Judith Butler e a Teoria Queer

FIRST QUEER SEMINAR CULTURE AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITIES We’re back for today’s final conference in the Queer Seminar. I would like to call to the stage as moderator, Vladimir Safatle. And Judith Butler. KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY JUDITH BUTLER First of all, I wish to thank all of you for coming here today, and to thank the organizers for all the work that they have put up so that this seminar could be held. I think it makes little sense for me to... -Louder! -It’s tough, here. As I was saying, I think that it doesn’t make much sense for

me to introduce Judith Butler, whom you all know very well. I’ll just recall that she’s not only a major queer theorist, but also one of the most important Anglo-Saxon philosophers today, with works that range from aesthetics to political philosophy to Israeli–Palestinian issues; and, of course, all the discussions about gender issues as well as feminism and post-feminism debates. So, I’ll give the floor right away to Judith Butler, who will present a communication entitled “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance”. And after that, we’ll open the floor to questions. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vladimir. I am, of course,

very honored to be here today and I wish to thank all of the people who made this event possible and my visit to Brazil possible. I know that some of you worked for a full year to attend to all the details, and I’m honored and moved to be here for the first time. Of course, one might ask why is this the first time? Brazil is on the map of queer theory and radical sexual politics. And we could argue that Brazil has been making and remaking that map for a very long time. Well, I am sorry

that I am so late to arrive. But I am here, and most thrilled to be. As you may know, my early work on gender focused on the theory of performativity. And now I am working more closely on the condition of precarity and the kinds of mobilizations against precarity that are taking place across the world as the global economy continues to produce accelerating inequalities and as we come to see ever more populations effectively designated as dispensable and ungrievable. In Brazil, the collective resistance to this condition has been enormous. And those resistances predate and prefigure the mass

demonstrations in Europe. So for me it is important to be here not only theoretically, as I try to understand the plural forms that performativity can take in resistance movements, but as the global understanding of queer lives and queer politics continues to be remapped to overcome the colonial dynamics of power, so that the extraordinary mobilizations in Brazil can illuminate the relations between economic destitution, racism, sexuality, gender, and the pleasures and powers of resistance. In my view, the word “queer” takes on importance for many reasons. I recognize that it may not translate, that other words may well

prove to be more moving and more mobilizing. But if “queer” is to continue to have contemporary meaning for us, it must retain at least two senses. One sense, that of deviation, of straying from the norm, of opening up to the unexpected. A second sense, that of an alliance rather than an identity among groups of people who do not otherwise find much in common and between whom there is sometimes even suspicion and antagonism. That sense of “queer” marks a field of connection erotic and political, and also the affirmation of difference that cannot be easily overcome by

a unified identity. Sometimes we are allied with those we love, but that does not mean that all alliances love, or at least not in my view. Sometimes we ally in order to establish the right to love and to live free of harm, to defend and preserve spaces of desire in both public and private life. But all that takes place with a commitment to living together across differences, sometimes in modes of unchosen proximity, especially when living together, however difficulty it may be, remains an ethical and political imperative and not an altogether happy affair. So though we

may mobilize for the rights of desire and love, for embodied freedom and against violence, that does not mean that we are desiring and loving everyone we stand next to. Alliances are hard. They tend to founder in conflict and fracture. Acting together neither presumes nor produces a collective identity, but rather a set of enabling and dynamic relations that include support, dispute, breakage, and solidarity. We surely know that those who gather on the street or in public domains where police are present are always at risk of detention and arrest, but also forcibly handling even death. It is

surely important for those of us who live in the United States to understand that even as we oppose the police killing of black people on the street and organize under the rubric of “Black Lives Matter”, in Brazil you have been living with the fact that a thousand or more people every year are killed by police, and less than one percent of those killings are prosecuted. Police do not prosecute, no matter what crimes the police commit. And the killings that are undertaken every year by drug cartels, how many of those are prosecuted? This leads us to

ask not only in whose interests the law exists, but whether laws have lost binding power. Or perhaps the question is different. Whose actions are regarded as crimes before the law, and whose actions are regarded as either legally justified coercion or acts of violence that the law, which includes its police power, chooses not to see. I think this regime of police violence and complicity is something that has to be understood outside of Brazil, and that it gives us a way not only to form networks of global solidarity to protest such violence, but also to see how

racism works in allowing certain populations to be freely killed, and others to be fiercely protected. Of course we know that this happens time and again in the “favelas”, but perhaps also we need to see how this particular regime of legal violence affects the lives of transgender and queer people, but also women, all of whom are disproportionately vulnerable to violent death. The Avante Brasil Institute reported that 40,000 women were murdered in this country of 200 million people between 2001 and 2010 alone, and that in 2010 a femicide was committed every other hour. I know that important

legal changes have recently happened, including the new law enhancing punishments for those who commit femicide or “feminicídio,” if we follow Berenice Bento. I understand as well, from the important work of Berenice Bento, that Brazil leads the world in the number of assassinations of trans people: 486 reported between 2008 and ‘13, and 121 reported in 2013 alone. We can produce more numbers. We should produce more numbers. They are important. But let us remember that numbers are always framed and presented, they can be dismissed or discounted, and they cannot by themselves produce an analysis. The typologies we

use matter in how we count, as underscored by the important work of Rita Laura Segato. It would seem that the queer analysis of violence, vulnerability and resistance has a global importance in Brazil that ought not to be underestimated. For at work here is not only a form of sexual and gender theorization that has the violence and complicity of the police at its center, but also a long history of racism, the ongoing reverberations of slavery in everyday life, and the designation of certain populations as dispensable and ungrievable, as available to be murdered with impunity. As much

as this victimization must be documented, known and opposed, brought to human rights tribunals and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, there is also, of course, a quite extraordinary history of resistance, of women’s networks, of organizations opposed to police violence. Very often, networks that are organized outside the field of law, opposing increased economic inequality and pervasive institutional racism. The situation raises questions about the relationship between vulnerability on the one hand, and resistance on the other. And perhaps this introduces a political paradox, as well. The necessity to discount those arguments that suggest that women bring their murders

on themselves. I saw some newspaper editorials in Mexico, “Women bring their murders on themselves.” Or “Trans people deserve what they get.” We must, against such ideological movements, insist on victimization. And yet, if victimization becomes the only paradigm we have for understanding the political situation, we risk eliding or effacing the concrete practices of resistance that are carried on by so many groups, people of color, queers, trans, sex workers, and women. And as much as we wish to affirm the importance of new laws, stronger laws, such as those passed in March of this year in Brazil, and

