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Gender theorist and political philosopher Judith Butler speaks to the Hankyoreh21 in Seoul on Dec. 4, 2024. (Kim Myoung-jin/Hankyoreh)

“President Yoon was testing his own sovereign powers as the executive power to quash his opposition. What I read was that he was claiming that progressive activists and those who were demonstrating were actually ‘communist totalitarians,’ and that they had been infiltrated by the North. So he made it seem as if it were a national threat to the border or to the integrity of Korean democracy in the South, but in fact, he was the one who was threatening Korean democracy in the South by imitating authoritarian powers that belonged to some states, including North Korea.”

This was the assessment of renowned academic, gender theorist and philosophical superstar Judith Butler, who was in Korea to deliver a lecture at the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University, in the wake of President Yoon Suk-yeol’s short-lived declaration of martial law in Korea.

“I think we can see how for people who engage in authoritarian tactics and accuse others of being totalitarian, their accusations, are in fact, a kind of indirect confession of what they themselves are doing,” the professor said.

King Lear and precarious life

“Oh, he’s like King Lear, the shape here,” Butler said while studying a photograph of Yoon on the front page of a special edition of the Hankyoreh, referring to the protagonist of the eponymous Shakespeare tragedy about a ruler who brings his kingdom to its knees because of a foolish decision.

Butler is a distinguished professor in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. The scholar sat down for an interview with the Hankyoreh21 at a hotel cafeteria in downtown Seoul on the morning of Dec. 4, 2024.

Fate seemed to bring this Berkeley professor to Korea in December 2024 to witness the dramatic events of Korea’s own King Lear and the perilous predicament he has created. Oddly enough, the title of Butler’s lecture was “Democracy and Future of Humanities.”

Butler’s seminal text “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” published in 1990, made them a globally recognized feminist philosopher and had a massive impact on queer theory. Since then, they have made great strides in ethics and political philosophy for vulnerable groups in such works as “Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death,” “Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence,” “The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind” and “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” (published in 2024).

As a political philosopher, Butler is interested in sexual and gender minority people, migrants from conflict zones, and the dangerous and precarious lives of disenfranchised people who resist neoliberalism. The ethical through line of their theory is sharing and expanding “livable life.”

Butler’s visit to Korea was not easy to arrange. They had been invited to be the keynote speaker at an international academic conference on critical theory at the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University in June 2023, but ended up being unable to come. In effect, it took over a year to finally get to Korea.

Butler has faced a backlash in numerous countries around the world. When they gave a lecture for the “Great Minds” series by Korean broadcaster EBS in 2021, Christian fundamentalists attacked them by spamming the broadcaster’s message board with hateful screeds. They have been pilloried as a pedophile and a witch.

As usual, the time and location of Butler’s lecture were kept under embargo. But the schedule was leaked, and Christian fundamentalists in Korea rose up in fury once again, trying to overwhelm the organizers with complaints in an attempt to have the lecture canceled.

In the end, the lecture time and location were changed only a day before the lecture. Organizers had a few backup options for venues in order to ensure that the lecture could be held safely, and ultimately decided on one in Seoul in consideration of the various circumstances. Still, the audience hall was still crammed with over a hundred people, much more than expected. Listeners had the privilege of hearing a powerful lecture that lasted more than three hours.

In the lecture, Butler spoke about the “paradox of democracy.” Just as a democratic election is restoring power to Donald Trump — a man who defends white male chauvinists and advocates excluding immigrants and gender and sexual minorities — democracy is what perpetuates the political norms that strip vulnerable people of their human rights.

“Perhaps most importantly, what new imagining can we offer that would have the power to defeat a vision of the world based on racial and ethnic hatred, on attacks on gender and sexual minorities, one that proposes capitalist accumulation and the decimation of social services as a dystopic version of the public good, the continuation of war and the destruction of the earth? What world do we wish to bring about? What future do we collectively wish to see realized in the world?” Butler asks.

Who exactly feels threatened by the words of such a little old scholar?

The Hankyoreh21 magazine was joined for this interview by two Kyung Hee University professors: Alex Taek-gwang Lee, a professor of British and American cultural studies at the School of Global Communication, and Sohn Hee-jeong, a research professor at the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Gender theorist and political philosopher Judith Butler speaks to the Hankyoreh21 in Seoul on Dec. 4, 2024. (Kim Myoung-jin/Hankyoreh)

Korea’s martial law and the ‘anti-gender ideology’ movement

“The failure of Yoon’s martial law is a testament to the checks and balances of South Korea’s social democracy. I also wonder whether he is appealing to Trump, saying, ‘I’m a strongman too,’” Butler said as we sat down on Dec. 4, after a night of turmoil prompted by the president’s shocking declaration of military rule.

