People outside the academy question their assumptions they wrestle with unfamiliar ideas and examine their own discomfort. And yet the work Butler demands of readers is of a kind that, more than ever, they are willing to do now - if not necessarily while reading theoretical texts, then in moving through their daily lives. “She made it clear that the body is not a stable foundation for gender expression.”įor much of her career, Butler was known mostly within academia, in part because of the difficulty of her prose. Gender Trouble, published in 1990, made Butler a star: It introduced “performativity,” the idea that gender isn’t something we are but something we continually do, opening the door for “cultural configurations of sex and gender proliferate,” as she put it in the book’s conclusion, “confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness.” If not for Butler’s work, “you wouldn’t have the version of genderqueer-ness that we now have,” says Jack Halberstam, a gender-studies professor at Columbia. president would be impossible in the 1990s,” Butler says.
We are speaking shortly after President Obama publicly voiced his support for transgender rights in the fight against North Carolina’s bathroom law, and gender - as something in need of definition, as something potentially ambiguous or complex - is at the center of national debate. “I think there aren’t very many of us who could have foreseen it,” Butler says, considering the blossoming mainstream interest in gender issues. We find ourselves poised someplace between gender mattering tremendously and mattering not very much at all.īutler laughs when I tell her about the Teen Vogue verdict on Jaden Smith. In 2015, the site abandoned that preset menu altogether and just let users enter up to ten terms of their own. In 2014, Facebook stopped limiting its gender options to male or female and began giving users some 50 other choices (from neutrois to genderqueer to cis). But beyond the “transgender tipping point” heralded by Time and the broader awakening of identity politics, there is another revelation going on: a growing acceptance, especially among a broad swath of young people, of easy gender fluidity and ambiguity.
Or, for that matter, since his father refused to kiss a man onscreen 23 years ago.Ĭaitlyn Jenner’s coming out last year was a Kardashian-scale teachable moment - the opportunity for patient, prime-time explanations of why not to take gender for granted. (Stenberg, meanwhile, recently came out as bisexual over Snapchat, though she’s also shrugged at conventional identity politics: “I don’t really see sexuality in boxes,” she has said.) Smith’s insouciant attitude toward gender looks less like affectation than evidence of a world that has changed profoundly in the two decades since his father starred on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And gender norms - they are pretty arbitrary, right? Smith also wore a dress, with a loose sport coat and sneakers, when he took The Hunger Games’ Amandla Stenberg to the prom. Rub your eyes, refocus your gaze, and really, is there any real reason why this ought to be weird? He looks good.
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