okay [Applause] Jud Jud Butler a distinguished professor gradate schoy f J so for [Music] in imp St for for for um I'm going to speak in English so our guest uh Judith Butler can understand uh my introduction of her uh work um good afternoon and thanks very much for being with us today and so numerous um before anything else I would also like to join Christina de Maria in thanking the University of bologna and particularly uh Christ Ina herself and Professor federo condello for their really enthusiastic support and for making this event possible and the offici chimon particularly Christina gamber who worked around the clock to organize this event to them uh my deepest thanks it is a privilege to be hosting Professor Judith Butler at the University of Bologna tonight with a talk titled fascist passions at a time like the present one when fascist Passions and actions make it so hard or impossible to breathe and not just metaphorically for so many people around the world from Palestine where a genocide is occurring in Raz that has eliminated by now at least 35,000 human lives with an unknown number of bodies still under the rubbles and destroyed entirely the habitat with homes and human bones together fossilized fossilized in a horror that seems to have no end to the West Bank where innocent children women and men are ordinarily attacked arrested and killed just for wanting to leave and breathe on their land to the war turnor Ukraine where the slaughter of bodies and the destruction of cities goes on unabated for years now and where irresponsible Western governments are pushing for an escalation and for widening this war with potentially even more catastrophic consequences to the USA and Europe where um thousands of students have been brutally attacked um and um you know attacked with tear gas by police violence 2,000 of them suspended or arrested for no crime other than staging courageous and peaceful protests demanding an end to their academic institutions complicity with the industrial military complex and with genocidal Wars they have been abused not just by police and in anti-riot gear but by white supremacist groups and proud boys chanting homophobic and racist slurs to countries where you're likely to die suffocated by a police office officer's tight gripped on your neck when not just um shot at Point Blank Range just because you're black and may be considered to have TransPass white territory to the Mediterranean Sea where Asylum Seekers and migrants will likely sees breathing underwater while trying to pursue a livable life this is also a time when in many parts of the world the possibility of a livable life for transgender and gender queer people who are deemed excessive to the normative project of the heterosexual family is threatened or violently obstructed altogether but by way of introduction to the introduction not only is an introduction of Judith Butler hardly needed but also how could one offer a brief introduction to Judith Butler over the years and now decades the academic and public writings of Judith Butler have alerted us to the imprisoning and worked Logics of biological determinism and nationalism the distortions and contortions of sovereignty and neoliberal modalities of this possession and throughout offered lucid and eloquent Discerning of the Dynamics through which certain people and communities become defined as in excess or as a threat to what is arbitrarily and violently established as the norm who counts as human which lives are grievable through Judith Butler's work we have learned to ask these as the central questions of our times their writing push the boundaries of knowledge but never for the mere sake of knowledge itself whether it is about gender queer transgender or ch gender identities bodies and rights lgbtq I A Plus claims and Visions human rights violations and the war on terror in the pre and post 911 world the thinning out of Rights in so-called liberal democracies or whether it is about the critique their critique to the exclusivist religious or secular Logics underpinning nationalist projects such as Zionism Judith Butler's work and in the tradition of other fundamental theorists of the 20th and 21st century and would like to obviously cite Hannah arent whose ideas have been a Point of Departure in judit's own writing Judit has remained solidly anchored to an ethical Vision that seeks to readdress injustices offering insights and radically reimagining the present and envisioning a common future Judith has not only changed the way we look at the word but also gave us a language through through which we can make claims so that this world can be home to us all in his not worthy and I think ever actual Reflections on the intellectual the late Edward S wrote that and I quote the role of the intellectual is not to consolidate Authority but to understand interpret and question it end of quote s so criticism and the moral impetus to alleviate suffering as quintessential aspects of the role of the intellectual an intellectual must speak truth to power engage in insistent criticism of authority and of given truth becoming an exile even as he argued in so far as privileges powers and honors are concerned even when this holding on to controversial standpoints might result in sensorship or backl backlashes and comes at an emotional at at really great emotional and personal costs I consider Judit a living and the best embodiment of the intellectual in sidian terms along with generations of Scholars students and activists myself included and probably all of you or most of you here bent over their books it is no wonder though that Judith Butler has also agitated the nights of detractors those whose fascist passions are so eloquently dissected in their last work who's afraid of gender which has just come out right-wing movements politicians and religious figures have seen them as a threat to their own idea of society and in their view of their rightful and morally respectable human so much so that the New Yorker has recently published an oped with the title who's afraid of Judith Butler and yet how ironic considering that the red threat running through judit's public and academic work is a deep commitment to Justice equality and an ethics of livable life premised on the necessity to embrace