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Amerikanistik: "Does Gender Still Exist? Gender Studies in the Age of Trump"

Ringvorlesung im Sommersemester 2025 im Rahmen des Studienprogramms "Gender Studies und feministische Wissenschaft" mit Themenschwerpunkt auf der Interdisziplinarität der Geschlechterforschung

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Amerikanistik: "Does Gender Still Exist? Gender Studies in the Age of Trump"

In her most recent study of 2024, Judith Butler asks the pertinent and eponymous question Who’s Afraid of Gender? People’s fear of gender seems to be the effect of a carefully crafted language use which projects all kinds of disasters, developments, and devastations onto gender. “[I]nflammatory rhetoric” (7) and the circulation of “the phantasm of ‘gender’” are ways “for existing powers – states, churches, political movements – to frighten people to come back into their ranks, to accept censorship, and to externalize their fear and hatred onto vulnerable communities” (6). This return to a seemingly happy pre-gender time with “national security,” “heterosexual marriage,” “the normative family” (4), also, as those in power say, caters to the fear of “a plot by elites to impose their cultural values on ‘real people’” (4). This authoritarian move “promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never have existed,” one that “only a strong state can restore” (7). Butler’s introduction reads like a blue-print for the current Trump administration.
In the following, I will briefly sketch the development of the women’s movement from its early late-eighteenth-century manifestations (Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray) via its nineteenth-century more radical and intersectional resistance (Seneca Falls Declaration, Sojourner Truth) and early feminist organizations to the women’s, civil rights, and gay and lesbian movements of the 1960s (Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich), and eventually to the twenty-first-century LGBTQIA* movements. Parallel to this historical development, I will look at academic changes starting with the emergence of feminist literary criticism and women’s studies in the 1960s and 1970s, moving on to gender studies and ideas of intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw) in the 1980s, and briefly discussing the emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the first decades of our century, including trans and queer studies. The concept of waves, even though highly debated, has served, and will serve me, to signpost important moments in this overview but also point out moments of backlash, of which we see the epitome in the second Trump administration. I will come full circle then by briefly looking at Trump’s executive orders affecting gender and gender studies and some practical consequences such as the curtailing of abortion rights and the banning of books. 

• Ringvorlesung 2025 Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven in der Geschlechterforschung
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