Ideas and definitions that Judith Butler resisted as a young scholar have caught up to them – and us

Warning in a 1992 interview against a “bad reading” of her landmark Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler insisted, “I decide what gender I want to be today” was not what she had meant. Such an understanding, by which gender would be something changeable, determined by one’s personal desire and acts of self-declaration, entailed the “commodification of gender … consumerism.” She noted, likewise, her discomfort with an apparently opposite notion of gender, according to which there are “essential, core gender identities” for the sake of which people living in the “wrong” body for their gender should seek medical procedures to align themselves with their unchosen gender identity.

Gender voluntarism, as we might call the first position, presupposes that identity is a matter of will, and perhaps of social recognition, but at any rate not grounded in some reality (biological, psychological, or otherwise) beyond the power of personal choice. Gender essentialism, as we might call the second position, presupposes that there is somewhere in us a fact of “gender identity” that could be discovered (located in chromosomes, genes, in persistent feelings, etc.) by others, making it something other than a questionable personal story.

Neither of these positions, Butler held, represent the complexity of her thinking, or of our real experience. But the ideas that Butler tried to resist are now all around us, and have finally caught up with Butler herself. Her most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? ought to have as it subtitle: Me!

Retreating from her earlier hostility to both the voluntarist and the essentialist models, Butler now accepts their hegemonic conflation. She herself has transitioned into a nonbinary identity. The otherwise unstable logic of the double belief that gender can be changed upon one’s saying so, and is a crucial fact about oneself is held together in her new book by the intensity of animus against gender’s supposed opponents: a team of conservatives, nationalists, climate change denialists, and misguided feminists who have the bad taste to doubt what Butler herself had once doubted: that we do justice to others by accepting as authoritative their own unstable interpretations of themselves.

Butler now claims that doubting others’ ‘self-identification,’ is an attack; to accept, even with ironic and skeptical provisos, traditional categories is to support oppression.

Butler’s work from the 1990s is full of searing moments in which she expressed not just skepticism about the two dominant, mutually contradictory logics of transitioning, but an at times disturbing smugness about the fantasies on which trans desire depends (see her discussion of the film Boys Don’t Cry in Undoing Gender) or the violence that befalls trans women (see her discussion of the death of trans drag queen Venus Xtravaganza in Bodies that Matter). There is much in her earlier work that today’s TERFS might read with nodding agreement, although Butler, even then, was careful (unlike some feminists then and now) to eschew political alliances of any kind with social conservatives who defined women in terms of biology or a reactionary view of women’s proper roles. Her writing about gender in the ’80s and early ’90s, indeed, took a difficult middle path between the false extremes of positing either that categories like “woman” can be freely redefined, or that someone—be it a doctor, a priest, a feminist scholar or trans activist—can be said to know with authority once and for all time who should count as a woman.

She was concerned above all to keep categories, and not only the categories of gender, flexible and open to discussion (without thereby abolishing them), in line with the tradition of philosophy in which she had been educated—a tradition grounded in an antitotalitarian appropriation of modern German thought. Yet now Butler finds herself ironically at the head of a global political campaign that asserts control over the very sort of definitions and categories she had once fought to pry open and expose to philosophical questioning.

To understand this shift in her thinking, and to understand how gender, with all its contradictions, became our culture’s most ubiquitous, energetically affirmed and seethingly resented mode of making sense of the entanglement of social roles and individual identity, we need to go back to the beginning of Butler’s intellectual career, to her time as a student of philosophy and young lesbian feminist writer. Previously, critics of Butler’s, from the fatuous and superficial Martha Nussbaum in the 1990s to right-wingers and gender-critical feminists today, have avoided the sort of serious engagement with the philosophical background and antitotalitarian politics that lies behind her ideas about gender. Only after apprehending that background, however, can we appreciate the appeal and the inadequacy of her thinking—although readers uninterested in philosophy but curious about smut may want to scroll all the way down to the final section and its discussion of Butler’s mysteriously problematic sex life, which holds a likely clue, within the terms of her own philosophy, to what has gone astray in her thinking—and ours.