our reciprocal and basic vulnerabilities as a condition for existing and living with humans and non-humans on this planet indeed since antigonous times Judith taught us it is in the ethical political force of compassion and the power of mourning that we might be able to create also today the conditions for a shared Humanity so let me end this by far too brief and yet too long as obviously we are all here to hear from Judith with a brief vignet um that was posted on um x a few days ago a short clip shows students of different Fates and backgrounds at a protest camp in a US campus they're forming a human chain around other students of Islamic faith who are intent in in a peaceful Act of collective prayer and of mourning we hear the human chain loudly crying out let them pray let them pray while Riot police push violently through them to attack and arrest the praying students I found the footage very compelling and um highly evocative of the power of concerted acts of physical bodies which Judith so powerfully articulated in their work on the performative power of assembly which made us think in novel ways about the public space of appearance and politics as an embodied and effective practice but the scene is also Exemplar I think of another of judit's most compelling insights that is the power of vulnerability in resistance Italo calino once defined literature as a method of knowledge and above all as a network of connections between the events the people and the things of this world at the core there can be a not a tangled scale sorry of UR an element which is at the center of a web of relationships and which I quote if it were permitted to go on further and further in every direction it would end by embracing the entire universe Judith butter represents for me precisely that knot and that Embrace to those around the world who fascist passions have defined as an excess a threat that is to their narrowly defined idea of the human and now and with no further Ado I give the floor to Professor Judith Butler thank you [Applause] [Applause] gr I I want to thank the University of bolognia for um the honor of visiting you and uh my two gracious hosts and the gender studies and Department Departments of gender studies and art uh and all of you for um Coming this evening um to hear me to think with me uh maybe it is just me but I suspect you might share the sense that I have State violence against people who are either rightless or struggling to acquire recognizable urable rights used to be conducted under the name of another value it was not violence they used to say but legitimate Force used by the state to defend the nation or the idea of the nation or the people it was not violence they used to say but a way of defending the rights of those who deserve to have rights there were many ways to twist the arguments that state violence gave as the rationale for its death dealing powers and the systematic way that people of color were targeted by the S by the prison system we were able to call it hypocrisy or a lie we were able in the past at least to expose its rules and to get on with the business of expanding alliances of resistance but as we can see now in the genocide that continues to be waged against the Palestinian people of Gaza the exhibition of mass violence of Unthinkable cruelty offers no excuse it does not pretend to be anything nothing other than Shameless brutality of course the Israeli state does claim it's not committing genocide and it defends itself uh not not by referencing the kind of violence it inflicts but by claiming that genocide is only conducted against the Jews well it surely was that state argues that it is obscene to CLA claim that the Israeli state is committing genocide given what the Jews have suffered and though these two forms of violence the genocide against the Jews and the genocide against Palestinians are certainly not organized in the same way and they do not have the same proportions it does not matter since the definition of genocide in the genocide convention provides for very ious kinds of violence to fall under that description of course it matters that atrocities were committed by Hamas on October 7th of 2023 they were horrific there is in my mind no doubt but that fact should hardly keep us from naming the massive killing of innocent lives that has happened every day since then against Palestinians nor should it keep us from understanding in the current violence and attempted expulsion of the people of Gaza in the context of dispossession bombardment maming and traumatization that has for decades been the history of Palestine the neba was an an event in time 1948 but it was also a way of structuring time ever since that time it is a moment mode of Perpetual dispossession and death dealing that continues to happen what we have called the nakba now takes the new the new form of a genocide from which many states and international institutions Look Away one can explain Israeli State and military power in many ways through its historical development the technology it used uses the political form it both embodies and seeks to instate fascism is there not only in the way that settlers are given guns and the authorization to act as Rogue militias on the West Bank but in the twisting and breaking of all laws in the pursuit of murderous exhilaration and in the targeting of Women and Children Health Care workers and those seeking to distribute food fascism in its current form is distinguished by repeated acts whereby people are stripped of their rights but it is also characterized by the Manifest joy and shamelessness by which people are stripped of their rights or indeed their lives hardly any Alibi needs to be given in Gaza but elsewhere we can note the lack of any sign of regret reluctance the absence of any recourse to moral alibis on the part of the Israeli State not only when taking away fundamental rights but in exposing people from a distinctly social religious and racialized group to starvation to injury loss of Limb and loss of life as many healthare officials have already noted the term trauma hardly works anymore to describe this situation which challenges the very limits of thought yet think we must and speak and act of course genocidal murder is not the same as rights stripping but