supported by President Rousseff, we have also to understand whether legal recourse is the only or ultimate political goal. I do not mean to underestimate the importance of new laws, but if new laws are instituted within a legal regime that exercises its own form of violence, what implications does that have for reporting, and for enforcing, and ultimately changing the social structures of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, that lead to the production and reproduction of ungrievable lives. It seems to me that making one law or strengthening an existing set of laws, is a clear step forward. But that

can never be the same as a challenge to legal violence. For when the law is invoked for a racial elite and not for a racial minority, or for a group of women that excludes trans women, we see that another system of power traverses the law and that our politics have to acknowledge and work against regimes of power that traverse the law and exceed it. So power, of course, is not reducible to law, which means that a politics has to be greater than a project of legal reform. Law may well be at the center of such

a politics, but not because law alone gives us the hope of a non-violent and egalitarian future. Rather, we have to develop and sustain forms of criticizing the violent powers of the law, not only police violence and police murder which goes unprosecuted, but legal complicity with murder, evident in the refusal to arrest and the refusal to prosecute, which establishes the law as a safe haven for those who murder. One can have a law that opposes femicide, or “feminicídio”, but will that protect transgendered people who suffer violence? And will it be applied differentially, according to racial privilege?

Are some of my friends from outside coming in? No? They’re staying outside? Okay. Maybe they would learn something if they were to come. Sorry. It is always possible to have a law, to have it on the books, to advertise it in the media, but still not to enforce it. If the police refuse, and if the witnesses are discredited, what status does that law have? Walter Benjamin argued in his “Critique of Violence” that the police not only enforce the law, but they also make the law, since at the moment when the police decide to invoke the

law they have reinvigorated its operation. And when they see a situation and do not call it a crime, then the situation, even when it is clear murder, is not treated as a crime and the law is not enforced, and the law disappears. Here, it would seem, the violence that is justified and the one that is not, is decided, time and again, by police who determine whether or not violence is criminal, and whose own actions are considered by definition not to be criminal. “How could they commit a crime? They are the police.” Although the police seem

to act as the delegated representative of a sovereign power, they also exercise that power on the spot. They are proxy sovereigns. The application of the law at a specific time and place, or in a reiterative pattern is, at the same time, a way of making law and a way of unmaking law. For the application of the law brings the law into existence again, and as it comes to apply to new and different circumstances, the law itself is elaborated and renewed. Every time an arrest is made, a crowd is dispersed, a set of people cattled or

detained, the police effectively say, “This is legal, sovereign power.” And in making that speech act, they bind the subject to the force of the law. Police do sovereign power on the spot. But what Benjamin does not consider is what happens when the police refuse to enforce the law. That produces a contradiction between the ideal of the law and its practice, showing that legislators may well seek to transform a society in one way, and police can and do decide to refuse to effect that transformation. Where then does power reside? Is there a single sovereign? Or are

we now in a field of competing powers, each of which wields a transient, sovereign effect and which are contesting for hegemony? The second point I want to bring forward from Benjamin’s “A Critique of Violence” is that what one calls “violence” depends upon the legal framework, without at once invoking the framework in which that designation makes sense. Benjamin remarks that a legal regime that seeks to monopolize violence must call every threat or challenge to that regime a “violent” one. Hence, it can rename its own violence as necessary or obligatory force, even as justifiable coercion. And because

it works through the law, as the law, it is legal, and hence justified. Within that framework, one which he calls “fate”, the law is justified because it is the law, and the established legal framework establishes and differentiates between what is justified and what is unjustified. So from within that framework one cannot ask whether the law itself is legitimate, that is, not this or that law, but the legal regime. The legal regime establishes the justificatory scheme that defends and sanitizes its own legal violence at the same time that it names as “violence” whatever threatens the regime.

So a massive resistance movement, say, within the “favelas”, can, within the framework of the state, be understood as uncontrolled and illegitimate violence, a “riot”, and the police repression of demonstrations can be regarded then as a justified use of force, invoked for security reasons or to protect the general public against unrest. But from within the opposing framework, it is the police who are the ones who are waging violence, and the massive protests are happening to oppose police violence, dispossession, poverty, accelerating inequalities, inadequate public services, including healthcare and education. And when a large number of people rise

up to oppose corruption and profiteering in their government, are they “violent” for rising up, or are they exercising basic democratic freedoms? I do not say that there is no violence within such demonstrations, but that should not be a reason to identify the demonstrations with violent acts. It is not only the loss of the monopoly on violence that the legal regime counters so forcefully when the police are unleashed on a protesting population and with the accusation of violence, but the posing of the question of whether or not the state and its legal apparatus are or continue

to be legitimate. When that question of legitimacy is raised, it is very often named by the state as an act of violence, because that state seeks to protect itself against any challenge. As we can see, we have to track those frameworks that name and misname violence, but also those in which there is a refusal to name violence which becomes its own form of complicity with violence. For if we see no crime, there can be no enforcement of the law. Hence, our political relation to the law must engage the perceptual field, itself steeped in power, that

supports and reproduces regimes of legal violence. Of course, I do not mean to give up on the law, but I do want very much to think about extra-legal forms of resistance that require a political vocabulary that is not reducible to a legal one. And so I wish to turn my attention to the relationship between violence, vulnerability and resistance, in order to suggest that vulnerability ought not to be straightaway identified with victimization. If that were the case, then we would all be seeking all the time to overcome vulnerability, and we would perhaps forsake the particular powers

of resistance that emerge from vulnerability. This is a queer matter, in the sense that the queer movement has always mobilized and risked vulnerability. At least a large part of the movement has valued showing up in public, not only to assemble and demonstrate, but sometimes simply to walk on the street as the gender that one is, to conduct one’s life openly with the assumption that everyone should have such rights to appear, such rights of mobility. One does not bring on the assault by walking on the street, but one does call attention to the fact that walking

on the street cannot be taken for granted as a safe and protected exercise of freedom for many people that are targeted on the basis of their gender or sexuality, or the perception of their gender and sexuality, or their race, or the perception of their race. If we say someone is assaulted “on the basis of their race”, and in English this is a very ambiguous phrase, we leave open the question whether the race is the reason for the assault, or the perception of race is the reason for the assault. Race, after all, is an attribution. Even

if it is an institutionalized attribution, it has a history, one that can be called “racialization”. It is negotiated differently depending on time and place. So it is important that we try to avoid formulations that suggest that it’s someone’s race, understood as a static marker, which is the cause of the violence done against that person. It is racism which attributes race and then inflicts that violence. Of course, there are many reasons to be skeptical of vulnerability. No one wants to identify as vulnerable all the time. I’m not leading a movement, “Oh, I’m vulnerable! We’re all vulnerable!

