Opinion | Judith Butler: When Killing Women Isn’t a Crime

In the United States, “#MeToo” has been very powerful in exposing the pervasive character of sexual harassment and assault across every kind of workplace. There is no way to shut our eyes to how long women have suffered with harassment, retaliation, and the loss of their careers — the loss of trust in those upon whom they often depend for work. But the “me” in #metoo is not the same as the collective we, and a collective is not just a sequence of the stories of individuals. The basis for solidarity, for collective action, requires that we depart from the presumption of individualism; in the United States, the tendency is to reaffirm that tenet of political liberalism at the expense of strong and enduring collective bonds. In Argentina, Ni Una Menos is in some ways taking up the ethical and political obligation of “Nunca Mas!” or “Never Again!” forged in the aftermath of the dictatorship. The destruction and disappearance of the lives of thousands of students and activists on the left has led to a sharp opposition to state censorship, repression and violence. The killing of women is equally horrific, very often aided and abetted by police and courts who fail to acknowledge the crime and by a government that refuses to assert the equal rights of women to live their lives in freedom and without the fear of death.

Yancy: The reasons for these two movements are linked to political and economic structures that marginalize and oppress women. Political and economic structures are inextricably linked to machismo, the toxic sense of male identity that translates into male entitlement to women’s bodies; indeed, tied into whether or not women live or die. Talk about the performative dimensions of machismo.

Butler: I am no longer sure what counts as performative, but my view is that one reason that men feel free to dispose of women’s life as they see fit is because they are bound to one another through a silent (or not-so-silent) pact of brotherhood. They look the other way; they give each other permission and grant each other impunity. In so many places, the violence done to women, including murder, are not even conceptualized as crimes. They are “the way of the world” or “acts of passion” and these phrases disclose deep-seated attitudes that have naturalized violence against women, that is, made it seem as if this violence is a natural or normal part of ordinary life. When feminist men break that pact of solidarity, they risk exclusion by some communities, and yet that kind of defection from the ranks is exactly what is needed.

In Barcelona, a well-meaning man told me he was not entitled to join in a feminist demonstration against violence. But I disagreed with him. Well, maybe I agree with him: participation is not an entitlement; it is an obligation. But men who join that important fight against violence against women and trans people need to follow the leadership of women. If they stand together against the lethal pact of brotherhood that permits, deflects and exonerates, they do it first and foremost by confronting other men, and by forming groups that reject violence and affirm radical equality. After all, when the lives of women and minorities of all kinds are taken, that is a sign that those lives are not treated as equally valuable. The struggle against violence and the struggle for equality are linked.

Yancy: In what ways does your new book on nonviolence speak to questions regarding the vulnerability of women?

Butler: The new book, “The Force of Non-Violence,” is concerned with women, for sure, but with all people who are considered to be more or less ungrievable. I work with the feminist idea of “relationality” in order to show not only how lives are interdependent, but also how our ethical obligations to sustain each other’s lives follow from that interdependency. The interdiction against violence is a way of asserting and honoring that bond based on the equal value of lives, but this is not an abstract or formal principle. We require each other to live and that is as true of familial or kinship ties as it is of transnational and global bonds. The critique of individualism has been an important component of both feminist and Marxist thought, and it now becomes urgent as we seek to understand ourselves as living creatures bound to human and nonhuman creatures, to entire systems and networks of life. The various threats of destruction can take the form of state violence, feminicidio, abandonment of migrants, global warming. We have to rethink the ties of life to know why we are obligated to oppose violence even when, or precisely when, hostilities escalate.