Interview with

Judith Butler1
Sara Ahmed

Sexualities
0(0) 111
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1363460716629607
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Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

SA: I have been asked to interview you about Gender Trouble and how this book
has shaped the eld of Queer Studies. In the preface to the second edition of Gender
Trouble, you write that the life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and this is
surely in part because of the changing context of its reception. I really like this
description. I like the idea that texts have lives other than the ones we give them as
writers, and that these lives are partly about how texts are picked up.
Could you comment more on these changing contexts of reception for Gender
Trouble within the academy? What were some of the surprising pickups?
JB: It is always a little odd when I have to answer questions about Gender
Trouble because I do not fully remember it. I remember more the arguments I
have had to come up with to explain or defend the book, but very few sentences
from the book actually come to mind. And I never reread my work, so it is not
really possible to check the text. Anyway, the idea of checking the text is strange,
since one can certainly go back to see whether there is textual evidence for an
interpretation, but textual evidence is not exactly data. And we end up interpreting
it again.
I sometimes think about that text as a manic defence of activity. At least the
incessant quality of performativity, understood as a kind of action, seems to
dominate the nal pages and seems to constitute, for some, the main theoretical
contribution of the text. I have even been told that the sections on melancholia do
not t well with the general theory of performativity, but I am not sure that is true,
but the suggestion troubles me, so maybe it is. Perhaps I was trying in a preliminary
way to think about marking losing, acknowledging, and acting. I think of demonstrations that are focused on public grieving as one place where those two dimensions come together, those sites where the funeral is already a certain kind of
demonstration, asserting and making collectively known that another valued life
has been lost.

Corresponding author:
Sara Ahmed, Goldsmiths, Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: s.ahmed@gold.ac.uk

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As for the reception, I have been pleased to see the way Gender Trouble has been
taken up by performance studies, by legal scholars concerned with the politics of
categories, by political and cultural theorists who are interested in the embodiment
of resistance. I am especially moved by the political and legal eorts that make use
of the text to depathologize queer and trans lives, or to arm alternative parenting
arrangement or new forms of kinship. Some work on citizenship as well relies on a
performative understanding of laying claim to basic entitlements and political
status. Of course, some of the more activist forms of appropriation rely on voluntarist accounts of performativity, but enactment can, in general be understood as
a less conscious and willed dimension of reproducing social and political categories.
So I think performativity may operate in the interstices of the willed and the
unwilled.
SA: It is interesting that you dont reread your own work. I do, but in a kind of
incessant anxious way: I spend the whole time looking for errors. Which, of course,
I then nd!
I guess error would be another way into thinking about the potentiality of
enactments, that sense that we might err, or go astray, or deviate, which is what I
have taken too from how you have used turning/interpellation: turning around as
keeping open the possibility of not returning to the same place, or not being
aected quite as expected. The sense of error that we are more used to, though,
is the sense of getting something wrong, or being in the wrong, or getting into
trouble. So I wanted to ask you about trouble.
This is one of my favourite sentences from Gender Trouble:
To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one
should never do, precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its
reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise
into my rst critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened
one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble.

I learn so much from the description of how trouble becomes a technique! It is

also an interesting moment in the text, because of the allusion to your own
experience.
Could you reect a little on this textual moment, and also about the extent to which
you have drawn on your experience in generating critical insights and why you would
or would not make that explicit in the text?
You talk in the preface not only of gender as trouble but how feminist debates
over the meaning of gender lead time and time again to a certain sense of trouble.
Could you reect back now on this certain sense of trouble?