In 1979, after her undergraduate years at Bennington and Yale, Butler studied in Germany on a Fulbright scholarship under the supervision of the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), who had been immersed in the development of a “hermeneutic” account of the philosophy of Hegel. For many previous commentators, “Hegelianism” had been the name of a comprehensive system that explained the structure of thought and the trajectory of history, showing how both culminated in the “Absolute Knowledge” offered in Hegel’s own writings (and instantiated, depending on the political leanings of the commentator, in the conservative modernist Prussian state, or in a not-yet-fully-realized egalitarian project identified either with progressive liberalism or Marxism). In Gadamer’s essays on Hegel, however (gathered in the book Hegel’s Dialectic, published in English in 1976), the thinking of the latter appeared quite differently—fluid, digressive and resistant to any fixation in a ‘system,’ let alone a political ideology.

Hegel, as Gadamer explained him, provided a way to make sense of the inevitable and endless slippage between the dynamism of life, on the one hand, and, on the other, our relatively static ideas. We cannot live as thinking beings, Gadamer observed, without ideas, i.e., concepts, categories, and classifications that allow us to group phenomena together as being the same kind of thing—and, in a further step, as behaving according to the “laws” that govern the behavior of such kinds of things. The world is for us, insofar as we think about it, a world of names (“that’s a tree … that’s a rock …”) and norms (“trees lose their leaves in fall … rocks don’t move unless pushed …”). But, of course, the world is also, and really, a world of individual, specific things that are always not quite in alignment with their categories and are constantly changing, becoming something else.

Ideas can only deal with what Gadamer called in a significant passage “types” and “genera”—the Latin term from which our word gender derives. We think in terms of abstractions, labels imposed on “different individuals.” However, “what is real is the individual,” the particular, concrete thing before me, and not the label that I use to name it, or the laws that I think apply to things thus named. Every real thing is different from every other real thing, including every other real thing in what we say is “its category.” And everything is, slowly or quickly, becoming different from itself (the acorn is becoming a tree, the tree is becoming a rotted log, etc.).

Gadamer put it thus in a rhetorical flourish: “The real world as it exists in opposition to the ‘truth’ of the law is thus perverted. Things do not occur in it in a way that would correspond to the ideas of an abstract mathematician or a moralist. Indeed, the live reality of it consists precisely in its perversion.” Everything that exists is, in his evocative language, a “pervert,” going against the supposed rules of its genus or gender. Perversion, that unexpected but inevitable nonconformity to labels and expectations, is just what living is.

The fact that everything—and everyone—is, in Gadamer’s terms, a pervert, does not mean that labels and laws, names and norms, should be seen as irrelevant or pernicious. The task of philosophy is to help us bear the tension introduced by our becoming self-conscious of the gap between our limited, static, flattening concepts (without which we cannot think) and the wild diversity and continual change in which all the world’s beings participate.

Many followers of Hegel have been tempted to endorse various flavors of totalitarianism, believing that they possess, through their mastery of Hegel’s system, the “Absolute Knowledge” in light of which the world should be administered. Gadamer’s reading of Hegel, in contrast, would seem to block any such political crusades. Instead, we are invited to contemplate the unbridgeable distance between our ideas and the world, and our unending but never wholly successful attempts to reduce that distance, in an attitude of ironic tolerance.

For Gadamer—who had been at one time a disciple of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, and had lived through the catastrophe of the Third Reich—finding an approach to philosophy (and an interpretation of modern German philosophy in particular) that could protect philosophers from dangerous political temptations had obvious and important stakes. If philosophy were animated by the attempt to articulate a comprehensive logical system, it could become the faith of potentially oppressive political activists. If philosophy, however, were seen as a way of life by which individuals learn to play with ideas in a skeptical, nondogmatic, open-ended manner, it could curb political zealotry.

This sounds, perhaps, like the background for what we might call a queer liberalism, one that accepts a range of variation in personal belief and self-expression as the natural epistemic and ethical consequences of our perverse existence. Butler, in her work throughout the ’80s, seemed to wish to be such a queer liberal. Her academic research added a new layer to Gadamer’s reading of Hegel, drawing on a set of French thinkers to consider what a nontotalizing philosophy might require to become not only an abstract ideal but a compelling way of life.

Meanwhile, in her writings addressed to lesbian feminists within and outside academia, she chided activists who embraced simplistic, polemical stances that pitted all women against all men, and who decried pornography, BDSM, and other sexual practices as necessarily demeaning to women. Resisting censorship, moralism and facile identity politics—while also skeptical of libertarian cliches that simply celebrated personal freedom—Butler linked her philosophy to the nuanced and thoughtful questioning of desires, identities, and slogans. Her role, however reluctant, as chief ideologue of today’s gender wars turns Gadamer’s defense of apolitical philosophical perversity inside out.