Vulnerability is the future!” I’m not doing this, okay? Some fear that even talking about vulnerability leads to an embrace of victimization, which in turn leads to a demand for paternalistic protection. I want to suggest, as many others have before me, that vulnerability might be more importantly bound up with practices of resistance than with calls for paternalistic protection. This becomes important to consider precisely because the legal protection we seek from a regime of legal violence may well augment that regime, its contradictions and its own complicity, for reasons I have just suggested. You appeal to the law

to protect you, but if you appeal to the law, you strengthen the law, you strengthen the law’s power, and if that law is part of a legal regime of violence, you may also be strengthening its own capacity for violence. It is a very paradoxical situation. Brazil has so many examples of resistance movements that might be called extra-juridical, including the black rebel movements, the “quilombolas”, that lasted for at least four centuries, opposing slavery. But even now the feminist networks opposing battery and femicide, the trans solidarity groups, the indigenous movements, the ecological movements to save the rainforest,

the impressive student movements that claimed world attention in 2013. You hardly need the lecture of someone travelling from the global North, to think about the relationship between vulnerability and resistance here. But perhaps you will agree that vulnerability does not emerge first, after one has resisted a countervailing power. Some would say, first you resist, then you are confronted with your vulnerability, either in relation to police power or those who show up to oppose your political stands. Surely, vulnerability emerges earlier, prior to any gathering or movement, and it conditions and instigates mobilization. An intensified program of austerity,

embraced paradoxically by some nominally socialist and workers’ parties, leads to a pervasive condition of precarity. That condition of precarity indexes a vulnerability that precedes the one that people encounter quite graphically on the street and in relationship to the police or to political opponents. If we also say that the vulnerability to dispossession, poverty, insecurity and harm that constitutes a precarious position in the world leads to resistance, then it seems we have reversed the sequence. We are first vulnerable and then overcome that vulnerability, at least provisionally, through acts of resistance. I think we need to rethink both

of these sequences. It will be important to establish a more precise relationship between vulnerability and precarity. They are not quite the same. But let us consider, as a clear example, modes of resistance that emerge in opposition to failing infrastructure. The dependency on infrastructure for a livable life seems clear. But when infrastructure fails, and fails consistently, then how do we understand that condition of life? We have found that that on which we are dependent is, in fact, not there for us, which means that we are left without support. Without shelter, we are vulnerable to weather, to

cold, heat, disease, perhaps also to assault, hunger and violence. It was not as if we were, as creatures, not vulnerable before, when the infrastructure was more or less working; and then when the infrastructure fails, we are suddenly vulnerable. When movements against homelessness emerge, the unacceptable character of that vulnerability, in the sense of exposure to harm, is made clear. But a question still remains. Does vulnerability still remain an important part of that mode of resistance? Does resistance require overcoming vulnerability? Or do we, when we resist, mobilize our vulnerability? Consider that a movement may be galvanized for

the very purpose of establishing adequate infrastructure, or keeping adequate infrastructure from being destroyed. We can think about mobilizations in the shanty towns or townships of South Africa, Kenya, Pakistan, the temporary shelters constructed along the borders of Europe, but also the “barrios” of Venezuela, the “favelas” of Brazil, or the “barracas” of Portugal. Such spaces are populated by groups of people, including immigrants, squatters and/or Roma who are struggling precisely for running and clean water, working toilets, sometimes a closed door on public toilets, paved streets, paid work, necessary provisions. The street is not just the basis or a

platform for a political demand. We don’t just gather on the street and then make our demand. We need the street, and we mobilize in order to have the street. The street is an infrastructural good. So when assemblies gather in public spaces, to fight against the decimation of infrastructural goods, to fight against austerity measures or neoliberalism that would undercut public education, libraries, transit systems and roads, we find that the very platform for such a politics is one of the items on the political agenda. Sometimes a mobilization happens precisely in order to create, keep or open the

platform for political expression itself. The material conditions for speech and assembly are part of what we are speaking and assembling about. We have to assume the infrastructural goods for which we are fighting, but if the infrastructural conditions for politics are themselves decimated, so too are the assemblies that depend upon them. At such a point, the condition of the political is one of the goods for which political assembly takes place. This might be the double meaning of the infrastructural under conditions in which public goods are increasingly dismantled by privatization and neoliberalism, accelerating forms of economic inequality

and antidemocratic tactics of authoritarian rule, the violent combination of government and cartel interest, and the institutionalized racism and massive forms of economic inequality and the environmental devastation that we find across the globe, but particularly here in Brazil. I wish to point out that even as public resistance leads to vulnerability, establishes us as vulnerable; and vulnerability, in the sense of exposure implied by precarity, leads to resistance; “Nobody should be so exposed”, or: “This exposure should be ameliorated”; vulnerability is not exactly overcome by resistance, it becomes a potentially effective mobilizing force. The demand for infrastructure is a

demand for a certain kind of inhabitable ground, and its meaning and force derives precisely when that ground gives way. What implications does this notion of supported political action have for thinking about vulnerability and resistance? Well, I think we know that the idea of freedom, that freedom can only be exercised if there is enough support for the exercise of freedom, a material condition that enters into the act, that makes it possible. Indeed, when we think about the embodied subject to exercise a speech, or moves through public space, across borders, it is usually presumed to be one

who is already free to speak and move without threat of imprisonment, or deportation, or loss of life. Either that subject is endowed with that freedom as an inherent power, or that subject is presumed to live in a public space where open and supported movement is possible. The very term “mobilization” depends on an operative sense of mobility, itself a right, one which many people cannot take for granted. For the body to move, it must usually have a surface of some kind, and it must have at its disposal whatever technical supports allow for movement to take place.