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Ahmed

JB: I suppose I am always aware of the trouble I might get into and I seek not to be
deterred by the spectre or prospect of that trouble. It is important to summon some
courage when trouble is threatened for causing trouble. If my positions are understood as destructive, those who seek to de-ratify them certainly have been known to
use their own violent forms of discourse and action. So trouble becomes the name
for a scene in which a certain eort to contest the status quo is punished or
maligned for its ostensible destructiveness. But to watch or witness the scene,
one is really forced to ask where the destructiveness can be found? Dismantling
forms of oppression, for instance, involves a certain way of destroying what has
been built badly, built in ways that are consequential in the damage they cause. So
to damage a damaging machine in the name of less damage, is that possible? And
can we distinguish between armative modes of taking apart the machinery that
causes injury and the destructive modes of injury itself? I think we have to continue
the labour of making that distinction.
In Gender Trouble, there are some sections of the book that talk about what it
means to be subjected to norms. There I am interested in how one is subjected to a
norm and also subjectivated, made into a subject, so the norm can be repressive
and oppressive, but also strangely, even disturbingly generative. We probably
know that experience best when we realize that we no longer require external
authority or the police to regulate our practices since we are doing that ourselves.
The moment that interests me, a recurrent moment, is what happens when we grasp
that we are in the midst of reiterating a norm, even that a norm has entered into a
basic sense of who we are, and start to deviate, to use your important term, from
that more obedient sense of repetition. I want to say that deviation brings with it
anxiety, fear, and a sense of thrill, and that when it is undertaken in concert with
others, it is also the beginning of new forms of solidarity that make it possible to
risk a new sense of being a subject. Others are doing it as well, and there, in some
sense, to facilitate the social and political change the deviation implies.
SA: I really like reading back through an authors writings, all those hap lled
journeys still lead us somewhere. I am currently reading some lesbian feminist
theory for a book I am writing, Living a Feminist Life, and I will return to
Gender Trouble for that. I know you have been working on vulnerability, so I
am interested in asking about traces of (the question of) vulnerability in Gender
Trouble: are they there? Is there a relation between trouble and vulnerability?
JB: I would rather ask you about living a feminist life, and whether you have
gured out how best to live a life, and whether feminism helps you there. If so, I
would like some pointers, though it is getting a bit late for me.
You ask about vulnerability, and I want to say that it is there from the start.
From the start in Gender Trouble, but also from the start for any of us, so my
answer is something of a joke. If, for instance, we think about gender assignment as
being called a name then we are aected by gender terms before we have any sense

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of what they mean or any understanding of what kind of eects they have. Indeed,
this follows, I think, from the fact that we are aected by the ways we are
addressed, and those modes of address start early and against our will; they are
there, as it were, from the start. Sometimes those modes of address embrace and
animate, but they can inaugurate a chain of injury as well. So from the start, we are
aected, even if being ignored or being called by injurious names are the modes
of address that aect us, install themselves in us, move or stop us in various ways.
So we might say that gender assignment nds us, from the start, vulnerable to its
eects. We are both vulnerable and animated by those eects, so I do not mean to
associate vulnerability with pure passivity or being without a will. It may be that
the will is formed precisely through this process.
There is, of course, vulnerability in taking the risk, knowing one will be called a
name, or worse, but there is also a vulnerability in the name of which one acts, and
which informs ones very acting. After all, responding with indignation to injury
means that one has been aected by that injury, and that being aected is not a
fully passive condition.
Vulnerability can be the condition of responsiveness something aects us, or
we nd ourselves aected; we are moved to speak, to accept the terms by which we
are addressed, or to refuse them, or, indeed, to skew them or queer them in directions that, yes, as you have shown, deviate from what seem to be their original
aims. Indeed, I would suggest that there are two dimensions of gender performativity from the start: one is the unchosen or unwilled situation of gender assignment, one that we can come to deliberate about and change in time; the other is
performative action that takes up the terms by which we have been addressed
(and so a retaking, a taking over, or a refusal), the categories through which we
have been formed, in order to begin the process of self-formation within and
against its terms.
As I have suggested, from the beginning, as it were, we are assigned genders, and
that assignment is an enormous discursive practice that acts upon us. We are vulnerable to that assignment and subject to it from the start, at the start, against our
will. Indeed, we can understand the rst discursive practices of gender assignment
as potentially exploiting our vulnerability. After all, we are beings who have to be
addressed in order to live, who are addressed by others, through language or
through other signifying practices, including touch and noise, and that without
those forms of enabling address, we do not really survive. Being fed and put to
sleep are also ways of having the body addressed at a very basic level. So without
address, there is no survival. But survival means that we do not fully control the
means by which we are addressed, and we can live with this as adults more or less
well, or we can seek to exercise power over how we are addressed. Indeed, much of
your work, Sara, derives its political power and appeal from holding out the possibility that we can speak out and against those who address us in ways that are
radically unacceptable, or against those who really fail to address us and, in that
way, potentially imperil our existence.

