was awarded the Susan Strange Prize Best Book Prize and The Sussex International Theory Prize, 2022.
Find out more and book your place here: https://www.lse.ac.uk/Events/2024/03/202403201830/gender
This event will be held online and at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, UK.