We know this from disability studies. So the pavement in the street are already to be understood as requirements of the body, as it exercises its rights of mobility. No one moves without a supportive environment and a set of technologies. And when those environments start to fall apart or are emphatically unsupportive, we are left to “fall”, in some ways, and our very capacity to exercise our most basic rights is imperiled. We could certainly make a list of how this idea of a body supported, yet acting, supported and acting, is at work implicitly or explicitly in any

number of political movements. Struggles for food and shelter, protection from injury and destruction, the right to work, affordable healthcare, protection from police violence and imprisonment, from war or illness, mobilizations against austerity and precarity, authoritarianism and inequality. So, on one level, we are asking about the implicit idea of the body at work in certain kinds of political demands and mobilizations. On another level, we are trying to find out how mobilization presupposes a body that requires support. In many of the public assemblies that draw people who understand themselves to be in precarious positions, the demand to end

precarity is enacted publicly by those who expose their vulnerability to failing infrastructural conditions. There is plural and performative bodily resistance at work that shows how bodies are being acted on by social and economic policies that are decimating livelihoods. But these bodies, in showing this precarity, are also resisting those very powers. They enact a form or resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind and opposes precarity. If we make the matter individual, we can say: “Every single body has a certain right to food and shelter, freedom to move and breathe protected from violence.” We can make

it into a question of individual rights. The right to appear in public is one that queer and trans people have been embodying since the outset of our politicization. On the other hand, we can universalize our statement: “Everybody has this right.” And then we particularize: “Everybody has this right; we should have it, too.” But it seems to me we have to ask: Which bodies can appear? What are the forcible frames within which appearance is possible? And which appearance is possible? Can we, on the one hand, be spectacles, enjoy hyper-visibility, at the same time that we lack

basic rights to be protected from violence? That is one question that the trans community has clearly posed. We may want that concept of right that individualizes, that establishes this concrete and discrete body as a body that deserves rights. But consider that this idea of the individual bodily subjective rights might fail to capture something important about that body, its sense of vulnerability, its exposure, its dependency not just on infrastructure, but on other individuals as well. Perhaps we need to continue to hold to an alternative view of the body. If we accept that part of what a

body is... And let’s just, as it were, take an ontological term for a brief moment. ...part of what a body is, is its dependency on other bodies and networks of support; then we are suggesting that it is not altogether right to conceive of individual bodies as completely distinct from one another. Of course they’re neither blended into some amorphous social body, but if we cannot readily conceptualize the political meaning of the human body without understanding those relations, the relations in which it lives and thrives, we fail to make the best possible case for the various political

ends we seek to achieve. What I’m suggesting is that it’s not just that this or that body is bound up in a network of relations, but that the body, despite its clear boundaries, or precisely because of those very boundaries, is defined by relations that make its own life and action possible. It’s bound up, we might say, in a network from the beginning. You know, I feel like this theory might be unnecessary to talk about in a Brazilian audience. Since the first moment I arrived in Brazil everybody is always on your body and in your body,

and next to you, embracing, and... you know. I barely had a moment to have a discreet body since I’ve been here. Okay. No, it’s nice. It is a little different from the land of individualism from which I come. Anyway, you know all this. But what I want to say is that I don’t think we want to think about bodily vulnerability just as this attribute of this body here, or an attribute of that body there. Vulnerability is perhaps a nodal point that articulates the relational network in which we all live. We cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside

of this network of social and material relations. It’s precisely because we are, our lives depend on those relations, that we understand our vulnerability as relational. But of course I want to add to this, which is that we also can’t really understand the body outside of the way it is performatively produced within that set of relations. I act, or you act, to produce the bodies that we are, but none of us can undertake that production without one another. Even as we act in that way, we always act within a situation of first having been acted upon,

named, situated, brought into being and mobilized by powers that are external to the selves that we are, that are prior to the selves that we are. One clear dimension of our vulnerability has to do with our exposure to being called a name. There are all those discursive categories waiting for us in infancy and childhood. Indeed, they wait for us throughout the course of our lives. I can’t fight with everyone who calls me a lady in the restaurant, right? If I were to fight with everyone who calls me a lady in the restaurant, then I would

be in jail all the time. Sometimes they don’t know whether to call me a lady. Once, I had a guy, he couldn’t take my order, because he didn’t know whether he should call me Sir or Madame. So he said, “Sir, Madame, Sir, Madame, Sir, Madame...” And I know that it was a little cruel, but I just waited. I didn’t help him, and he just kept going, “Sir, Madame, Sir, Madame, Sir, Madame, Sir...” You know, I thought, “How long is this gonna last?” And I finally said, “Is it necessary to determine my gender before taking my

order?” Okay, but you know, it’s a bad example, because there’s a class difference in there, right? I’m ordering, he’s taking my order, so it’s not as funny as it should be. Okay. All right, here we go. All of us are called names. And this kind of name-calling demonstrates an important dimension of the speech act. We do not only act through the speech act, “I call myself this name. Please call me this name.” Speech acts also act upon us. There’s a distinct performative effect of having been named as this gender or another gender, as part of

one nationality or as a minority, or to find out that how you are regarded in any of these respects is summed up by a name that you yourself did not know and never chose. We can and do ask what the great 19th-century black feminist Sojourner Truth: “Am I that name?” How do we think about the force and effect of those names we are called before any of us emerge into language as speaking beings, before we are able to use language to express our own agency, our own capacity to act? Does speech act upon us prior

to our speaking, and if it did not act upon us, if it were not actively working upon us, could we speak at all? Perhaps it is not simply a matter of a sequence. Does speech continue to act upon us at the very moment in which we speak, so that we may well think we are acting, but we are also acted upon at the very same time? I use a word, but that word is given to me. I reproduce a word, I call it, I call myself it, I call you. When Eve Sedgwick wrote about the

relationship between performance and performativity, she showed that speech acts deviate from their aims, very often producing consequences that are altogether unintended, and oftentimes quite felicitous. For instance, one could take a marriage vow, and this act could then establish a public recognition of marriage, which then allows or opens up a zone of possible sexuality that takes place quite under the radar, taking advantage precisely of its non-recognizability. The marriage vow provides public cover for forms of sexual life that remain unrecognized, and happily so. In such cases, marriage organizes sexualities we might expect in conjugal and monogamous forms,