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Ahmed

So vulnerability is there in the concept of subjectivation, being acted on from the

start by norms we never chose, but also, concretely, through gender assignment,
which forms a very intense predicament for those who want to contest the terms of
that assignment, or to engage in practices of self-assignment that refute or revise
(deviate from) assignment given by others and prior to the formation of my will.
The formation of the will in the sphere of gender might be understood as taking up
the task of self-assignment, and we might understand the linguistic register of
autonomy here.
SA: I guess we could think too of deviation from assignments (or as a task of selfassignment) in terms of intellectual trajectories. I remember you saying in a workshop in Amsterdam that you were a philosopher who had become derailed. I really
liked that idea as you could probably tell. Just a small deviation and you can fall o
the track, one that was leading you somewhere. No wonder a small deviation can
be a hard thing to achieve! So much pressure in an assignment, just as you have
shown in your work on gender. And if the consequences of deviation can be derailing, no wonder that that can just add to the pressure. A consequence can be a
warning system: if you deviate enough, everything might come to a stop. Even if
you are willing those consequences, even if they can be thrilling, it can be frightening, not knowing where you are going to end up. I think it might require a certain
wilfulness just to be condent enough that falling o can still mean getting somewhere, even when falling o is not a matter of will.
So two questions about your intellectual journeys to and from Gender Trouble:
You described once that you had been derailed as a philosopher. Would you
describe Gender Trouble as part of your derailment as a philosopher? Is there a
connection between being a derailed philosopher and being a feminist and queer
theorist?
Gender Trouble is very generous in terms of its citational practice, bringing many
dierent authors and intellectual traditions into conversation. Who do you think of as
your primary conversational partners? Has/how has your sense of who you are in
conversation with changed over time?
JB: I am sure that that derailment was happening way before I was derailed from
philosophy. I was not following the right paths or, if I was, there were always some
swerves that disturbed those who thought I should be seeking only conformity and
safety. At the time that I was in graduate school philosophy departments were
already arguing about what counts as philosophy and everyone lived in fear of
being discounted. So it became clear to me that the way philosophers tried to
exclude one another from the denition of philosophy was actually part of their
professional practice and should enter into any sociological description of the eld.
There was always something grave and authoritative about the claim that someone

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else was not really a philosopher. Sometimes it was said with an air of superiority
and other times it was delivered as an act of derision.
So given that I am the one who was from the start suggesting that none of us are
really quite commensurate with the norms that govern who we are supposed to be,
I took up the position of the unreal and even made forms of solidarity on the basis
of that interpellation. It is not that I think that the more narrow-minded people
should be able to lay claim to really being philosophers, but I knew that it would be
a form of subjection to struggle for recognition within those terms. After all, those
terms are in contest, which is why the police force is so stringent. Sometimes the
recognition did arrive, or arrives still, without my bidding, and that is salutary, but
not necessary. In graduate school, neither in my choice of dissertation topic nor in
my turn to gender theory did I try to conform to philosophical standards that were,
after all, everywhere debated; where they did exist, they were enforced by a kind of
disciplinary police action that I opposed at a quite visceral level. I very much like
your idea of the sweaty concept, and think perhaps that it might also characterize a
certain dicult but necessary embodied resistance to forms of disciplinary power or
cruelty within academic life. It is the action of the concept in ones tissues, ones
muscles.
It is true that when I started Gender Trouble I proposed to write a book on the
philosophical foundations of gender so I was working within some established set
of philosophical norms at that moment. But it is interesting how my engagement
with scholars in anthropology, history of science, feminist history, and literary
theory all turned my head, as it were, and I ended up writing, I think, an antifoundational treatise on gender. What a deviation that was! That turning of my
head was also my departure from more traditional ways of doing philosophy and
though that was a loss to me, I was also glad to be released into a broader world of
interdisciplinary scholars. Every conversation with Donna Haraway blew my mind,
and some of the feminists who were working in literary criticism challenged me in
ways that took a long time to work through and understand (still not sure I am
there!). The fact that I remain, at whatever level, wedded to the concept (hilarious
phrase!), makes it dicult for some people who have a criticism of the concept
(either those who prize gurative language or those who think aect is adamantly
pre-conceptual). So I do still sometimes register an anti-philosophical prejudice
within queer or cultural studies even as I am derailed from philosophy. It is an
awkward place to be, but surely bearable.
It is true that I was very much in conversation with people in the preparing of
Gender Trouble and then again when I had to respond to the criticisms in writing
Bodies that Matter. But I think perhaps that now I work in greater solitude, possibly because that particular theoretical time of the feminist movement is not happening any more, and my work has wandered o in some other directions. One
reason your work, Sara, has been such a joy for me is that it brings theory back
into play in a way that is conceptually patient, imaginative, and urgent. That
combination of patience and urgency is dicult to nd.