there is a connection the shadow of genocide falls upon the those stripped of fundamental rights since once a group is stripped of basic rights they are exposed without protection to debilitating and potentially fatal life negating forms of power we have seen soldiers and militants celebrating murder but we are also seeing right-wing activists and politicians celebrating rights stripping they are not the same but the accelerated normalization of Rights stripping can lead to fascist political formations and in Europe and in the United States we also see the escalation of fascist passions in the US it would be difficult not to call fascist the call to eliminate trans and non-binary people what did they have in mind when they made such a call if they destroy the very category of transgender in an effort to show that trans people do not exist they are calling for the eradication of the existence of trans people perhaps you are familiar with these quotations Michael NES from the daily wire in the US quote for the good of society trans genderism is his word must be eradicated from public life entirely end quote spoken uh at the conservative Pol political action conference uh in May of 2023 of March of 2023 nolles previously suggested that there can be no genocide against transgender people because they are quote not a legitimate category of being end quote such ontological wisdom from our most virulent critic whose Mastery of Science and ontology is suddenly on trial he remarked and I quote I don't know how you could have a genocide of transgender people because genocide refers to jeans it refers to genetics to biology n said um on his show and I quote and the whole point of transgenderism is that it has nothing to do with Biology nobody's calling to exterminate anybody because the other problem with that statement is that transgender people is not a real ontological category he added it's not a legitimate category of being setting up a fight with me all right how's my English it's okay okay okay that's it you know most Americans get up and like so it's important to know who you're speaking with and I see you have support very good as you know it is one thing to say that biology determines who we are and quite another to say that biology is always in the mix of who we are and what we become most feminists queer and trans people have questions about biological determinism or biological reductionism what Michael nlls fails to grasp is that his enemies do not deny biology but they do contest biological determinism in addition when people claim that gender Advocates reject science they fail to consider how much science actually supports their views no matter which political position one takes it makes sense to ask which science is being used for which political position equally it is important to show that interactive models of biology dispute the assertion that nature or what is natural in US operates independently of its interaction with the human world the built environment and the infrastructures of life one reason it is important to underscore the difference between the sex assigned at Birth and the relation we take to that assignment in the course of life is because that assignment tells us very little about what relation we will develop toward that assignment in time we may love that assignment and occupy the assigned category with Joy or we may find that it is a sight of ambivalence or unlivable suffering the complexity of gender attests to the variability of that lived relation to the C categories that others have assigned us to be assigned a sex May well come with all sorts of social expectations But the Sex we are assigned gives no guarantee of the sex that we will become we thank Sim B for this insight into the importance of becoming and the difficult struggle that we call Freedom that gap between being called a sex at Birth and becoming a sex in time is actually also life and time for categories such as sex and gender have a temporal life and the trajectory of historical categories intersect with our own life histories now it may seem strange to refer then to Palestine in the midst of such a discussion but we can see that Shameless rights stripping and unconscionable exposure to violence are but two dimensions of contemporary fascism the Shameless joy in killing or exposing others to slow death the production of famine the eradication of all legal rights and the flagrant violation of all International rights characterize this fascism as well genocide in Palestine and we have every right and obligation to use that term is made possible by genocidal Logics that Most states and World institutions have come to accept or are willing to consider this genocide emerges in the midst of other forms of death dealing that may feel more proximate and that allow for deaths in the name of the nation and nationalism and defy International conventions the push back deaths at Sea the deaths of migrants in detention camps the suspension of all due process for those held in indefinite detention along with the absence of adequate shelter and health care for many living at the border are these practices on a Continuum with other forms of fascist rights stripping what about the replacement theory that runs through all of these instances why does the acknowledgment of trans rights or rights of lesbian and gay parenting often seem to their opponents as a threat to their own rights what is taken away if heterosexual from heterosexuals if marriage is extended to gay and lesbian people what is truly taken away from women assigned female at Birth if trans women are women legally and socially is the dominant class replaced by the vulnerable Community I think not and yet how often do we see this power attributed to those who are struggling for basic rights from a situation of vulnerability when one suggests for instance that a one-state solution that guarantees rights for all people regardless of religion race or background might put an end to violence in Palestine and Israel it might allow for the realization of equality and freedom for everyone one is very often accused of anti-Semitism or even terrorism under what conditions does a version of radical democracy with the aim of establishing true peace become construed as part of a hostile war