but it also produces another zone of sexuality, defined precisely by its lack of overt recognition in the public sphere. Sedgwick underscored the sense of how a speech act could veer away from its apparent aims. So, you take the marriage vow, say, in a heterosexual context, and that allows your queer life to be happily pursued with nobody noticing. That was one example from her work. Sedgwick underscored the sense of deviation; the speech act deviates from its aim. That was one important sense of the word “queer”, understood, of course, less as an identity than a movement of

thought and language contrary to accepted forms of authority, always deviating, and so opening up spaces for desire that would not always be openly recognized within established norms. Discourses on gender seem to create and circulate certain ideals of gender, generating those ideals. What we sometimes take to be natural essences or internal truths, are ideals, phantasms or norms that have taken hold of us in some deep and abiding way. So the ideals produced by a discourse, a set of gender ideals, can be inhabited in one’s gestures and actions, even come to be understood to be essential to

who we are, indeed abiding and governing images, norms and ideals such as these cannot be cast off at will without losing a sense of who we are. That essential sense of who we are is, to some extent, the workings of a set of social norms. Having a sense of who we are “essentially” is not for that reason an argument for innate differences. Arguments from innateness constitute only one form of essentialism. And one can have a sense of what is essential for one’s life without exactly being an essentialist. As you may know, my early formulation that

gender is performative became the basis for two quite contrary interpretations. The first is that we radically choose our genders. The second is that we’re utterly determined by gender norms. These widely divergent responses meant that something had not quite been articulated and grasped about the dual dimension of any account of performativity. For if language acts upon us before we act and continues acting on us in every instant in which we act, then we have to think about gender performativity first as gender assignment; all those ways in which we are, as it were, called a name and

gender, prior to understanding anything about how gender norms act upon and shape us, and prior to our capacity to reproduce those norms in ways that we might choose. Choice, in fact, comes late in the process of performativity. Following Sedgwick, we have to understand how deviations from those norms can and do take place, suggesting that something queer is at work at the heart of gender performativity. A queerness that is not so very different from the swerves taken by iterability in Derrida’s account of the speech act as citational, but which takes on specific, embodied and social meaning

in Sedgwick’s view. So let us assume, then, that performativity describes both the processes of being acted on and the conditions and possibilities for acting, and that we cannot understand its operation without both of these dimensions. That norms acts upon us implies we are susceptible to their action, vulnerable to a certain name-calling from the start. And this registers at a level that is prior to any possibility of volition. An understanding of gender assignment has to take up this field of an unwilled receptivity, susceptibility and vulnerability; a way of being exposed to language prior to any possibility

of forming and enacting a speech act. Norms such as these both require and institute certain forms of corporeal vulnerability without which their operation would not be thinkable. That is why we can and do describe the powerful citational force of gender norms, as they are instituted and applied by medical, legal and psychiatric institutions; and we object to the effect they have on the formation and understanding of gender in pathological or criminal terms. Of course I should add some religious institutions, so that my friends outside can feel recognized. And yet this very domain of susceptibility, this condition

of being affected is also where something queer can happen, where the norm is refused or revised, or where new formulations of gender begin. Although gender norms precede us and act upon us, that is one sense of their action; we are obligated to reproduce them, and there’s a second sense of their enactment, precisely because something inadvertent and unexpected can happen, in this realm of being affected and in reproducing the norm, we can find and form modes of gender that break with mechanical patterns of repetition, deviating from, re-signifying, and sometimes quite emphatically breaking those citational chains of

gender normativity, making new room for gendered life. The theory of gendered performativity, as I understood it, never prescribed which gender performances were right or more subversive, and which ones were wrong and reactionary. The point was precisely to relax the coercive hold of norms on gendered life. That’s not the same as transcending all norms. The point of relaxing the coercive hold of norms on gendered life and of suspending judgments about gendered enactments was precisely to produce a mode of living that is more livable. Both performance studies and disability studies have offered the crucial insight that all

action requires support, and that even the most punctual and seemingly spontaneous act implicitly depends upon a set of conditions that quite literally support the acting body. This idea of support is quite important not only for the re-theorization of the acting body, but for the broader politics of mobility; what architectural supports have to be in place for each of us to exercise a certain freedom of movement, one that is necessary to exercise the right of public assembly. In the same way that we claim that the speech act depends upon its social conditions and conventions, we can

also say that the performance of gender, more generally, depends upon its infrastructural and social conditions of support. This bears implications for a general account of embodied and social action, but also for understanding the bodily risks that women take walking on certain streets at night, assembling in public squares... Sexual assault is a clear example. ...and that trans people risk in walking on the street or gathering in public assemblies. I suggested that we rethink the relationship between the human body and infrastructure, so that we might call into question the body as discreet, singular and self-sufficient. And I

proposed instead to understand embodiment as both performative and relational. Relationality includes dependency on infrastructural conditions and legacies of discursive and institutional power that precede and condition our existence. I’m also suggesting that certain ideals of independence are masculinist, and that a feminist account exposes the disavowed dependency at the heart of the masculinist idea of the body. This is different from saying what women’s bodies are or what men’s bodies are. I don’t know. I’m not making those claims. I’m only showing what I take to be a masculinist conception of bodily action that should be actively criticized. My

reference to dependency may well include dependency on the mother or the primary caretaker, but it’s not that form of primary dependency that concerns me here. I’m interested in theorizing the human body as a certain kind of dependency on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations and networks of support, and sustenance by which the human proves not to be divided from the animal or from the technical world. In this way we foreground the ways in which we are vulnerable to decimated or disappearing infrastructures, economic supports, and predictable and well-compensated labor. We’re not only vulnerable to one

another, an invariable feature of social relations and sexual relations, but this very vulnerability indicates a broader condition of dependency and interdependency which challenges the dominant, ontological understanding of the embodied subject. So I’m almost done here. I have to maybe move toward my end. Okay, I’m not gonna tell you stories about California. No, it’s just, there are political abuses of the term “vulnerability”. So, when some members of the white population in California were worried that people of color were becoming the majority of the population, they went to the press and they went to the State Assembly,

and they said: “White people are vulnerable!” I thought, “Oh...” So, you can see, sometimes hegemonic forms of power can claim that they’re vulnerable. “Oh, you’re afraid you will be dismantled in the service of equality? Sorry, we’re not listening to you. We’re not listening to you.” Okay. Usually, when we oppose vulnerability as a political term it’s because we prefer to see ourselves as agents. We want to be actors. We think better political consequences will follow if we see ourselves always in the process of acting. If we oppose vulnerability in the name of agency, does that imply