After her Fulbright study with Gadamer, Butler returned to Yale to write a dissertation deeply shaped by his influence. It was ostensibly a work of historical scholarship, tracing the impact of Hegel’s thought in 20th-century France. The early ’80s were an exciting time to be working on such a topic. What was coming to be called “French theory” or postmodernism—the thought of figures like Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva and others—was arriving in American humanities departments, stoking controversies and transforming intellectual life. “French theory,” or “Theory,” itself was the product of a cultural exchange (some would say, a misunderstanding), as a set of German thinkers, such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, were taken up in new ways by French readers.

Positioning herself as an expert both on the history of German philosophy and its contemporary French reception, able to explain their ongoing hybridization to an American audience thrilled and confused by “Theory,” Butler started her career with promise. The danger was, however, that she had to keep up with a rapidly evolving field—and jealous rivals. Finishing her dissertation in 1984, she rushed to publish it as a book in 1987, adding sections on the recently deceased Foucault, whose work she had only begun to understand (many of the lectures and essays necessary for a sober evaluation of Foucault’s thought have only become available, even in French, in recent years).

The book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France, was savaged in a review by Robert Buford Pippin, then about to complete his own magisterial (albeit barely readable) Hegel’s Idealism, which would cement his own status as America’s chief Hegel explainer. Pippin, heir to a different lineage of German scholarship, was critical of Gadamer’s interpretation of Hegel (which, he implied, reduced Hegel’s holistic philosophy to pre-Hegelian truisms) and even more critical of the French reception of Hegel. Pippin’s negative review of Butler’s book, in which he exercised on a junior scholar his rage at broader intellectual trends, hampered her chances of a career in the field of philosophy, and doubtless contributed to her shift soon after to the new pastures of gender (if only he could have foreseen the consequences!).

Subjects of Desire is, it must be said, not the finest scholarship. Butler’s treatment of the French thinkers she discussed is hurried and partial. Overlooking these flaws, it deserves to be read as an intriguing attempt to draw on Hegel to give an account of what Butler called the “philosophical life”—a way of living founded on the sort of open-ended quest for truth Gadamer had seen in Hegel—and its relationship to “desire.”

Desire—particularly desire for another person, to be recognized by another person, to be the kind of person who would be, in turn, desired by that other person—has throughout the ages struck defenders of a more rational, orderly and systematic conception of philosophy as a threat to their enterprise. Kant condemning masturbation and Socrates (supposedly) refusing Alcibiades’ advances are philosophy’s equivalent of the desert monks who fled the world to perfect their contemplation of higher things. But if, like Butler, we take philosophy to be less the search for an ideal system than a kind of epistemic and ethical exercise for improving our ability to apprehend the world in its multiplicity and mutability, then desire can appear to be a friend of philosophy. What, after all, opens us up, wrests us from our routines and mental ruts, more powerfully than love—and what reveals more clearly that within categories like “human beings,” “men,” “women,” etc., there are remarkably singular individuals whose difference from all other members of their type is as precious as it is unaccountable?

If the philosophical life, purged of potentially totalitarian aspirations for absolute truth, is a life of desire, then it is also, obviously, a life of risk. Desire—as every reader surely has experienced—can be disappointing, and even delusional. Butler seems to signal this danger by beginning Subjects of Desire with a discussion of Blanche DuBois, who took the streetcar named Desire to a bad end. Passing herself off, unsuccessfully, as a kind of person she was not, the faded Southern belle acted on her own desires and was victimized by those of others, and finally lost her sanity and freedom. Butler thus cautioned readers from the outset that a desirous, adventuresome philosophy might destroy us, if not tempered by a moderating capacity for self-awareness, which she linked to comic irony.

Throughout the book, and with special emphasis in her concluding paragraph, she urged readers to cultivate an ability to “make fun of ourselves” as we try to live philosophically and erotically. Self-mockery resembles desire in its ability to disrupt our old certainties and the stories we tell about ourselves. But unlike desire, which opens us up by attaching us to someone or something else, this self-reflexive sort of comedy does not fixate us elsewhere. Rather, it temporarily and provisionally locates us in the perspective of an imagined observer, from whose vantage we can see, and even enjoy, how silly we must look. With a “laugh of recognition,” we acquire a clearer idea of ourselves—and thus a greater degree of power to become different from who we had, without realizing it, been until now. To be a life, philosophy needs desire; to be decently livable, both need irony.

All of this seems as far as can be from Butler’s present-day thinking about gender. Now, neither the concepts and norms that organize society, nor the ways we and other people understand ourselves, appear to be open for healthy-minded, half-serious questioning, motivated by a passionate quest for wisdom tempered by a comic appreciation of how easily we delude ourselves. Instead, concepts and norms appear as an invariably grim and oppressive matrix within which we vainly but valiantly struggle, while the stories that people tell about themselves must be accepted as unquestionable.

To doubt others’ “self-identification,” Butler now claims, is to attack their dignity and freedom; to accept, even with ironic and skeptical provisos, traditional categories is to support oppression. Butler has managed to find, within the tolerant, liberal, antitotalitarian Hegelianism of Gadamer, the means to wage a polemical—and self-contradictory—campaign for and against gender, a term, after all, that names both the norms (gender as a cultural system) she abhors and the self-interpretations (gender as personal identity) that she defends.

Butler’s understanding of what she eventually came to call “gender” was shaped profoundly by Maurice Natanson (1924-96), an American Jewish philosopher who is today obscure. Natanson, Butler’s dissertation adviser when she returned to Yale, was an expert on mid-20th-century European philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology. His most important work for understanding Butler is The Journeying Self: A Study in Philosophy and Social Role (1970).

The Journeying Self combines philosophical concern for personal authenticity with a sociological understanding that role-playing characterizes every aspect of our lives. What is perhaps unique to Natanson is his sense that these two facets of his work are not in a tortured, agonizing friction, such as often had seemed to characterize the writing of earlier existentialists. In his account, our life is best understood as a “journey” through which we come, again and again, to new ways of making sense of ourselves, others, and our common world, by means of the masks that we wear, put aside, sometimes contemplate. “Social roles,” Natanson argued, “are the necessary condition for the emergence of the identity of the ego and remain essential to its expression as a being in the world.”

Previous thinkers who combined philosophy with an awareness of society and history (foremost among them, Hegel), to be sure, had called attention to the social dimension of the “categories” through which we think. I do not see, for example, a unique, unprecedented, confusing object (or flux of sensations) in front of me—or I do not merely see that; I also, and perhaps most fundamentally, see (it to be) a table, a member of the category “table,” a category that exists for me only because I have been given it by other members of my linguistic community.

Refining this insight, Natanson further argued that thinking is always social because it not only uses “categories” but a more particular kind of concept he called “types,” in a process he called “typification.” Although most of the time we are no more conscious of this fact than we are of the fact our perception of this table involves the use of the category “table” (which is social in origin), our thinking depends on our having a continual sense of ourselves as “performing” the actions appropriate to a specific kind of person, a member of a group larger than our individual self but smaller than the whole of humanity. When we philosophize, for example, we imagine ourselves to be doing an activity of a philosophical type, the sort of thing that the human type “The Philosopher” does. We are acting out a role, wearing a mask, playing a part, even when we are thinking by ourselves.

Natanson’s teaching suggests that we have neither a core, unchanging self to be contrasted with the multiple guises that we adopt in our dealings with others, nor a capacity to be pushed by the force of thinking out of such role-playing. To be sure, moments in which we experience relative isolation from others, disgust with the roles that we have thought ourselves required to play, or the bracing challenge of thinking that upends our sense of who we are and what society is, are part of our lives—and we may try to organize our lives, as it were, philosophically, either in light of what we take to be the consequences of such moments, or in order to have more of them. Natanson held, however, that these moments do not reveal some basic structure of human existence that is somehow truer than or prior to our ordinary, commonplace experience of being able to use categories, types, roles, etc., with a great deal of ease and sureness. At bottom, he argued, there is a “solidarity of consciousness and world,” meaning that who we are and what we think is, however things might appear to us in moments of alienation, inseparable from (indeed an emanation of) nature and society, which we, in turn, live within and think by “typifying” the things and people around us, as well as ourselves. We are fundamentally typed and typing beings.

While many other philosophers have presented the most authentic, real, or important aspect of our life and thinking as the rare sort of wrenching experience by which we separate ourselves from society’s common sense or our own old self to encounter a dazzling new truth or at least a more honest ignorance, Natanson has a different ideal, which he names “transcendence.” This is a lifelong process by which we learn how to act out the roles available to us in ways that we can recognize as fulfilling our own freedom and potential, through a “continuing spiral of decision through which the concrete individual establishes his stance in mundane life.” Natanson presented the task of philosophy as one of helping (in league with art and religion) individuals to understand that acting out their social identities in the world is not antithetical to ethical authenticity or true thinking but is precisely what authenticity and thinking are properly about.

Butler rarely cites Natanson in her work, and the relationship between them might not appear obvious at first glance. Two shifts, at least, mark the difference between his thinking and hers. First, the connection between individual and social life that Natanson analyzes through a vocabulary of role, type, etc., is analyzed by Butler, from the late 1980s on, through the vocabulary of gender. Second, Natanson’s relative hopefulness about the possibility of “transcendence” through role-playing—his sense that by taking on new roles and acting out our old roles differently we are increasing our power to relate freely to our socially imposed identities—is replaced in Butler’s work by a series of alternative affects that she associates with the most potent mode of intellectual freedom, each decreasingly joyous in tone: in Subjects of Desire, comic self-knowledge, in Gender Trouble, subversive “parody,” and, in her later work, by “melancholy”—concepts on a downward slope away from the idea that playing a role can be a fulfilling experience.

Butler’s first significant scholarly invocation of “gender”—a term just then being popularized in the American social sciences, as a replacement for the terminology of “sex role” or “sex-based role,” referring to the ways men and women, on the basis of biological difference, are socially coerced into playing different ranges of social types—came in a 1986 article, “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex.” The title already made what would become a characteristic sort of mistake. There is, speaking literally, no such thing as “sex and gender” in The Second Sex (1949), the critical text of midcentury existentialist feminism.

There is, of course, as the title indicates, sex, and there are sexes that divide humanity in two. We have sexed bodies, with penises or vaginas (and in rare cases some third intermediary, combinatory, or other alternative), and experience those bodies, along with our psyches, as having attributes of masculinity and femininity through what Beauvoir called “myths” about how men and women are and should be. Crucially, these myths are not simply binary (there are men and there are women) but multiple, expansive, and historically shifting—we think individual women, and universal womanhood, through archetypes like the mother, the girl, the vamp, the lesbian, etc. Nor, indeed, is The Second Sex, a call for the abolition of the biological category of woman. The idea of separating nature and culture as “sex” and “gender” would appear suspect within the horizon of Beauvoir’s thought, which assumes that we never encounter facts (which are, nevertheless, real) of any kind, or our own bodies, except through our continually active imaginations and interpretations of them. We are, fundamentally, self-interpreting beings, even in our apparently most unmediated experiences of our flesh—and, because the facts we are always interpreting are also real, we can be wrong about them and misinterpret ourselves. Authenticity, in Beauvoir’s account, names the proper way of accepting our constitutive mix of determination (by our bodies, and by our cultures) and freedom, as we try to avoid being deceived either by the lures of our culture (which solicits us to identify with illusory figures that promise impossible happiness) and our own fantasies of transcending our disappointingly limited—and sometimes frustratingly real—bodies and histories.

This excursus on Beauvoir reminds us that earlier generations of feminists were by no means unaware that the social roles available to women were masks, personae, imposed on them. Women, in their oppressed situation, had fewer and worse masks available to them than men, and less capacity to play enjoyably with their roles. Feminism could be understood, from within this conception, as the positive task of increasing the roles and freedom of role-playing for women—not as the negative one of abolishing role-playing as such, or abolishing “woman” as a category. It certainly could not be understood as an imperative to accept the roles that other people play, and their manner of playing those roles, as necessarily worthy of acceptance and affirmation. Neither “gender abolition” nor the logic of “self-identification” make sense if human existence is understood as essentially related to the taking up and acting out of what Natanson called roles and Beauvoir called myths.

By adopting the term “gender” to refer to social roles in their specific connection to our cultural norms and personal fantasies dealing with sexual difference and the meanings of our sexed bodies, Butler could have begun a project that would have applied to feminism the antitotalitarian philosophy of Gadamer and performative theory of self outlined by Natanson. Her second book, Gender Trouble, is, from one perspective, such a beginning.

In Gender Trouble, Butler shows how the kind of life she had theorized in Subjects of Desire is not merely a private, isolated practice of philosophy at a smirking (albeit also yearning) distance from the public realm, but is also social and political, even when it may seem not to be. Butler argues that certain forms of comedy—the camp humor of gays, the joking gender-bending of drag queens, and the feminist “laugh of the Medusa”—can help us loosen the grip of desire or ideology’s delusions in our own lives, and can shake them up for other people as well. What she called “subversion” and “parody” was the public-facing counterpart to the more private, inward-looking concept of irony articulated in her first book.

Butler, however, emphasized the negative power of parodic humor to expose existing roles as oppressive and pointless, rather than the positive power of humor to increase our freedom either to rewrite our roles or play them differently. Parody was an instrument for the “deconstruction of identity,” she put it in the conclusion of Gender Trouble, albeit not for the “deconstruction of politics,” which could now continue endlessly as the open pursuit of new identities and norms to burst apart with laughter. Comedy was becoming an instrument of a politics without goal, and possibly without limit, rather than, as it had been in Subjects of Desire, part of the “philosophical life” and its constitutive suspicion of the delusions built into both personal identities and political ideologies.

Many of Butler’s examples of the subversive potential of comedy, moreover, are ill-chosen—and her analysis of them rather leaden. Her reading of drag in Bodies That Matter, for example, is deadeningly boring, intent on tarrying with every possible critique of drag (as unfeminist, capitalist, etc.); far from parody being potentially liberating, its potential must be carefully, painstakingly, seriously explained. Indeed, for Butler (as becomes clearer in the passage from Gender Trouble to Bodies That Matter, published three years after) “parody” comes to name not so much intentional practices of making fun that have deliberate or accidental political effects as unintentional failures, ruptures, or glitches in an individual’s performance of gender. The significance of these breakdowns in role-performance is clearer to the observing theorist than to the performer—to Butler than to the drag queen.

Where Gadamer and Natanson, respectively, envisioned a philosophical life continually surprised by new insights and a potentially transcendent life of fulfilling, authentic role-play, Butler began to see life as a sadder and sadder sort of comedy, in which the joke seems to be always at our own expense. In a 1995 essay, “Thresholds of Melancholy,” dedicated to “Maurice Natanson, the one who taught me,” on the eve of his retirement, Butler argued, in a striking inversion of his teachings, that philosophy, or life properly informed by philosophy, is an interminable process of grief. For Natanson, moments in which we suspend our normal engagement in roles like husband, teacher, friend, father, etc., to consider what those roles mean for us and who we really want to be (moments, he reminded readers, when we are acting out the role of the philosopher, or the skeptic, or the alienated individual) are not obviously associated with any specific emotion and can be leveraged, in the best of cases, toward personal fulfillment and inner freedom. For Butler, however, our capacity to, as it were, mentally step back from our everyday roles, which she calls “reflexivity,” or “the self’s relationship to itself,” is one that invariably “melancholy comes to haunt.”

If “parody” as a concept suggested that the insights of philosophy and the work of politics alike depended on our ability to laugh at ourselves, taking up the mask of the fool, the comedian, the drag queen, etc., to question how we have been playing out our other, everyday roles, from “Thresholds of Melancholy” on the opening up of the self and its routines to questioning increasingly appears as a bleaker enterprise. Butler presents the slippage away from self-certainty that philosophical thinking initiates as a “loss” and a “sorrow,” the death of our earlier (mis)understanding of who we were and what the world was like. It creates an unfillable “lack that remains coextensive with the self who would mourn it.”

What had been the erotic comedy of the philosophical life, laughing at its mistakes, becomes an endless melancholy, mourning its losses and limitations, once Butler began to confront the fact that we are never free of our histories—the record inscribed in, and beyond, memory of all our previous performances. Our having a past, like our having a body (if we recognize their reality), sets a limit on the scope of our otherwise overweening and imperious fantasies, whether erotic or political, and their totalizing, possibly destructive allure. We cannot play ourselves free of the past.

The perennial desire that animates every delusional individual and every totalitarian ideology is to do away with such obstacles—history, body, the unthinkable diversity of real life—and replace them with the splendid coherence of fantasy. The melancholy of gender is a sulking over the fact of our having an unchosen history, body, and so on; the euphoria of gender identity is the willful forgetting that these obstacles are real, a forgetting that our contemporary ideologues of gender, Butler now foremost among them, seek to make universal and compulsory.

Butler rarely invokes her own history, although she did so more frequently in what is perhaps itself part of the past she would rather forget. At a demonstration organized outside a 1982 conference on feminism and sexuality at Barnard College, a critical moment in what were called the “Sex Wars” in which feminists debated pornography, BDSM, and other practices that some saw as patriarchal objectifications of women and others as potentially legitimate expressions of women’s sexuality, Butler (a qualified member of the latter camp) invoked in support of sexual freedom the dubious case of her intersex uncle, who had been committed to a mental institution after repeatedly exposing his ambiguous genitalia in public restrooms. These, she held, were subversive acts, defying standards of public behavior and anatomical normality. They were as much an inspiration to her as her uncle’s tragic fate was a frightening warning of the danger of dogmatic sexual politics, whether right-wing or feminist.

While luridly sharing with fellow members of the “Lesbian Sex Mafia” that had organized the event a bit of family history, Butler was much more circumspect about her own past, even when she wrote for specifically lesbian audiences about sexual topics. In one of her first publications, a 1980 essay weighing in on the Sex Wars for The Green Mountain Dyke (she had been, after all, at Bennington), she presented herself as holding to a sensible, moderate position on the topic of lesbian BDSM. While some thought acts of consensual sexual violence among women were liberatory, a way of reclaiming pleasure from masculine domination, others thought that such sex was nothing more than oppression’s latest ruse. Instead, Butler argued, we should hold to a more complex position that acknowledged how desire always eludes our attempts to keep it within proper moral and political bounds.

We want things that we think we should not want. We can neither excise our unruly desire (at least not without deadening ourselves) nor follow it wherever it leads. We must have a more subtle, fluid, nondogmatic relationship to both our desire and to the norms by which we constrain it, taking each expression of desire as an opportunity to exercise an existential choice about who we really want to be—keeping always in mind that both our desires and the rules we try to set for it are products of a “historical situation” that we have inherited. In this case, women’s use of their sexual autonomy is never simply a free, personal decision, but a fraught event within the ongoing history of women’s collective struggle for equality, as well as the individual life histories within which women have learned to desire domination, submission, pleasure, pain, and the freedom to choose.

Concepts and norms appear as a grim and oppressive matrix within which we vainly but valiantly struggle, while the stories people tell about themselves must be accepted as unquestionable.

This was so much liberal hand-wringing, a dithering rumination on choice informed by Butler’s unfinished apprenticeship in philosophy. Ever since, she has tended to strike a similar tone of digressive vagueness whenever weighing in on some specific topic (perhaps it was because she recognized a kindred meanderer that she donated to Kamala Harris’ campaign). It was also, however, a rare moment for Butler to disclose something of her own sexual and romantic history—although the disclosure, in fact, was entirely irrelevant to the matter of BDSM: “I’d like to step back into my own personal experience of these ideas and desires. I’ve never done sm as it is institutionalized, that is, with all the ‘equipment,’ accoutrement, and jargon that goes with it. But I’ve felt the passion and intensity that has gone along with certain dominant-submissive power dynamics in my own sexual relationships with women. I’ve always felt ambivalent about the power imbalance that drew me, and I’ve even tried to legislate such desires out of existence. Knowing this ambivalence in myself, I think I can at least see the contours of this ambivalence with the lesbian-feminist movement at large.”

This mild nonadmission, from a woman still young enough to write under the name Judy Butler, is notable for how little it says—and how anxiously it says it. What could be more normal than having some sort of “power imbalance” in a relationship, especially in one’s adolescent or undergraduate years? Butler, though, seems to have regarded this admission as a bit of daring frankness, overcoming the shame of desiring what, according to the admonishments of some imaginary egalitarian feminist killjoy living in her head, she ought not to.

Here sexual history—one’s personal history, and the collective history of one’s sex (a term Butler still used without qualifications in 1980)—stood in Butler’s thought as a counterweight to both the possibly thoughtless exercise of desire and to the totalizing potential of feminist politics. It served, in other words, the same role that ironic self-mockery played in Subjects of Desire: a safeguard against the overbearing intensity and overreach of both desire and ideology, each of which needs to be moderated, not only by their mutual balancing, but also by a third force that puts them in touch with reality.