effort or a call for violent overthrow the Israeli State very often imagines that living on the basis of equality with Palestinians would mean the destruction of the Jewish State and hence the destruction of the Jewish people genocide again they make that assumption precisely because they because Israel falsely claims to represent all the Jewish people which means that any opposition to Israel is an opposition to the Jews themselves and those Jews like myself who oppose what Israel is doing are called unews I don't know how you do that okay effectively stripped of their rights to speak as Jews the replacement theory has long operated for Israel as a rationale for maintaining demographic Advantage for the Jewish population it is said that forfeiting the rights to Dem demographic Advantage for Jews would lead to the replacement of Jews by Palestinians or Arabs more broadly but what if Jews and Palestinians were able to live as equal citizens of the land what if they lived under a constitutional democracy that they were both part of realizing every vision of cohabitation in the region of equal citizenship of a state single dual or Federated that would put an end to colonization and to Uprising is often regarded as nothing other than a threat to Jewish life since when are the values of equality and freedom inimical to Jewish life it is not my conception of Jewish life indeed I was taught as a young Jew that we fought for justice that we name inequality and Injustice not just for the Jews but for everyone thank you [Applause] there are fears at the heart of some of the central fantasms stoking fascist passions during our time when gender critical feminists and the right-wing allies am misnomer because they do not understand critical critical is not negative critical is the inquiry into taken for granted presumptions in order to imagine a different world okay when they claim that that trans women will substitute for them or Rob them of their maternity or steal their Identity or appropriate femininity for themselves they are gripped by a fantasm they are imagining being replaced by those who want to live who want the right to live in freedom without fear of violence discrimination and pathologization with affirmative healthc care shelter and employment the great replacement Theory articulated with such toxic Force by Orban and milone alike figures the most vulnerable migrant washing up on the shore as a major threat to the nation the family and the Very future of Europe we might well wonder how such fantasmatic transfigurations can take place I hope to articulate the logic of this Pro process process as I go along but to do that I have to return to this phenomenon of exhilarated sadism now increasingly Shameless that describes fascist excitation in our times the excitement that accompanies the call to deny people of fundamental rights let us ask first what makes that call exciting what kind of excitement is involved in making or receiving that call one reason I am interested in this excitement is that it is enigmatic to me as I began my remarks we are used to charging governments and agencies with indifference when they fail to protect the fundamental rights of people and in those cases we consider those institutions to be unfeeling or cold engaged in a lethal form of turning away J de writing on sad in 1967 insisted that we were looking at a phenomenon characterized by coldness and cruelty and yet to say that cruelty is cold is not to say it is dispassionate and in its contemporary form I would argue there is often a kind of self-righteous passion that accompanies the decision to let migrants diet sea or perhaps a religious excitement about stripping people of their fundamental rights although these are not the exact same phenomenon something intersects here not a joyous fascism but an excited one that takes hold and makes itself known when rights of parenting are denied to gay and lesbian people or when gay marriage rights are withdrawn or when reproductive Justice is dis mantled and when rights to determine sex assignment are proscribed what characterizes the passions that I wish to describe today is that they are felt as moral and lived as Shameless or they begin as forms of violence felt to be morally Justified only to be released from all moral justification and constraint the moral dimension of their expression operates surely as a kind of just justification for doing harm but it is also the vehicle of their accelerated excitation indeed those who ban books on gender from classrooms take sex education out of schools strip trans youth of affirmative Health Care refuse to let the history of slavery be taught support the abandonment of migrants at sea or their indefinite detention within camps or prisons understand them themselves as doing good as restoring the good life or as warding off a corrosive dangerous force or even the force of evil it would be one thing to say that they do harm and then Supply a moral justification for doing so that would make them devious or hypocritical the situation however is I think actually worse they understand themselves as not doing harm at all but doing good and they conceive of Rights stripping or fatal abandonment as activities that will help to restore a world they understand themselves to have lost sometimes that kind of argument goes even further the only way to restore the good life the natural family including gender hierarchies is through right stripping or potentially fatal forms of social abandonment these are measures that must be taken the argument goes to achieve or restore the good life or in the name of the good itself and to the extent that these measures are conceived as preconditions of the good life or rather its restoration then the very Act of taking rights away or denying a group of people the possibility of life and legal status becomes itself a good deed an activity that realiz as the good in the course of doing what it does to understand this we would have to understand the Thrills of exposion and dispossession coupled with the moralized right to turn away if one understands the harm one is doing to be morally right to be justified in advance and to be bringing back the good life then what whatever one has to do to realize that end would seem to be justified it