“But his declaration of martial law was refused by the National Assembly and even, I think, by the military. It turns out that he has produced himself as a very weak president. Now, if you’re going to be a true sovereign, a strong sovereign, and declare your will, impose martial law, and criminalize dissent, you can only really do that if you have the will of the people, the will of the military, and the deference of your legislative assembly. But if you don’t have that support for that kind of action, your declaration is hollow. It’s weak. It cannot take the force. It cannot be efficient. So instead of being a strong authoritarian who is able to impose his will on the country, he reveals his weakness, and even makes himself vulnerable to ridicule, but also to losing power. And it seems that he has lost power, and he may well lose power definitively.”

In their latest work, “Who’s Afraid of Gender,” Butler explains that new right-wing groups have projected onto gender a “phantasm” — an image that “draws on anxieties and fears and converts them into hatred for others.” The theorist says gender has become the target of authoritarian regimes, fledgling fascists, and those people known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or “TERFs.” Butler is highly critical of a duplicitous reality in which the most vulnerable — sex and gender minorities, refugees, immigrants, foreigners — are seen as the greatest threats to states. The scholar argues that such an “anti-gender movement” stokes aggressive nationalism and leaves people vulnerable to subjugation. When Lee pointed out that the situation in Korea bore many similarities to what Butler laid out in their book, the scholar elaborated on the phenomenon. 

“Who belongs to the nation-state, who belongs to the nation, who is a threat to the nation?  What is a democratic nation? We are seeing, I think, a fight now over who has that power,” Butler explained. 

“The anti-gender ideology movement advanced by Christian nationalists here in Korea suggests that their idea is that to be properly part of the nation, to define the nation, is to embrace the heteronormative family, heterosexual marriage, reproductive sexuality inside of marriage, and to oppose all forms of sexuality. But as far as I’m concerned, we have to also see that the anti-gender ideology movement here, as elsewhere, is against feminism and also against trans rights and against gay and lesbian rights, and is anti-migrant and xenophobic, almost always because it is interested in defining the nation in very limited terms.”

Pointing to Giorgia Meloni, the first woman to serve as Italy’s prime minister, as an example, Butler explained the political structure of the “phantasm” exploited by Christian nationalists. Just as Korea has had its own anti-gay slogans that reject “male daughters-in-law,” Meloni has positioned LGBTQ people as a threat to the “natural” heterosexual families that are “blessed by God,” wielding her political influence to ostracize and exclude sex and gender minority people. 

“They produce a scene of enormous fear or horror through the Christian nationalist framework,” Butler explained. 

Before the martial law debacle, gender had been a lightning rod under the Yoon administration. But had military rule become cemented as the law of the land, gender would have been the object of more deleterious attacks. Only after martial law was lifted did it come out that Park An-su, the Army chief of staff who Yoon named as his martial law commander, also serves as the president of the Korea Missionary Christian Federation and sees the evangelization of the armed forces as his life’s calling. 

“They produce a scene of enormous fear, like, ‘Oh, these gender biologists are coming to destroy our entire way of life and my godly sense of who I am and what my family is, what my marriage is — the gender ideologists are attacking the most intimate dimensions of my life.’ Well, now we can ask a question. First of all, are the so-called ‘gender ideologists’ doing this?” Butler asked.

“If you look at what gender studies does, or social policy that is engaged in gender, it does none of those things. In fact, it respects children’s freedom and ability to explore their own worlds and to find their own pathway. It does not, in fact, abolish the heterosexual family. It just asks for gay and lesbian marriage, or gay and lesbian associations that are different, or other possible families, to be equally valuable. To claim that gay and lesbian parenting or marriage is equally valuable does not destroy heterosexual marriage conjugality, it just lives alongside it. But there’s something absolutely unacceptable about that equality to the people who want to see their identity and their sexuality and their marriage as natural and God-given, because they want theirs to be the only possible form. They fear equality, because they want to guard their supremacy or their exclusive claim to be the only possible way of life. The attack on ‘gender ideology’ is actually an attack on the complexity of life.”

“My experience is not mine alone”

When it comes to the “4B” movement — adherents of which swear off marriage, having kids, dating and sex — among Korean women, Butler said they understood it as “saying no to an obligatory position,” in which women say they’re “not obliged by state or culture or their family to enter into a marriage or to reproduce.” Yet if these women felt that they had choices about their life, marriage and sexuality, Butler argued, “then we probably wouldn’t see this resistance movement.” While elaborating on the rights of heterosexual married couples and an alternative system of long-term partnership, the scholar brought up their partner of 34 years, distinguished theorist of modern democracy and power Wendy Brown, professor emerita of political science at UC Berkeley, with whom they have a son.