that we prefer to see ourselves as only acting, but never acted upon? How might we then describe those regions of aesthetics and ethics that presume that our receptivity is bound up with our responsiveness? How would we describe sexuality, a zone in which we are acted upon by the world, by what is said and shown, by what we hear, by what touches us? If we take this domain of impressionability or receptivity as primary, then we can ask, what aspects of the world impress upon us at the very moment we form an impression of that world? What

we find is that at the same time that we act upon the world, we are acted upon. So I think we cannot do away with the vulnerability, because we would then be doing away with responsiveness, impressionability, susceptibility, injurability, openness, indignation, outrage, desire, resistance. If nothing acts on me against my will without my advance knowledge, then who am I? I am a sovereign. I have a posture of pure control over the property that I have and the property that I am. I’m a sturdy and self-centered form of the thinking “I” that seeks to cloak those faultlines

in the self that cannot be overcome. What form of politics is supported by this adamant sense of disavowal? Is this not a masculinist account of sovereignty, that as feminist, or as queer or trans activists, we are called upon to dismantle? So, I think you can see that I want to contest the idea that performativity can be reduced to the idea of a free, individual performance. We are called names, we find ourselves living in a world of categories and descriptions way before we start to sort them out critically and endeavor to change or make them on

our own. In this way, we are, quite in spite of ourselves, vulnerable to, and affected by, discourses that we never chose. In a parallel way, I want to suggest that there is a dual relationship to resistance that helps us understand what we mean by vulnerability. There’s a resistance to vulnerability that takes both psychic and political dimensions; the psychic resistance to vulnerability wishes that it were never the case that discourse and power were imposed upon us in ways that we never chose, and seeks to shore up a notion of individual sovereignty or mastery against the shaping

forces of history on our embodied lives. On the other hand, the very meaning of vulnerability changes when it becomes understood as part of the very practice of political resistance. One of the important features of extra-legal mobilizations, demonstrations and assemblies that we recently have seen, confirms that political resistance relies fundamentally on the mobilization of vulnerability. Vulnerability can be a way of being exposed and agentic, at the same time. A collective exposes its own vulnerability as part of a political statement. In arriving in public, a collective is exposed to potential injury from the police, from those against

whom the police provide no protection. These are political subjects who establish their agency not by vanquishing their vulnerability. A most important criticism emerges from those who argue that vulnerability cannot be the basis for group identification without strengthening paternalistic powers. I understand that critique, but I think that we have to keep in mind that paternalistic protection is not the only political aim, and that we need to set that aside in favor of forms of political agency and resistance that are undertaken by so-called vulnerable populations. To summarize, then: vulnerability is not a subjective disposition. It characterizes a

relation to a field of objects, forces and passions that impinge upon or affect us in some way. As a way of being related to what is not me and not fully masterable, vulnerability is a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence; where receptivity and responsiveness become the basis for mobilizing vulnerability, rather than engaging in its destructive denial. Of course, I’m aware that I’ve used resistance in at least two ways: there’s a resistance to

vulnerability that characterizes forms of mastery; there’s a social and political form of resistance that is informed by vulnerability, and so not its opposite. I want to suggest that vulnerability is neither fully passive nor fully active, but operates in a middle region, a constituent feature of a human animal both affected and acting. I’m thus led to think about those practices of deliberate exposure to police or military violence in which bodies, put on the line, either receive blows or seek to stop violence as living blockades or barricades. In such practices of non-violent resistance, like those we saw

in Gezi Park, we can come to understand bodily vulnerability as something that is actually marshaled or mobilized for the purposes of resistance. Such a claim is controversial, I understand. It may look as if those people are engaged in self-destruction; but, in fact, I think that the mobilization of vulnerability can be a way of asserting existence, claiming the right to public space, equality, mobility, opposing violent police security and military actions. Sometimes, under certain conditions, continuing to exist, to move, to breathe, are forms of resistance, which is why we sometimes see placards in Palestine with the slogan:

“We still exist.” In political life, it surely seems that first some injustice happens, and then there’s a response. But it may be that the response is happening as the injustice occurs, and this gives us another way to think about historical events, action, passion, vulnerability and forms of resistance. Without being able to think about vulnerability, we cannot think about resistance; and by thinking about resistance, we are already under way, dismantling the resistance to vulnerability in order precisely to resist. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. I would like, first of all, to thank Judith Butler

for this wonderful lecture. We have here a few questions, but I wish to begin by putting a question myself, also to give time for other questions to arrive. My own question would actually be the following one. I’d like to understand a little better how you understand a certain paradox involved in transforming vulnerability into a central political mechanism. At times, one has the impression that, in your works, there are two paradigms of vulnerability, almost contradicting one another. One of them is vulnerability as a condition for desire. Which means that it is only possible to desire by

accepting a certain vulnerability, since the other is not just he who confirms me in a relation of recognition, but he’s also the one who dispossesses me in each and every relationship. But there’s also the idea of vulnerability as a social condition of precarity against which we should fight. When you discussed the individual body as a political entity, but, first and foremost, not simply as an individual body but also as a body that opens up to this kind of constitution of a social body; and when you mentioned, in your conference, that vulnerability could allow for the

constitution of this kind of social network that constitutes the body politic, I wonder how vulnerability could be an affection that, in the political field, wouldn’t turn into fear or even into a desire of mastery, of domination, in a certain way, in order to avoid vulnerability. You mentioned many times this risk that vulnerability might turn into a demand for support, as if it were some kind of “Hilflosigkeit” (helplessness), asking for a paternal figure of protection. But it wasn’t so clear to me how it would be possible to transform vulnerability into something more than that, something that

would actually place us in the political field within this dimension, this almost primeval and ontological condition of desire, that you discuss so vigorously. Well, thank you very much, Vladimir, for your question. I have appreciated, by the way, your engagement with my work, and I’m very glad you are here with us today. First of all, let me say I don’t think that we can identify vulnerability just with precarity, okay? And I want to hold open the idea that vulnerability has a dimension that we actually seek to value and to preserve, and that is important for us