is so however only if the means serves the ends but if one does not realize that what one is doing is harmful then there is no need to justify the harm a full transvaluation of values has occurred for those who have undergone this conversion and as a consequence one is thus freed of traditional moral constraints and authorized to act in ways that would otherwise be called harmful with the full conviction that one's action is right or good that it restores good to the world or that it makes a bad World good again or that it safeguards the world against un impending and Unthinkable destruction if one says that this action that others call harmful is actually beneficial then one has turned or reversed the meaning of words that name moral values the problem is not just some generalized semantic confusion since the conviction is passionate and by Passion I mean not just any emotional state passion as you would all know emerges from the Latin for suffering but also enduring it is different from an affection that one can reflect upon in the mind a passion implies being affected by something from the outside enduring that condition of that has the quality of being out of one's control a passion is to some extent something ungovernable or not thoroughly governable that one undergoes the Mind cannot Master a passion or has difficult difficulty doing so a passion always more or less governs the mind leaving one both out of control and excited excited to be out of control excited finally to be out of control ungoverned and ungovernable something Lawless is in the air Lawless and yet in the name of a morality realized in depriving and dispossessing others under the guise of morality here comes the possibility of living in a lawless way or to develop laws that consecrate that lawlessness as when the government in its policies and laws not only Stokes such passions but recasts them as moral Mission or even Crusade the experience of what is right under such conditions becomes self-righteous moralism and it permits of various kinds of Cruelty in the name of what is considered right and good it is not morality which would have to explain the principles by which it acts no it is an excited moralism outside the law now operating within the law freeing those most besieged by hatred to Doom to do whatever harm they wish to incite and circulate hatred in the name of what is right it is I would suggest no accident that we have arrived at a language of governance of becoming ungovernable and this may well point us in the direction of answering the initial question namely how do we explain the excited character of fascist passions especially as they operate in the anti-gender ideology movement in particular how do we explain the excited character of doing harm that is fortified by the conviction that one is either doing good or more messianically restoring good to an ailing or imperiled world what we know about passion is that it has a passive element that it is undergoing something that seems to have an origin external to the self and that it is either a temporary or enduring state of feeling or being ungovernable what then would make a passion or set of passions ungovernable well if a heightened political discourse on the right tells you that your life is being threatened well you will tend to rise up against whatever it is is that has been identified as a threat to your life that makes sense but if that same Authority in its discourse tells you the only way to keep your life or perhaps your way of life is to deny or destroy the rights of others then you are as it were being conscripted into a war pitting your own life against others you are told that your rights your right to life will be taken away from you by some people unless you move quickly to take away their rights sometimes even their right to life you are then fighting for the good at the same time that you are able to mobilize your desire to destroy others your long-standing resentments or your newly incited forms of disdain all this can happen apart from a fascist state or a thoroughly fascist Society for fascism as we know as Italy knows begins as a trend a potential thus it is Our obligation as critics to find and oppose those potentials before they saturate society and its state structures thus we do not have to see a fully fledged fascist state to say that fascist Trends and practices are happening now when various vulnerable communities are targeted with rights stripping fatal abandonment to perilous conditions and slow and quick forms of killing are both becoming the Norms assisted by exhilarated forms of moralism something ungovernable rails against government and regulations including protections and rights and yet it also supports a state that will dismantle precisely those public goods and obligations but there is another element here the fantasm that takes the place of the enemies who must be stripped of Rights including the rights to life whether that is the teacher who is said to indoctrinate or groom the student to be gay the transwoman in prison who is set to do harm the gender theorist who assumes demonic form in the media and is said to attack the laws of nature and the rules of the church the trans child in need of good care is seen to threaten the core of the nation the migrant or the colonized seeking to live in Freedom equality and justice in a shared world are they really the dangers that are being posed today those who are figured as threats to the people are by definition separated from the people not part of the people and as such they those nonp people they must be disempowered if not eliminated they have no right to live in the common world the common world is divided into the people who have such a right those who legitimately count as the people and those who do not but as we know this is not a just Arrangement it relies on splitting inequality and a fantasmatic reorganization of reality the idea of gender has operated as an excitable con Concept in contemporary politics and many political campaigns Target gender as a destructive force and construe this gender as a threat to national identity and the natural family the Vatican has added to this discourse by likening gender to a nuclear bomb the Ebola virus and Hitler Youth when when gender is figured as