Introduction

SPIRITS RUSTLE across these pages. The dead, the injured, those for whom life has been made unlivable, or very nearly so. But also ancestors, deities, maybe even gods. Melancholy is here, together with its uneasy and off-kilter twins, mourning on the one side, mania on the other; and—wonderfully—kitsch too, with the suggestion that perhaps all of these things have something to do not only with Judith Butler and Gender Trouble but also with religion. As Kristin Bloomer shows in her article, religion is not always about dogma and so not only exemplified by what Butler in their most recent work, Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024), sees coming from the Vatican, from Evangelical Christianity, and from other ideological sites so ruinously shaping contemporary gendered life.

This roundtable is a celebration also marked by the difficulty of these times. Planned by Adrián Emmanual Hernández-Acosta and Siobhan Kelly as a commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble, meant to take place at the 2020 meeting of the AAR, the pandemic delayed the party a year and took it online. As we publish the articles, expertly edited by Kelly, we are nearing Gender Trouble’s thirty-fifth birthday, but the issues raised by these scholars of gender, sexuality, and religion feel more timely than ever.

Adrián Emmanual Hernández-Acosta, Sarah Bloesch, Kristin Bloomer, Biko Mandela Gray, and Siobhan Kelly all reflect on the crucial role played by melancholia in Gender Trouble and all ask what is lost, illuminating and pushing further Butler’s insight that the incest taboo is always proceeded by the taboo against homosexuality. Kelly insists that intersexuality and transsexuality must be foreclosed for the interdictions against homosexuality and incest to come into play, a view with which I think Butler would agree. Bloesch, bringing Jan van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon Joris van der Paele (1436) to bear on her reading of “the temporal, embodied, and social forces of melancholic performativity,” demonstrates that within this very white European Christian painting Mary and Jesus and Saint George are bleached of their alterity and Judaism is incorporated as the (in)essential other; small background scenes from the Hebrew Bible enact the painting’s refusal “to lose a time that is already gone.” For Bloomer, thinking about a particular iteration of the Roman Catholic tradition in South India, the person possessed by Mary is a “radically permeable self, open to human and non-human bodies”—this is the Tamil conception of selfhood, one deeply resonant with Butler’s own—in defiance of the Vatican’s claims about Mary and her necessary agency in accepting the incarnation. This is important, for Bloomer and for all of us as readers of Butler, as it suggests that binaries around agency are as false as those around gender. It also asks, along with Anthony Petro in his discussion of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, whether a Butlerian frame has space for thinking the nonhuman with which humans stand in relation and by which they are co-constituted.

One understanding of the other side of melancholy in Freud, as Hernández-Acosta rightly points out, is mania. In an astute reading of the two halves of Gender Trouble, one sparked by an observation made by Jacqueline Rose and taken up by Butler, Hernández-Acosta asks what loss is being resisted through the arguably manic last section of the book, those parts in which the notion of performativity plays most substantive a role. He asks whether mania marks an overcoming of melancholia or instead “mourning’s grip on the subject,” a question about mourning, melancholia, mania, and temporality that also runs across most of the articles collected here.

This is a question about Butler and about feminist, gender, and queer theories—about what they have lost and how to reckon with those losses—but it is also, I think, a question about the political mania and violence by which the United States and other parts of the world are currently wracked. The issue is too big for me to begin to handle, and I need to assert from the outset that I am not a psychiatrist, a political scientist, or a historian of the present. I do think, however, that these articles and Butler’s own work enable us to identify a certain structure of feeling that mar(k)s contemporary life. So let me end by pointing to two places in which something like a mania of the right—a mania that resolutely refused to acknowledge the loss on which it is grounded, thereby enabling the tip into violence—is uncovered and diagnosed in this roundtable and in Butler’s most recent work.

The first, from Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender, passes by almost without notice. Butler cites a 2020 speech given by Giorgia Meloni, the current Prime Minister of Italy, at the National Conservatism Conference in Rome. Defending the “natural family” against gay and lesbian parenting—although with no clear articulation of how gay and lesbian parents threaten heterosexual ones—Meloni claims that “today it is considered highly scandalous and even revolutionary to say that a family is made up of a man and a woman, and any son they may have” (Butler 2024, 254–55). Turning progressive, left, or radical rhetoric against itself is by now all too commonplace, although no less disingenuous and dangerous. But what struck me here was that the only child that matters is the son, “any son they may have.” The risk, the imagined devastating loss, is of the white European nontrans—and I assume nonqueer—male child. Patriarchal white masculinity is under attack—and I think we need to acknowledge that in a very real way, although not that claimed by its defenders, it is—helping to give rise or create a space for the manic and maniacally violent, rhetorically and literally, political forces represented by Meloni.

I say rhetorically and literally because this is the same loss against which the mass murderer Dylann Roof rails, as Gray reminds us in his article. Roof massacred six Black women and three Black men in their place of worship because, he said, “You rape our women. And you’re taking over our country. You have to go.” To the police who arrested him, who then took him to Burger King when he complained he was hungry, “he was not problematic.” Having spent his maniacal rage against Black ungendered flesh at Emanuel AME Church—Roof was indiscriminate in killing Black men and women, suggesting, as Gray shows, that gender difference does not pertain, for Roof, to racially othered beings—Roof was apparently docile with these police officers. Yet one is left, ineluctably, excruciatingly, with the question raised by Gray: is Roof not problematic to the police because they understand and share in his rage? This is not, I want to emphasize, to equate indifference with hateful speech or hateful speech with murderous action, nor is it to pretend to understand what makes a mass killer kill. But something is happening here to which we must attend.

Only sons matter. Only white sons matter. Only with the continuation or reinstatement of a regime in which white patriarchy is the inalterable norm can the lives of straight white nontrans boys flourish—or at least that is the claim Giorgia Meloni, Donald Trump, and JD Vance would have us believe. The fact that so many of these same boys do not flourish within that world, real and imagined, remains unseen, perhaps unseeable to those embedded in the presumptive idealization of white patriarchal supremacy.

This is only one of the many ways in which what passes for analysis from the right is simply wrong. There are worlds in which white men flourish that do not depend on the domination of others; we see such worlds around us every day. The challenge the right now poses for those of us who resist patriarchy, resist white supremacy, resist colonization and imperialism, resist the forces that render all other lives unlivable, is to recognize the loss of the fantasy—all too often the reality—of unearned goods and to imagine and enact other, better lives. As Butler insists—as they have argued in all of their work—we have to find ways to mourn even those forms of life that were not worth idealizing in the first place, that always depended on the devastation and immiseration of others. Or perhaps better, since there is always the question of whose labor is required by and for whom, we need to help those who do mourn these forms of life to recognize their losses, to recognize the harm these lost ideals perpetuate, and to see what other possibilities, what other more vibrant, more lively, more just futures are possible.

References