## Butler on how _Gender Trouble_ drew from phenomenology, Husserl's constitutive acts (00:09:20) ###### Butler expands on how their early interest in German Idealism, ethics, and phenomenology turned into work on gender, and ultimately Gender Trouble: >I set out to write a book on the philosophical foundations of gender. Because I thought, actually coming out of phenomenology, that there were some \[...] clear questions about whether, in Husserl's terms, gender is built in a step-by-step way. I mean, how does the phenomenon of gender come into being, if we don't come into the world fully gendered? How is it accomplished over time? And Husserl did have a way of thinking about constitutive acts, that is to say those acts that built or formed phenomenon over time. And he thought that with the appropriate methods you could get a close look at what those acts were. So I perhaps **borrowed from Husserl a bit in thinking that gender was a stylized repetition of acts.** And that's one of the formulations from Gender Trouble that I think has a a strong echo of phenomenology in it. ###### So the phenomenon of gender is a stylized repetition of acts? >That was **one formulation that I offered** in the late 1980s, yeah. ## Butler explaining performativity isn't best for explaining anti-trans movements; distances from their original formulation of performativity (00:13:43) ###### Maybe we should focus a little bit on the theory of gender performativity and how different groups think about gender. That might help us better understand the so-called phantasm that people are creating when they’re fighting against gender. > Actually, I’m not sure that performativity can help us understand the phantasm. > > I mean, performativity was a theory that I introduced 35 years ago, and **I’ve kind of drawn back from it. I’ve revised it in many ways over the years.** But there might be an idea about what gender performativity is—an idea that opponents of gender have—that has very little to do with what anyone has actually written about it. ###### Well, maybe I should ask then—what is your current theory of gender? > Oh, **I don’t have one.** Sorry. --- ## Butler suggests a grand unified theory of gender would be "laughable," encourages open thinking and discussion, mentions their continuing evolution (00:43:18) >I’m resisting the idea of _a_ theory of gender—if you’ll excuse me—because there are many theoretical things to say about gender, but **a single, unified theory of gender I think would be, maybe, laughable at this time.** There are so many competing views. > >What’s more important to me is that we keep the question open, that we allow and support gender studies programs, women’s studies programs, gay and lesbian studies, queer and trans studies. Let these folks read and discuss. **Don’t shut them down, don’t censor them, don’t ban them.** > >So my view, at this moment in my life, is not to put forth a new theory of gender, but rather to insist that we be able to think openly and well about these matters. And I’m still learning. I mean, I’m but one author. > >It would be silly if I had my own little property, _“Oh, this is my theory of gender!”_ Which I did. But one learns through conversation and reading and experience. In ways that continue to open up my own horizons as well. ###### I know that you no longer abide by the theory of gender performativity. >Well, I don’t dispute it or reject it. It’s just that it’s been revised several times. And, it would take me a couple of hours explain. ###### Does gender have to be performed? Or can it also be something internal? (Imagine someone who knew they were trans but were unable to perform their preferred gender.) >Absolutely. **I've never said it's only performed.** There's a whole **psychoanalytic dimension** of my work that includes quite a lot of reflection on the internal psychic dynamics of gender, and also how people feel, and sometimes the contradictions between how they feel and how they act. I'm not a behaviorist. I'm not an Irving Goffman person who thinks you wear a mask and that's who you are. > >We are treated as a boy, we are treated as a girl from the minute we enter the world. So those meanings are being attributed to us, they become part of what we know, they're the ways in which we orient ourselves. But at a certain point, it could be that one is, oddly enough, radically disoriented by the terms that are supposed to orient you. And what do you do then?