"Q. What was your family like?
A. My parents and grandparents — especially my grandparents — struggled to assimilate into American cultural norms. They came from Eastern Europe and — at least on my mother’s side — many people in her family were Jews who were murdered by the Nazis. So, my family was worried about appearances. They copied Hollywood figures and wanted to have a very American look, very chic and elegant. Gender was very important: you had to 'do' your gender right. You had to be a handsome man and a beautiful woman.
I grew up in this world of gender secrets and ideals. And I guess that’s how I started thinking about the cruelty of gender norms and how important gender freedom is — the freedom to produce a world in which people who don’t always fit the norm are free to live and breathe and be accepted and loved and recognized for being who they are, without discrimination or being pathologized.
Q. The idea behind the book Who’s Afraid of Gender? partly came out of an incident involving harassment and violence in Brazil. What happened? And what did you learn from that experience?
A. They burned an effigy of me outside the Sesc Pompeia Cultural Center in São Paulo. I saw it online — I was hidden inside. It was 2017. Then, the mob (made up of Bolsonaro supporters) harassed me at the airport when I was leaving with my girlfriend, my partner (the political scientist Wendy Brown). She’s not my wife, because she doesn’t want to marry me. We’ve been a couple for 33 years and she doesn’t want to marry me. She’s a Marxist, she doesn’t believe in that!
Q. Would you like to get married?
A. No, but I like to ask her about it. I always ask her — it’s like a joke. She says she would have to divorce me if I tried to marry her. You can put that in the interview."
~ Marc Bassets, Judith Butler
"Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘Feminists who don’t repudiate the right-wing, anti-gender movement are complicit’"
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