a threat to humanity civilization man and nature when gender is likened to a nuclear catastrophe or fullblown demonic power then it is the fear of Destruction to which political actors are appealing of course there is a ready and continuous fear of Destruction probably most of us feel this the source of that fear is difficult to name it is solicited and spiked to fortify both religious authorities and state powers or their strengthening Alliance as we see in Putin's Russia the Republican Party in the US and various countries in Eastern Europe East Asia and Africa and here in Italy the displacement of this fear of Destruction from its conditions of production climate disaster systemic racism capitalism carceral Powers extractivism patriarchal social and state forms results in the production of cultural figures and fantasms invested with the fantasy power to destroy the Earth and the fundamental structures of human societies precisely because that destruction is happening without being named and checked the fear and anxiety congeal without a proper vocabulary or analysis and gender or critical race studies are targeted as the cause of Destruction gender a category that describes the division of labor the organization of states the unequal distribution of power has never been merely cultural but it is cast that way by opponents who want to identify the source of the destruction the fear of Destruction at the cultural level and once gender is identified as a cause of Destruction something to be feared gender itself must be destroyed and what follows is censorship the D departmentalization of gender studies and women's studies the stripping of Rights of Health Care increased pathologization the repeal or rejection of laws that protect against discrimination um inevitably violent marginalization and the erosion of democratic norms let us remember that the killing of women trans queer bisexual and intersex people is a form of Destruction actually taking place in the world as we speak the killing of black women black queer and trans people the killing of migrants including queer and trans migrants all these are actually destructive acts happening in this time our time and as those numbers increase it becomes increasingly apparent whose lives are considered dispensable and whose lives are not and in this way the inequality of the grievable makes itself known once gender comes to include as it always has abortion rights access to reproductive Health Care Sexual Health Services trans rights women's freedom and equality queers of colors Freedom struggles single parenting gay parenting new kinship outside of heteronormative models adoption rights sex reassignment gender confirming surgery sex education books for young people books for adults images of nudity well then gender comes to represent a wide range of political struggles that its opponents seek to shut down in their effort to restore an authoritarian patriarchal order for the state religion and the family the only way forward is for all those targeted to gather themselves more effectively than their enemies have to recognize their Alliance and to fight the fantasms prepared for them with a powerful and regenerative counter imaginary if what I have described is true it follows that fascist passions or political Trends are those that seek to strip people of the basic right they require to live and to do so either without regard for their probable demise or more likely because fascism is an effective mode of annihilating those lives authoritarianism is usually understood as a form of state power and yet authoritarian personalities flourish within democracies stoking fascist passions where the fear of Destruction converts into a moral Alibi to destroy other people people's lives the authoritarian who seeks to stoke fascist passions knows too well that the fear of Destruction already courses through those who are seeing the destruction of the Earth the environment the destruction of labor unions prospects for Financial Security it is inflamed and organized by the fantasm of anti-gender ideology that locates destruction as emanating from foreign and Elite Powers engaging ageold conspiratorial Logics to prop up anti-democratic regimes and if the foreign sources are characterized as Jewish then that is apparently all the more effective in converting the fear of Destruction into fascist passion perhaps arguments won't address the fear of Destruction that motivates the anti-gender ideology movement that movement Taps into a sense of the world on its inevitable way to self- imulation it draws upon those kinds of fears to Rally support for its legitimately destructive plan I say that in quotes there's hardly an example of the anti-gender ideology movement that does not claim to be saving its Believers particularly the children from harm and the movement finds Stokes and organizes that fear of Destruction wherever it can nothing could be more personal and singular than the fear for one's bodily safety or that of one's children or those who are most proximate but the real fear is felt by those groups um by those grouped unwillingly under the term gender and not by those who propagate the fear the fear is the fear of being injured killed pathologized or incarcerated on the part of trans kids who are hurt by this movement that claims to be saving the children equally painful is the fear that women feel on the streets as they seek simply to live their lives and move freely without fear to realize how many women and lgbtqia a plus people are seized with fear on the street in the workplace or in their homes is to know how pervasive and corrosive that fear can be and it matters in the US for instance how many black and brown people undergo that fear in proximity to the police or the store owner who regards them with suspicion or how many young black people in the US have their breath choked out of them by self-justifying police it's a singular fear for one's life and at the same time it is also someone else's the one that someone felt before they died the one a parent felt when they sent their kid for for groceries at the corner store what if political movements were forged from all those who fear discrimination and violence in public and private spaces who demand to live and love freely without