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Ahmed

As for a feminist or queer theorist I have to say that I am glad to own those
terms, and I certainly realize that feminism is a name I took on, and that queer
theorist is one that arrived at my steps at a certain point in history. So they are
dierent histories. Deciding that I was a feminist that must have been at age 14
was an exhilarating and clarifying experience. And then realizing that queer theorist would become a category, a way of identifying a person engaged in a certain
kind of theoretical practice that remains interesting to me, something I own
without precisely having decided to take it on much less to participate in its
founding. All these terms have the potential to become prisons, of course, so I
am often challenging them, even disappointing those who imagine I should or
would speak only from one perspective and pledge my loyalty there. I cannot do
that for whatever reason perhaps both my intellectual freedom and the pleasure
and promise of my alliances would be undermined. But I would not deny or refuse
such terms. I would only dedicate myself to not letting them become ossifying in
their eects. After all, these terms have to be living, have to become embodied in a
life, have to be passed along, or passed between us, if they are to remain living, if
they are to remain terms we need in order to live, to live well; even to live under
conditions of equality or freedom and justice, ideals that inform the political struggles that remain so important.
SA: I appreciate both these answers very much. Sometimes, writing can seem rather
lonely, but really there is so much companionship, so many conversations including
not only those that turn up as citations, but also those that enable us to get to the
point of writing and that leave rather more obscure traces. I often think of other
feminist and queer books, the ones I keep nding myself picking up at moments of
being perplexed, as my travelling companions, what I carry with me, wherever I go.
I also appreciate how you give a sense of terms as having their own histories, and
also their own lives, which are not separable from ours; how terms can stay alive by
becoming part of how we live, by being embodied in a struggle to live or to live
well, or by becoming ways of keeping life open as a question. I guess one question
that could follow is how the life of a book, lets say Gender Trouble, as well as the
life of the terms introduced by a book, lets say performativity, might relate to the
life of a eld, lets say Queer Studies. I think it is dicult and demanding to ask an
author how their own work has shaped a eld, so I wont ask that question directly,
even though it is an interesting one.
I appreciated your reections in Against Proper Objects about some of the
diculties and dangers at stake in designating elds by giving boundaries to
objects: and the invitation that follows to think from the entanglement of dierent
intellectual and political histories. With all these tangles no wonder so many of our
objects are improper! So my question:
If queer theorist is a term you own without exactly having decided to take on, could
you reect on how you would relate to Queer Studies, understood, provisionally, to

