Approximately 200 WashU community members gather to hear Judith Butler speak at the Center of Humanities’ 2026 Faculty Book Celebration (Jun Ru Chen | Contributing Photographer)

Author and feminist philosopher Judith Butler spoke to a crowd of about 200 members of the WashU community about their most recent book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” and the future of world democracy in the Clark-Fox Forum in Hillman Hall, Feb. 3. 

Butler is a gender theorist and distinguished professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate program in Comparative Literature, recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities, and a member of the advisory board for Jewish Voices for Peace. They are the author of many books, most notably “Gender Trouble” (1990), which proposed the concept of gender performativity — the idea that gender is a set of performed and learned actions rather than an inherent way of being. 

Butler first spoke about how progressives should deal with the uncertainty of what the future looks like in a time when, they said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans roam the streets of U.S. cities, the United Nations has declared Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and there have been federal attacks on trans-rights, amongst many other things progressives denounce. 

They emphasized that focused attention to current events is key to preventing these horrific acts by governments from becoming the norm. 

“I have suggested we may be feeling anxiety and alarm, that we also have to keep such events from becoming normal,” Butler said. “But does that mean we have to be on alert all the time? I want to say that we have to be focused and attentive, but refuse to be undermined by anxiety if we are to elude, oppose, and dismantle such powers.”

Butler argued that those who seek to resist conservative power need to create a future that supporters of conservative power would want to live in as well. 

“My wager is that those who would like to expose and defeat this [conservative] power have to ask themselves, ‘For what passionate principles do we stand, and how do we craft, display, and circulate them such that people will see what we offer?’ The kind of world in which they desire to live, to live in common,” Butler said. 

Butler said this strategy involves implementing imagination as a political tool.

“This last requires linking our political movements with the work of the imagination and creating an imaginary that allows us to think experimentally and hopefully about the new coordinates for a world that makes democratic life irresistible along the way,” she said.

Senior Ash Withrow said Butler’s talk made them rethink their idea of dismantling power.  

“Power is not formulaic in how it acts, but that’s how it presents itself, and how we can sort of dismantle it is through the ability to reimagine and recontextualize and recreate,” they said.

Senior Marissa Mathieson said she greatly appreciated Butler’s messages of community in the face of attacks on higher education.

“Beyond the talk about the literature and their book and all of the scholarly work they’ve done, I think the most important part [is] about social change and social justice, and hearing talks about it is that it reminds us how imperative it is to stay together in a time like this, no matter how much is changing around us,” she said. “One line that stuck out to me was that ‘Courage is collective,’ and I think that, especially when education is being reprimanded and taken away in a lot of different forms and aspects, that this is a time that we need to push forth against it and stay together to continue in the pursuit of education.”

Butler’s lecture was accompanied by two shorter introductory presentations by WashU faculty members celebrating the release of their new books. René Esparza, assistant professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) spoke about his book “From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS,” which deals with the Midwest’s reaction to the AIDS crisis, and argues that policies enacted during this time to counteract the spread of AIDS fueled gentrification in St. Paul and Minneapolis. 

In his book, Esparza details the history of seemingly progressive LGBTQ+ politics in the Midwest and argues that although gay men were the ones advocating for these policies, they were white gay men who assimilated well into Midwestern cultural values and severed ties with sex workers and racial minorities to achieve their means.

Anca Parvulescu, Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature, presented on her new book “Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism,” which connects transatlantic modernist literature’s obsession with the human face to the vast array of current technological and medical advances dedicated to improving, categorizing, and identifying faces. 

Parvulescu links physiognomy (the pseudoscientific idea that the face is a mirror into the soul) to notions of the human face as an access point to current politics of societal belonging in an era of Instagram filters, normalized plastic surgery, and airport security checkpoints based on facial recognition technology. 

She emphasized the relevance of the humanities to democracy today, speaking about the need for protesters to protect themselves from facial recognition to avoid repercussions from the government. 

“I ask myself as a literary critic, ‘What can literary studies and the humanities more generally contribute to [today’s political] conversation?’” Parvulescu said. “Just a look at the books published this year here at WashU should be enough to flag such questions … [Yet] we, again and again, have to justify our existence and so-called ‘advocate’ for the Humanities.”

In response to the increased pressure humanities departments across the country face to justify their existence amidst the federal government’s cuts to higher education funding, Butler echoed Parvulescu’s defense of the humanities.

“Washington University has always had a strong reputation in the humanities, especially its graduate programs,” Butler said. “Let’s make sure they stay strong, well-funded, and well-respected.”