fear of violence perhaps then the fear of Destruction could be identified in a way that shows how its fascist exploitation is so egregiously wrong in considering the operative fantasies about migrants elaborating in support for xenophobic and racist migration policy or the operative fantasies about women as child murderers in the anti-abortion movements or those that figure trans women as CIS rapists infiltrating bathrooms we are encountering phenomena that that are at once social and psychological when fear runs through a population when hatred is stoked against a concept or an idea such as gender or populations represented by the idea of gender um that is said to wield the power of total Destruction then the tools we need to understand deflate and oppose such a movement are drawn from media with the power to occupy and dispel the fantasm in the service of another way to imagine Alliance we need this way of imagining solidarity going forward as much as we need air to breathe for living on and living on together requires solidarity and a sense of living that includes and exceeds the basics of human life consider that when thank you [Applause] consider that when the anti-gender movement says that gender gender whatever it is it's an animated Force an animated force of Destruction that gender will strip you of your sex identity they confess the right stripping that they are actually advocating they ask the public to experience the psychosocial fantasy of being stripped of a sex identity by law when what is really happening is that trans people are asking to be able to assign themselves a new sex status and those who oppose gender are stripping them of Rights it is a malicious yet powerful inversion this right to self-determination to decide one's sex status in the world takes no one else's rights away and yet if this freedom of self-de is allowed it is said the gender ideologues will strip everyone else of their sex assignment do you know anyone who has proposed that no it doesn't but it doesn't matter because it's not based on evidence self assignment understood as a form a fundamental form of freedom is thus Twisted into to a rights stripping activity in order to justify stripping trans people of their rights similarly queer families do not negate heterosexual ones they only dispute the inevitability and superiority of the heteronormative family form those who defend the family are being asked to accept a world in which families take various forms and to understand that they are living in only one such form this is not a future world we are talking about but this world the one in which we are living now it can feel overwhelming these attacks how to call all of these inversions these attacks on legitimate Freedom how to call them out in the most public of terms can the psychosocial dimension of new fascism become understandable in terms that everyone impacted will understand without that psychosocial analysis we cannot come to know how our most intimate fears and desires are woven into the social Fabric in which we live including the social ruptures and conflicts those tears in the fabric that pitch into precarity whose exploitation we can only live through if there are others who refuse to let us fall as I've have tried to argue this heightened focus on gender by the right deflects from the various social and political forces that are in fact destroying the world as we know it even so we cannot conclude that gender is only a deflection from these other and more truly destructive forces for gender relates to an intimate sense of lived bodily experience a sense of who one is and sometimes to an anchor that that holds the architecture of the ego together to be told that sex assigned at Birth is not necessarily the same as a sex assumed in time is unsettling even disturbing but only for those who want to think of their own sex assignment less as a legal act conducted in relation to codified Norms than as an immutable truth of the self well okay maybe some do live gender as immutable that is surely acceptable as long as the assumption is not made that everyone lives it that way to derive from that experience a theoretical generalization or indeed a universal rule is to impose a cruel falsehood on those who are living gender differently and yet gender is presented as frightening not only because it exposes that what was once taken to be immutable is actually mutable but because if someone else can engage in gay sex or sex reassignment or enjoy sexual imagery that another denies to oneself then the other is living out what feels to be an impossible human possibility that denial becomes a requirement of selfhood and so these lives over there the other they are living out what one has established as Unthinkable for one oneself to make them Unthinkable means that they cannot Be Imagined so when they do appear they appear as fantasms with the power to destroy a heteronormative self that has grounded itself on their denial and of course trans people can be thinkable and imaginable by those who do not follow that course of being the same applies to abortion or with lesbian and gay sexuality you don't have to do it to imagine it and to accept it as a possibility and even a right but for some once these issues become thinkable public and imaginable they do not appear as possibilities but rather as monsters fantasms aimed at destroying the self convenient catch-alls for the world's catastrophes the foreclosures of the the Foreclosure of these issues leads to their return in paranoid fantasms and under certain political conditions those fantasms can be circulated to gain support for movements that Target gender and promise to restore patriarchal orders that thrive on vibrant and toxic tautologies sex is sex and no debates or changes allowed in that Infamous marbas speech Georgia sorry money chanted no to gender ideology yes to sex identity see okay earlier in 2020 Melone addressed the national conservatism conference in Rome on the topic of God Homeland family where she defended defended the natural family opposing abortion as inhumane in her view quote they would like us to give up defending the family considering it to be an archaic and backward concept to be superseded they would like us to convin they would like to convince us