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have the status of a eld? What are the risks and potential of thinking of Queer
Studies as either an audience or as a eld?
JB: I remember that Queer Studies seemed to emerge rst in the 1990s as a way of
distinguishing certain kinds of queer scholarship from queer theory. I remember
this as an eort on the part of those who work in the social sciences or who have
important empirical or historical referents for their work to combat what was once
perceived to be the hegemony of a more abstract queer theory. I do not remember
all those details, but it struck me as right that Queer Studies had to encompass a
variety of modes of knowing and that the more rareed versions of literary theory
could not speak to those who were trying to bring queer perspectives to history,
geography, public policy, popular culture, economics, science studies, and the history of science. So I understood it as a demand for greater epistemological inclusiveness, though was, of course, sorry to see that theory was somehow gured as a
problem. There are, of course, many interesting theoretical issues at stake for those
who are seeking to tell histories or account for economic formations in late capitalism or trying to understand the public stakes in certain forms of scientic experimentation. So for me, what seemed at rst to be a tentative opposition between
Queer Studies and queer theory turned into a situation in which theory became
diused or refracted throughout Queer Studies. Some people obviously still do
theory but theory is undertaken in relation to issues that engaged the world in new
ways, or that are clearly undertaken in relation to the struggle to imagine new
worlds.
I was also disoriented by the emergence of Queer Studies as an armation of
queer identities, and that happened in certain places within Europe. People now
say, I am queer and at the time that queer theory began, I am pretty sure that
nearly everyone thought that queer should not be an identity, but should name
something of the uncapturable or unpredictable trajectory of a sexual life. Eve
Sedgwick made this point perhaps most elegantly and emphatically. Perhaps I
am queer is supposed to be the public display of a paradox for others to think
about. I understand that in certain contexts the demand for recognition within
institutional and public structures is great, and that one way to achieve that is
by establishing an identity. But since a fair amount of queer theory has been directed against the policing of identity, the demand to have one and to show one
upon demand, it has been a bit startling to me. But then again, I have to ask myself:
why should we not be startled by the directions that a term like queer takes? It has
travelled far and wide, and who knows what next permutation it will have.
That said, I am much more drawn to queer work that is probing the possibilities
of alliance, and not just struggling for the rights of one identity. PQBDS2 is one
important example: Palestinian queers who are for BDS and who link the struggle
against homophobia with the struggle against occupation. Queers who join alliances against racism, or whose struggle against the discrimination of genderqueer
and trans people is linked with their struggle for health care and demilitarization,
against precarity, nationalism, and racism.

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Ahmed

If queer once sought to provide an umbrella term for nonconforming genders

and various sexualities, ones that did not easily submit to categorization, it is now
clearly embroiled in a battle of its own. Many trans people, or trans advocates,
have argued that queer is exclusionary, that it does not include or describe trans
experience. And though certain versions of queer have been rightly criticized for
being presumptively white and classist, I think that the queers of colour movement has done enormously powerful work to redirect the orientation of the term, to
democratize its potential, and to expose and oppose its exclusionary limits in the
context of a broadening struggle, the articulating of a more complex alliance that
contests some of the older versions of the collective.
I think there are questions about how the term queers of colour works outside
of geopolitical contexts that are for the most part arguing about race and colonialism within the framework of multiculturalism. Some groups want to be described
more specically, and others worry that the framework is too US-based. But what
impresses me most is the way that queer activists have worked in organizations that
seek to shift signicantly HIV politics not only within the Euro-Atlantic context
but in the global south, especially Africa, as well as organizations that battle antimigrant nationalism and racism in Europe. There are also many important links in
South America as movements there continue to debate about how the postcolonial as it is currently theorized does and does not include them. Queer politics in
South America often has to deal with post-dictatorial conditions and the emergence of democracy in ways that require a dierent genealogy, and which debate
the structure of public space and economic precarity. I have learned from Leticia
Sabsay at LSE about much of this.
But the strongest criticism of queer lately has come from the trans community.
And that takes several forms. I accept these criticisms as necessary, and have found
myself revising my views in response to some of what has been said. I also found
that those who work on intersex have found queer to be sometimes less than
helpful, so it is important to understand why. If queer means that we are generally
people whose gender and sexuality is unxed then what room is there in a queer
movement for those who understand themselves as requiring and wanting a
clear gender category within a binary frame? Or what room is there for people who
require a gender designation that is more or less unequivocal in order to function
well and to be relieved of certain forms of social ostracism? Many people with
intersexed conditions want to be categorized within a binary system and do not
want to be romanticized as existing beyond all categories.
Of course, there are dierent debates on this issue in both trans and intersex
communities, but the message to the advocates of queer seems quite pertinent:
some people very much require a clear name and gender, and struggle for recognition on the basis of that clear name and gender. It is a fundamental issue of how
to establish and insist upon those forms of address that make life liveable. At issue
as well is a question of autonomy, conceptualized not through individualism, but as
an emergent social phenomenon: how do I name myself, how can I establish my
status within the law or within medical institutions, and to what extent will my