as embodied, sexual and responsive creatures. It is the case, however, that we can be exploited on the basis of our vulnerability, right? We are creatures who need shelter. We are creatures who need social relations. We are creatures who need food. In other words, we cannot be understood as self-sufficient, without all of these forms of support, or nourishment, or relationality. So, if we take apart the idea of the abstract individual who is disembodied and self-sufficient, and we find that we are embodied creatures, we also find that our bodies depend on all of these relations in order

to thrive. So I want to hold on to that idea. But precisely because we are vulnerable in that one sense, we can be exploited. In other words, shelter can be denied to us, food can be withheld, food can be unequally distributed, our homes can be dispossessed. We see this in Barcelona... movements that have been objecting to the dispossession of people from their homes. We are not just individuals who are dispossessed from homes. As individuals, we are embodied creatures who require shelter. That is part of what embodiment means. And if we are denied shelter, we are

left in an uninhabitable position of precarity. So, on the one hand, if we take seriously the concept of vulnerability that I’m trying to put forward here, we are also obligated to build a world in which basic services are provided, where basic services are understood as part of what a political organization of society must provide for. Because we cannot think the body outside of its environment; we cannot think the body outside of its food source; we cannot think the body outside its social relations. So... But precarity is the condition of being exploited precisely at the level

of basic vulnerability such as these. So, the homeless revolt. Those who are without employment revolt, and they are articulating something basic about what needs to be provided for by any legitimate political organization. Now, of course, vulnerability can lead us to fear; vulnerability can lead us for the desire for mastery; vulnerability can lead us to cry out for paternal protection. Of course. Of course. Which is precisely why we have to actively make the case that it could also lead us to radical egalitarianism, it could also lead us to socialism, it could also lead us to the

radical redistribution of wealth, or to housing rights, or to employment rights, or to the right to education, the right to healthcare. I mean, it has to be mobilized precisely for those purposes. By itself, there is no immediate political consequence. It has to be argued politically. And where there are no collectives that are making the case for a radical, egalitarian, political future, people do experience their vulnerability as fear, or the desire for mastery, or the need for paternal protection, or stronger police, right? “I’m vulnerable, I want stronger police.” Thank you very much. I’ll now read a

few questions from the audience. The first one, by... Oh! Okay, I will do the questions made by the public. The first question, by Marina Ganzarolli. Her question is, “During your conference in Salvador, you spoke about resistance through law. How could we find out, or rather expand, this emancipatory potential within the law, when it’s precisely the law and its norms that categorize gender and sexuality and conform our bodies? How could these categories serve the recognition of our rights? Or rather, how to deal with that paradox?” It’s a very large and important question. Look, I think, on

the one hand, it is important to have laws that recognize and oppose violence against women and trans people, for instance. It is important to have those laws. On the other hand, we would be very, very foolish if we thought that the political opposition to violence against women and violence against trans people could be solved through a law. That will not solve the problem. And it won’t solve the problem precisely for the reason that I have suggested here, which is that laws can be passed and then never enforced; laws can be passed and then they can

become part of a public relations campaign that the state is running; and laws can be passed and never enforced by the police, and even undermined by the police, who either commit their own violence or allow that very violence against women and trans people to continue. So, what does it mean? It means that there has to be an extra-juridical, political mobilization; that we cannot rely on the law as the ultimate instrument. On the other hand, sometimes laws do work to bring public consciousness or to change institutions. So, it’s always a question of a strategy, you know?

We can’t answer this question in the abstract. We have to see whether the law is doing more violence or whether the law can ameliorate violence. If the law is part of a regime of legal violence, we must always be skeptical of the law. But in my view, there’s no reason not to struggle for new laws. It just means that our political struggle should never be limited to the struggle for new laws. I’m sorry not to be able to give you more of an answer, but I think that there are deep, extra-juridical forms of mobilization and

resistance that have to be retained, and reanimated, and invigorated that allow for a critical distance from the projects of legal reform. And I think that is what I said in Salvador, that legal reform itself cannot be sufficient if the law is engaged in its own form of violence. So, a second question... That’s okay, I understand “segunda pergunta”. So, a second question based on these issues that touch upon gender law, is asked by Renan Quinaglia: “How do you analyze the demand for criminalization of violence against LGBT people? Given that, on the one hand, the criminalization of

violence offers some degree, however slight, of legal protection; but it also reinforces the penal system and mass incarceration. In view of that paradox raised by you, would it be interesting for the LGBT movement to make that demand?” Again, a very important question. It’s very difficult to be in favor of increasing the population in prisons. I don’t think incarceration is the answer to violence against LGBTQ people. I think that this is another reason why we need to have a more complex analysis of legal violence. The prison is, as we know, along with the police, one of

the major instruments of legal violence that many of us, in many countries, live with. And criminalization also usually requires either the pathologization of the person who commits the crime or some new set of typological categories that make that individual into a kind of an aberrant character. “This is an aberrant personality.” Well, the truth is that violence against trans and... against women and against LGBTQ people, against racial minorities, against sex workers – let us remember violence against sex workers here –, new migrants; that violence is an expression of a larger form of institutional violence; it’s an

expression of larger forms of racism, of sexism, of homophobia. They have to... Those kinds of hatreds and those kinds of institutionalized forms of oppression have to be countered at every level. We cannot depend upon the prisons to do that work. The prisons will not, and the courts will not recognize, for instance, violence against women and trans people as endemic to the society, as working throughout the society. They’ll make individual criminals and say, “It’s just that person.” “It’s just that person.” “It’s just that person.” So they get to exonerate themselves by criminalizing the individuals and putting

them away. Indeed, all those crimes implicate the society at large, which means there must be a much more massive institutional critique of that kind of violence. It’s true, I don’t believe that incarceration is the answer, but I think that we also have to look at the way in which police, by not arresting or not prosecuting, also make themselves complicit with the violence. So, we are in a paradox. Maybe we could ask, “Okay, once arrested, what then?” You know, Angela Davis has an idea of restorative justice that could happen outside of the prison system. There are

different ways of thinking about how to handle those situations that are not necessarily that of incarceration. These are much larger questions, and I appreciate the difficulty and the intractability of the paradox that you name. Okay. Now, an unnamed question. “In her ‘Contra-sexual Manifesto’, Beatriz Preciado briefly critiques gender as performance, and affirms the need to analyze the materiality of bodies. Considering that debate, couldn’t we say that an analysis centered on materiality would open rooms for questioning genitalizing discourses, with their genitalization of genders?” Is the question... Is the question whether... The microphone! Technology and the body... Is