“Let’s imagine a future in which you get to have your sexuality and your freedom, or you can reproduce outside of marriage, or you can have a partnership with somebody of any gender with some duration and stability that doesn’t have to be marriage, and you can have the benefits, legal and economic of marriage without getting married, like me,” Butler said.

“My partner is a Marxist. She’s against contracts of that kind,” Butler said of marriage. “Plus she said she would divorce me if I tried to marry her. 34 years. Are we a family? Are we a marriage? I fought for legal rights, but without being married, as an unmarried, single person, in the eyes of the law; I received equal parenting rights to our son’s birth mother. Wendy and I have had joint custody since Isaac was 1 year old.” 

The professor said that a movement that bases itself on saying “no” will have to, at some point, articulate what it wants to affirm and what precisely it is concerned about. “It would be a terrible mistake if 4B rejected trans life or trans identity, trans rights and aspirations,” they said. 

“The right wing that is patriarchal and heteronormative is attacking both women who are not reproducing and trans people who are departing from a ‘natural’ order; they’re both considered to be unnatural and against the nation,” Butler said. 

“Trans people are vulnerable to violence on the street. So are all kinds of women, including trans women. If you’re against random violence on the street against people, then you’re not going to say only certain people deserve to be protected. And if that is your view, as it should be, then we need to generalize the coalitions to reflect our principles,” they went on. 

Feminism, in many cases, starts with a painful and violating personal experience, which then becomes a departure point for making connections with others who have experienced similar things, Butler says. That eventually leads one to question the social structures and conditions that produce such serial violations, and in asking those questions, one becomes involved in a social transformation. But alongside an analysis of the social structure that oppresses us, we need solidarity that transcends the atomization of the “women’s” movement and individualization, Butler argues. 

“My experience is not mine alone. I’m part of a big crowd. Our obligation is to establish the reliance that coalition is possible. [We need] excellent analysis of the conditions under which this is perpetuated, and to imagine and call for and undertake the transformation of society in favor of freedom, equality, protection for violence and injustice.”

Gender theorist and political philosopher Judith Butler speaks to the Hankyoreh21 in Seoul on Dec. 4, 2024. (Kim Myoung-jin/Hankyoreh)

We are all interdependent

After taking an interest in public assembly, Butler penned their work “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” in 2015. In their ruminations on street protests and those who band together for them, Butler stressed “relationality” and “interdependence.” While noting that holding a rally or participating in it is not, in itself, democratic, the scholar interrogated what is meant by the “public,” who belongs to “the people,” and who we work together with. In regard to the ongoing Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination protests in Korea for the mobility rights of disabled people, Butler said that guaranteeing mobility and access to disabled people is crucial in that “equal participation is a fundamental democratic ideal.”

Mentioning a video on YouTube they appeared in with disability rights and animal liberation activist Sunaura Taylor, Butler noted that the disability rights movement has always been a movement that demands access to institutions, including political ones. 

“In the United States, one of the very first and largest demonstrations that disabled people had was when they went into the congressional offices and took over governmental offices. Society has to be committed to rights of mobility for everyone and rights of participation for everyone,” they said. 

“The body is also always open to others. I think the pandemic made it clear that we needed to support each other in ways that acknowledged each other’s frailty, permeability, and exposure to illness or death. If we kiss, we exchange fluids. I eat what you cook, you eat what I cook, and we help each other up the steps. Sometimes, when someone falls, we help them up. We are the infrastructure of physical support for one another. So to see the body as relational or porous or interdependent seems to me an alternative to a radical individualism. I think disability studies and the disability movement have made us all reflect on our interdependency.”

Butler also expressed interest in the young people protesting climate change and those fighting for animal rights, calling the work of forming connections between humans and non-humans “really important.”

“If we go back to the idea that interdependency is a central feature of a counter imaginary to neoliberalism, then we could ask ourselves, how do we think about interdependency? It’s not just humans who are interdependent on each other. Humans are inter-social and economic, architectural infrastructure, but they’re also dependent on other living creatures and living processes in the world.”

In this light, ecofeminism presents “a very strong movement” that “makes us rethink our relationship to the living Earth and our obligation to regenerate life, to halt its toxification,” Butler said, while adding that the ecofeminist movement made them reflect on humans as “a set of relations,” in the vein of Donna Haraway. 

“We’re not absolutely distinct from animals. We’re not the exact same, but we are interlinked. And what happens to animals affects us as living creatures, and we have an obligation to them. I think there’s a strong vegetarian politics, and I know this exists in Korea because of the Nobel Prize [won by Han Kang]. So I appreciate what young people are trying to do. I see my connection to it, for instance, like the work of Donna Haraway, or rethinking the human as a set of relations to technologies, to animals, to the air, the soil, the water. That is certainly what I want to do.”

