Judith Butler at The New School: 'Contemporary fascist passions'

Judith Butler gave the keynote at the GSSI Symposium — Feminisms Against Fascism — held at The New School on 23-25 April 2026. The talk was titled "Gender Matters 2026: Contemporary Fascist Passions".

The ground of the argument#

Butler's most recent book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, examines how the concept of "gender" became a political target worldwide. Its thesis is that the simultaneous appearance of this opposition in very different countries and very different political traditions is no accident: "gender" works as a vessel into which anxieties ranging from economic precarity to migration are poured.

Butler characterises the movement's language as "moral sadism" and traces how it has settled into religious, political and cultural institutions.

February at WashU#

Speaking to an audience of about two hundred at Washington University on 3 February 2026, Butler discussed the same book and the future of the world's democracies.

Butler's concept#

Butler's name is bound up with Gender Trouble (1990). Its central proposal is performativity: gender is not an essence a person possesses but something produced through repeated acts. To "be a woman" or to "be a man" is not the expression of a prior reality but the series of behaviours that constitutes it.

Thirty-five years on, that thesis remains the reference point for feminist theory and for its critics alike.