An Interview on Feminist Ethics and Theory with Judith Butler
- An Interview on Feminist Ethics and Theory with Judith Butler
In 2015 I was asked to conduct an interview with Judith Butler by the editorial board of Kharmagas: Nashriyyih Falsafi-Ejtemaʿi (Gadfly: Persian Journal of Philosophy) for an August 2016 issue dedicated to the themeof identity. I conducted the interview in English, and it was translated into Persian (Tohidi 2016). The main readers of the journal are Iranian intellectuals and activists, including many feminists. Butler is known and respected as a feminist philosopher among Iranian intellectuals. Her seminal book Gender Trouble was translated into Persian (Butler 1999, 2006).
The questions I posed reflect my own intellectual and political concerns as a feminist scholar and activist of Iranian background. But they also address transnational questions that remain relevant to feminist studies and Middle East studies and are within the realm of Butler’s published works and expertise. I submitted all the interview questions by e-mail in October 2015, and Butler submitted her responses in April 2016. The interview therefore lacks the natural back-and-forth flow and dynamic interaction of a more synchronic conversation. I think that such interviews are important for intensifying intellectual discussion between feminists in the global North and the global South, including regarding the continuing barriers to building alliances. Such exchanges should problematize not only binary understandings of gender and sexuality but also the simplistic binary of the West against the rest by exploring the current geopolitics of scattered masculinist hegemonies at the local as well as global contexts. Actively crossing these divides is more urgent with the growing global trend of right-wing ethnocentric nationalisms and populisms, and religious fundamentalisms. [End Page 461]
Thanks to our firsthand praxis and also the work of some feminists, especially feminists of color in the West or in the global South, such as sociologist Patricia Hill Collins and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, many of us academics and activists have adopted an intersectional approach and try to avoid universal statements that assume woman as a unified class. Furthermore, thanks to feminist philosophers like yourself, especially your groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble, we have moved away from binary conceptions of gender and sexuality that limited our understanding of gender on the basis of oppositional notions of masculinity and femininity. We have thereby become better aware and critical of pervasive heteronormative assumptions in feminist theory. Having said that, my first question is ostensibly simple: How would you define feminism?
I am not sure that I can define feminism. In my mind, feminism is a historical movement, so we have to ask,what has it become and what is it becoming? And we have to ask about the place and time of its articulation. At a minimum, feminism opposes inequality, exploitation, and violence, and it recognizes that women suffer disproportionately from illiteracy and poverty. I try to register definitions of feminism when I come across them, but I do not understand myself in a position to define feminism. It could be that I do not want feminism to have a fixed definition, but that is because I want it to remain alive, becoming more expansive, inclusive, and powerful.
In the preface to the second edition of Gender Trouble (1999), while you emphasize the irreducible complexity of sexuality, you state, “I continue to hope for a coalition of sexual minorities that will transcend the simple categories of identity,” a coalition that “will counter and dissipate the violence imposed by restrictive bodily norms” (xxvi). Do you also advocate for such coalition building among women in general? In spite of sexual, racial, class, ethnic, and national differences among women, do you agree that there are enough common issues and concerns (including violence against women and practices such as forced marriage, genital mutilation, forced veiling, and forced prostitution) that make negotiated local, national, transnational, and even global coalition building among women possible and even necessary? If yes, can this happen without some sense of solidarity and feminist identity formation?
Here is where the intersectional approach that you mention in your first question becomes important. My sense is that when we refuse the unified...