the question whether it would be better to start with the material reality of bodies, rather than performativity? Can the person answer? It’s a person without name. Can the person without name answer? Oh, no. Good. Okay. Okay. I can try to make sense of the question. I’m sorry. Well, in my view, performativity is materialized. There’s a materialization of the body. But what do we mean when we talk about the body acquiring its material reality? What I mean is that the very shapes we take and whatever it is that emerges for us as genital or as sexual,

the very ways in which we live and comport our bodies, they take shape over time; and cultural norms, and our resistances to those norms, and our ways of reworking those norms also take shape in our embodied lives. So, when we talk about taking shape: the gender takes shape, it takes shape over time; we’re talking about a process of materialization. The matter of the body is not some kind of static matter; it’s something that gets formed over time: we grow, we age; we may well shift genders, or we may embody gender very differently. When we talk

about embodiment, we’re talking about an active and temporalized sense of materialization. So, I don’t think as performativity as linguistic, an abstract, and denying the body which is concrete and real. I think the concrete and the real are structured socially, and we live that concrete structuring of the body in our own bodies. We live the materialization of the norm in our own bodies. So, for me, these things are... they move together. I’m not sure they should be understood completely as oppositional. I hope I addressed the question. Two more questions, then? The first one, by Adriana Moura:

“How do psychoanalysis discourses undercut the ways for resistance and the relaxing of gender norms?” Well, maybe you’re reading too much Lacan. I forgot, he has written a... No, no! Psychoanalysis can be very interesting insofar as it turns out that the identifications we can have are very shifting and mobile. And, of course, there is a very conservative side to psychoanalysis that seeks to normalize and pathologize. I don’t doubt that. And sometimes, of course, when you read Freud, that becomes very clear. But there are now very important queer readings of Freud, and we could name many of

them, Lee Edelman among them, that suggest that actually, for Freud, desire, sexual desire, is not at all naturally linked to reproduction, to the reproduction of the species. And even Freud, when he talks about the drive, describes it as something that deviates from its social aims. “You’re supposed to be desiring X, but you desire this way instead.” So there’s a queer movement to the drive that Lee Edelman has, I think, underscored, that I think is an important point. There might be something very queer at the heart of the psychoanalytic theory of the drive. Theresa de Laurentis

has also made this point in an interesting way. But you have to be willing to play a little with Freud, and with psychoanalysis, right? You argue with the parts you don’t like, and you steal the parts you do. That’s, at least, my approach, generally. Unfortunately it won’t be possible to put all these questions. So I’ll ask one final question, and then send the remaining ones directly to her. Unfortunately, time is tight. But maybe a more contextual question here: “In Brazil today, we have a very conservative Congress and House, and in the city of São Paulo

they have just prohibited the discussion of gender in educational policy. How to act in the field of public policy? And how do you see the possibility of creating a Feminist Party?” Well, I do know that references to gender and sexual diversity have been excluded from the educational policy in Brazil, recently. I also know that the word “gender” has been debated in the passing of the femicide bill, and it was excluded. So, there seems to be some fear about gender and some fear about sexual diversity, as well. But this is, of course, one moment in an

ongoing struggle. We lost to this one, for now. But it’s just one moment. People will come back and say, “No, we insist that this be part of educational policy. Children should learn about gender.” Why should they learn about gender and sexual diversity? Well, first of all, children are struggling with their own genders. How many of them are okay with their gender assignment? How many of them are comfortable with their gender assignment? How many of them feel that they don’t really conform to the norm? The schools have an option. You teach the norm. “This is what

is to be a girl. This is what is to be a boy. You only have two choices. You actually don’t have a choice.” “There are only two choices, you don’t have a choice.” Beautiful lesson. So, what are we doing? Are we producing an environment in which young people can ask the questions they have, and can discuss openly what it means for there to be variation in how you live your gender or how we think about these norms? Why we might not like these norms. Maybe we could debate these norms. Education is supposed to be a

place where you think about formation, you think about what is necessary in culture, what is not; what can be debated, what can be opened up. So, basically the exclusion from the educational policy seems to me to be a form of censorship that seeks to shut down the conversation about how gender is lived, how variously gender is lived; and to act as if whatever your sex is, is established by the Bible or by some version of science that conforms with the Bible. So, there will be people from the scientific community who will reject this, there are

feminists, there are all kinds of people, there are educators who think this should be an open discussion who will reject this. So, the only question I have is, what is the form that the new mobilization will take that will counter this censorship? I think it’s an act of fear to censor that material, clearly. I do find it peculiar that very conservative religious groups want to claim that the question that the Bible establishes men and women and the difference between them, and that that should become the basis for all learning; but they also seem to claim

that the term “gender” is unscientific or refuses the scientific existence of the difference between the sexes. But, of course, the scientific community has many complex views about how sex determination takes place. And they fight all the time. There’s the hormonal people, there are the chromosomal people; there are the people of the interactive model, there are the people with the causal model, there’s the non-causal, non-interactive people. There’s an enormous debate, and even trying to understand sex determination in animals, or in insects, has become a very contested area. People bring their hypotheses to the fore when they’re

trying to determine sex. So, why shouldn’t all those debates be known? That’s science. We know that the category of sex has changed throughout history, and it changes depending on what language we’re talking about and what part of the world we are in. Why shouldn’t that be known? Why wouldn’t it be interesting and helpful to find out the various ways that people think about sex? Not just the religious ones and not a single, reductive, scientific one. In the name of open intellectual enquiry, it should be obligatory to teach gender. But also, I guess I just want

to say that when you start censoring a word: “No, we are not gonna teach gender”, it’s because gender is considered to be very powerful. So, they’re attributing a certain power. Like, if a young person will learn that you can change your gender, that young person will go out and change his gender right that moment. If a young person learns about gay life or lesbian life, that person will become a gay person or a lesbian. They imagine that whatever we’re doing is so attractive and it’s so powerful, that those young people will not be able to

resist and that they will all be recruited into one giant army of gay, lesbian, trans. So, they have a massive fantasy. Okay, so... Thank you very much, Judith. Thank you very much, Judith, for your presence. Thank you very much for the presence of all of you. The remaining questions will be sent her afterwards. Well, that’s it. Thank you very much. FIRST QUEER SEMINAR CULTURE AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITIES