Judith Butler

“gender” with sociocultural forms of becoming.

In a late interview, Laplanche suggests that “ideology” takes place when cultural codes enter into the most primal fantasies where there is no clear way to dissociate the unconscious from the work of the cultural

but to see how a range of cultural and social elements are reorganized through pathways or arrangements already operating at the level of the unconscious

For it is not just a set of beliefs that we came to adopt in time, but ways of organizing reality that are part of our very formation, including our education. Ideology provides the terms by which we come to understand ourselves, but it also brings us into beings as social subjects.

The backlash that we see against “gender” is part of this larger restoration project that seeks to shore up authoritarian regimes as rightful forms of paternalism, the dream come true.

The incoherence and impossibility of the case against gender represent contradictory phenomena, and even offer its public a way to collect many of its fears and convictions without ever having to make the bundle coherent: gender represents capitalism, and gender is nothing but Marxism; gender is a libertarian construct, and gender signals the new wave of totalitarianism; gender will corrupt the nation, like unwanted migrants but also like imperialist powers

What is dismissed as “academic” procedure is actually required for informed public deliberations in democracies. Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute. Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precon
dition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.

Is this a description of gender studies, or a mirror reflection of a form of religious orthodoxy that has projected its own operation onto gender, figuring it as a rival orthodoxy?

As a project that shuts down the kind of critical thinking that contests the heteronormative status quo, the anti-gender movement is a politically consequential form of anti-intellectualism, opposing thought itself as a danger to society—fertile soil for the horrid collaboration of fascist passions with authoritarian regimes.

Whereas ideologies for Mannheim work to preserve existing social orders—or preserve the idea of a former social order—in the face of instabilities, they can be countered by utopias, which activate certain potentials within society to foster a collective imaginary of transformation.