History, like comedy, could appear as a resource for a cautious, thoughtful, moderate, and ambivalent quest for a proper life in Butler’s early writings, at least as along as she was the one to invoke it. But when, in 1994, an anonymous young lesbian comically fantasized about Butler’s sexual history, all this philosophical sophistication broke down in an explosion of persecutory paranoia.

A two-issue zine Judy!, created by one “Misspent Youth,” was a gushing, sizzling intellectual fan-zine dedicated to enacting Butler’s theory of parody far more parodically than Butler herself ever had. It included, among other ribald riches, many joking speculations about the thinker’s sexual preferences (is Butler dom, sub, switch? A tough butch, a pillow queen?) and imagined her mud-wrestling with rival feminist philosophers. Butler, once she became aware of this publication, might have ignored it, or taken it as proof that her thinking was finding an echo in the world. Here was an extended essay in campy, unmistakably queer comedy in which the philosophical life, with its invitations to laugh at ourselves, was identical with the lesbian feminist work of subversive parody—and with a circuit of comic but no less vividly libidinal pulsing, set in motion by Butler’s own search for wisdom. She had become a sort of Sapphic Socrates for the postmodern era, with college-age groupies; she might have been happy about it.

She rather lamented: “I wish it hadn’t happened … It draws attention away from my work and puts it on my person.” And raged: the zines were not only “salacious conjecture” but “hallucinatory speculation.” She attacked their author as “homophobic.” When the academic gossip bulletin Lingua Franca wrote an article about the zine, bringing it to wider attention—and in the process outing its anonymous author—Butler had her publisher, Routledge, withdraw its advertising to punish them, not for exposing a vulnerable young lesbian, but for embarrassing her.

Butler championed desire, self-mockery, and parody as means by which to keep thinking open, supple, lively and nontotalizing. She had luxuriated in the ambivalences of sexual history and transgressive acts. But confronted with those forces in her own life, she became every gay person’s nightmare: the bullying, morally outraged punisher.

The Judy! episode suggests that there was, even quite early, something awry in the life from which this thinking arose, and something faulty in the thought. Butler asserted—reasserting the distinction between private and public her own work had undermined—her right, her authority to police others’ fantasies, to protect herself from others’ (comic, horny, silly, stupid, and perhaps illuminating) perceptions of her. She claimed, as it were, the power of self-determination over her own gender identity, over the account of her embodied, sexed difference, her sexuality, and their meaning—and over anyone else’s ability to interpret it, over how others talked about her.

What is at stake, after all, in contemporary debates about gender is not just an individual’s right to his or her self-understanding, to a personal interpretation of the facts about their life—but rather the extent of an individual’s power to demand that others conceal or align their own interpretations. It is not a question of autonomy, but of authority—or indeed it is a question that reminds us that autonomy (the power to determine ourselves) and authority (power over others) are only separable in the (perhaps, after all, useful) fictions of political liberalism.

Our desire, our laughter, our thinking are potential threats to the self-interpretations of others. The power required to neutralize this threat, even in such a small and scarcely political episode as the Judy! incident, works through apparatuses of surveillance, control and exposure that recall, in their operation if not in their scale, the ones that had, in the bad old days, oppressed the women and gay people Butler meant her work to help protect. They recall, too (again with the necessary moderating provisos), the sort of totalitarian politics against which Butler and her teachers had meant to defend us.

Totalitarianism, after all, is not just an especially oppressive species of dictatorship. It is a uniquely modern form of politics that is imagined by its participants as determining what counts as reality—a politics that is no longer limited either by liberal ideas about universal, ahistorical human rights or by conservative ideas about natural and divine laws. Wielding the power to police how other people talk about her gender, to force them to take her own view of herself seriously, even as she argued that the subversion of gender through parody was vital to progressive politics—trying to protect her own identity while promoting the subversion of identity in general—Butler was already in her reaction to Judy! a miniature totalitarian. The promise of her earlier philosophy—that there could be a nondogmatic, intellectually playful, comic, erotic, fun way of living in the insuperable gap between reality and thought, that indeed there can be no basis for a political life of mutual tolerance except in that gap—had already been betrayed. Perhaps by returning to the forgotten lessons of Gadamer and Natanson—and to the laughter of Judy!—we can begin anew.