that a family is any any emotional bond between sensient beings that it is a sign of great civil and moral progress to pay a poor mother to keep her child in her womb for 9 months and then snatch it from her arms to give it away to whoever has bought it we reject all this without a moment's hesitation even though today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made of up of a man and a woman and any son they may have and Son it is not scandalous but it is surely false although she's now uh uh trying to adver advertise herself as a cent interest um this is fascist rhetoric warning against the powers of those gender ideologists who will destroy the social Bedrock of the self and its most intimate relations parenting rights and the right to live in the sex that one is and yet these are among the very rights for which most gender Advocates are struggling here the right shares a supposition with the Trans exclusionary feminists sex is a property to which one has exclusive rights and any effort to challenge the property framework is a ruse of those seeking to steal or appropriate what is not rightfully their own but note the structure here the destruction that one causes is said to have its cause in those it seeks to destroy Destruction has through the syntax of the fantasmatic been relocated in another part to another part of the scene so that one is now free to destroy because what one destroys has been rhetorically and ideologically established as the cause of Destruction this is not an argument it is a fantasmatic scene which allows those it benefits not to see the contradiction in which they are engaged they will take your rights away we are opposed to those rights being taken away so we will take their rights away without noticing that we are contradicting [Applause] ourselves throughout the anti-gender ideology movement a morally righteous sadism has triumphed over the powers of capacious Alliance or any commitment to coh habitation on the basis of equality this form of sadism rides on the conviction that fueling hatred is the only way to save the world that only by destroying will Destruction come to an end it intensifies destructiveness in the world in the name of saving the world from destruction and the attack on the health care rights of trans youth is undertaken in the name of saving children from harm but here again the attack on the right to Health Care is itself the harm the claim to be saving youth by denying them education and Health Care actually hurts the youth and because this aggression against young people is moralized it facilitates sadism with a moral Alibi in thinking about here I'm going to end soon because I'm going too slowly okay I'm almost done in thinking about our own strategies of resistance it is crucial that gender politics oppose neoliberalism and other forms of capitalist Devastation and not become their instrument that it militates against the continuing of colonization and all forms of racism including those afflicting migrants and that it takes its stand within expanding alliances on the left it cannot simply be an identity politics and still create the world in which we all want to live it is by virtue of our interdependency that we stand a chance of surviving and flourishing can we make alliances that reflect that interdependency with both human and non-human life one that will oppose climate destruction and stand for a radical democracy informed by socialist ideals the fear of gender is also the potential for the fear of gender is uh uh is figured by uh the right as a potential for Universal salvation but we have a different notion of universality in mind when gender politics remains restricted to the liberal sphere of individual rights it cannot address the basic rights to housing food non-toxic environments the right to be free of unpayable debt the right to health care that should belong to any struggle for social and economic Justice and when countries and regions are coerced into accepting AV verion of rights that leaves their basic needs un addressed it is no wonder that skepticism emerges towards those very rights and when those rights are framed in terms that do not translate well into local cultures then the critique of cultural imperialism is not without justification for the critique of financial coercion and cultural imperialism to become an integral part of a transnational gender politics we will need to live with our profound differences without succumbing to the destructive forms we oppose the only way out of this bind is to align the struggle for gender freedoms and rights with the critique of capitalism and colonialism to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for social and for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides Healthcare shelter and food across all regions such an agenda would develop an understanding of the formation of the individual within a social world the individual body as bearing the trace of the social and its relations with others both actual and implied a body at once porous and interdependent it would mean accepting that as human creatures we persist only to the extent that we are bound up with one another when we say I want to be free or that I want you to be free we are speaking about these distinct selves but also about social freedoms that should be accorded to everyone as long as no real harm is done and for that caveat to work we have to expose the fear mongering that would recast fundamental freedoms as harms and make Freedom into a new and vital object of desire to live according to such a maxim means that we must distinguish between actual Harms and those that grip the imagination as imminent possibilities but we cannot learn how not to cause harm if Freedom itself is regarded as a harm or if we become convinced that struggles for equality freedom and Justice are hurting the world let us show instead that the world the Earth depends upon our freedoms and that freedom makes no sense when it fails to be Collective and no matter how difficult staying in emancipatory collectivities may be it is imperative in order both to acknowledge our differences some of them irresolvable as we seek to build a world that affirms the equal value of our loves and our losses thank you [Applause] w [Applause] [Applause]