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desire to live as a particular gender or within an established gender category be

honoured by those who claim to ally with me but who position themselves against
my desire to be named and recognized a certain way? This question makes sense to
me, which is why it is really important for us to rethink questions of autonomy and
embodiment within a social eld saturated with power.
SA: Thank you. And a nal question about futures.
What kind of questions, concerns, interests, directions would for you be the ones that
would keep Queer Studies alive as a project?
JB: Here are some questions that I think are really important:
How do we understand those desires that we might call abiding, persistent, and that
for many dene their basic sense of self? How do we even understand that basic sense
of self, when it exists or when it struggles to exist? How is that sense formed, and when
does it take hold, if it does? Under what conditions is it dismantled or even shattered?
And how do we live in ways that request that this sense of self, these abiding and
obdurate desires, be recognized? How do we account for those whose experience of
desire does not settle in this way, so that either desire may contest a basic sense of
self or may establish the self as changeable or alterable? How do we tell the stories
about how we came upon our desires, how we came to negotiate the basic ways in
which both gender and sexuality were assigned against our will at the same time
that we insist on the enduring or bedrock quality of the category that describes who
we have become? How do we still value becoming without losing track of what
grounds and denes us? How much of our self-denition is found and how much is
made, and under what conditions do new naming practices oer us a chance to be
who we wish to be? How do we think about the doubleness of the self that wants to
be who it is? Is that doubleness fully overcome when we say that we have arrived
and that we are now that being what we always wanted to be? What lingering
disappointments or doubts follow, and are we still living when we have decided on
who we are? How can a sense of living be preserved within the terms of decision, so
that deciding does not put an end to the processual quality of life? Conversely, if
we never decide who we are, are we at risk of becoming dispersed in ways that
make life unlivable? How do we think about those self-naming and self-dening
practices that take place in concert with others in a world in which the language we
use is itself in a process of change?
What if we shift the question from who do I want to be? to the question, what
kind of life do I want to live with others?? It seems to me that then many of the
questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about the good life very
ancient yet urgent philosophical questions take shape in a new way. If the I who
wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a you and a
they then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of
us are to live.

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Ahmed

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It is of course especially dicult to ask this last question, what kind of life do I
want to live with others, if the life that we are seeking to live is not regarded as a life
at all? How do these philosophical desires become compromised or complicated if a
life is considered a non-life under regimes of racism? How do we account for the
experience of someone crossing national borders only to nd that they are racialized in ways that never existed before? A sudden, unexpected interpellation. How
does the issue of race divide those queer activists and writers who ally with struggles against racism, nationalism, war, and occupation from those who think that
queer ought to become its own identity, its own discipline, and so dierentiated
from these other concerns and struggles? It seems to me that queer has to be part of
the weave of a broadening struggle.
Important also is to ask: Whose stories do we read, and how important might
the story be in telling a history, in explaining how science changes, or in making
clear how a philosophical concept works, or can work?
How do we think about bringing feminism into a closer relation with queer and
trans and with anti-racist struggles, without letting those who conduct transphobic
diatribes monopolize the meaning of feminism, or those who continue to believe
that feminists must defend themselves against the claims of cultural dierence?
Can we still own queer or any of these terms without letting them monopolize
dierence, allowing for a certain movement of thought that is grateful to its critics
for letting us think something new, that is glad to be in the mix of emerging alliance
and not the ultimate sign of its unity?
SA: Thank you for giving an answer by asking more questions!
Notes
1. This interview took place during September 2014.
2. PQBDS is Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, while BDS is
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. For PQBDS, see http://www.pqbds.com/ (accessed
January 2016).

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