Gender theorist and political philosopher Judith Butler speaks to the Hankyoreh21 in Seoul on Dec. 4, 2024. (Kim Myoung-jin/Hankyoreh)

Theoretical through lines from gender to anti-violence

The starting point for “Gender Trouble,” which elucidated how desire is socially constructed, came from Butler’s real concerns about gays, lesbians and trans people during the 1980s. Not only were these people’s real lives and real love forbidden, but publicly mourning for them was as well. 

“I was worried, especially during the AIDS crisis in the US, that a lot of people were losing their friends and lovers, and there was no public acknowledgment. It was as if these were shameful deaths. They had to be hidden. You didn’t tell the truth about why somebody died,” Butler said. Even after losing lovers or best friends, those that they love most in the world, these relationships would be treated as “not real love” and their deaths as “not real loss,” the scholar explained.

“I was, at that point, trying to fight against the idea that non-normative genders and sexualities were less real than normative ones, and the theory of performativity was a way of trying to transform our ideas in reality so that we could see what the world would be like if we were all equally valuable or equally grievable,” the theorist said.

Butler noted that one of the main issues of the gay and lesbian movements that they were a part of in the 1980s was the claim that queer people have the right to walk on the street without fear of violence. “The fear of violence was always there, as was my call for a world in which queer people, women and trans people could live and breathe without the fear of violence,” they said. That was when they began considering the political ethics of the prohibition of mourning through Antigone, by Sophocles. 

“I think that became more intense for me when I started thinking about the violence in the state. The work on Antigone was involved in that. She sought to bury her brother, and she was banned from that burial by her uncle Creon, who was the autocratic leader of that state. I was taught as a young Jewish person that we should be standing up to state violence wherever it occurs, including when it’s genocidal. Because for me, Jewish values are not compatible with state violence. I think my theory of non-violence didn’t really come to fruition.”

But there is a through line in Butler’s theoretical work from past and present that the scholar themself acknowledges. Upon arriving in Seoul, they headed straight for the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and took in an exhibition on Asian feminist art, which they related to their theory of gender performativity. 

“Yesterday, I went to see this beautiful exhibition on Asian feminist art, which included artists from different parts [of Asia]. It was really beautiful, but some of the work was focused on the repetition of gestures. Now in ‘Gender Trouble,’ I say something about how gender is built up or accomplished over time through a repetition of gestures, and that they’re stylized in certain ways — how does a young girl learn to be a woman in the ways that are expected of her?”

Those expectations, Butler explains, begin before even a person is born and the medical professional delivering the baby declares, “It’s a girl.” They begin when there is an expectation itself about whether the child will be a boy or a girl, when people are “already dreaming of you,” the scholar said.  

What Butler emphasized about their theory of performativity is the potential for transformation it carries. “If gender is made through a certain kind of repetitive acts — maybe unconscious, maybe conscious, maybe explicitly imposed, maybe communicated less than explicitly — then we can use those forms of repetition. You can take them apart,” they said.

“At some point, it may become unlivable for a person to be involved in these obligatory repetitions. They may say, ‘No, I cannot do that. I cannot prepare the meals every day,’ or ‘I cannot get married for them and do those daily tasks.’ I think becoming acquainted with those repetitions and learning how they can be interrupted leads to thinking about our everyday lives and how we’re implicated in both, how we can live differently,” Butler says. 

“The deeper trouble is about freedom, but it’s not a radical freedom to make yourself in whatever way you wish. It’s a freedom to struggle with these kinds of constraints that have been imposed on us and to see what can come out of that strength,” the scholar continued. 

Throughout their career, Butler has continually criticized Israel’s war on Palestine, the discrimination against and exclusion of Muslims after 9/11, and Zionism, making them anathema to Christians, far-right forces and fundamentalists who have relentlessly attacked the scholar. Their resistance to Butler is motivated by their desire and intent to hold tight to their privileges and create a world based on the notion that their God is the one-and-only, and their way of life is the only way of life. 

“The question of who is grievable pertains not only to those already lost, but to those who are living a sense of being ‘already and irreversibly lost’ in everyday life. To establish a principle that all lives are, or should be, equally grievable, is to say that all lives are, or should be, equally valuable. And once we ask this question, we are already taken up by a radical form of imagining that would establish the grievability of all those who have lost their lives without a memorial, those who have become a mere demographic item in a report that rarely sees the light of day.”

So says the world’s most dangerous scholar. 

Butler assumes a serious pose during their lecture hosted by Kyung Hee University. (courtesy of Yang Hae-woo)

By Lee You-jin, senior staff writer

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