Epilogue: Dancing While Queer

I am writing this in mid-2024 as the United States elections loom and authoritarianism is a growing global threat. The “anti-gender ideology movement” in Russia, the Vatican, Italy, Brazil, Taiwan, England, and other parts of the world characterizes gender as the most destructive force in the world and a monolithic threat to children, national security, masculinity, and the differences between the sexes. In Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024), Judith Butler points out that there are many reasons to fear: climate change, forced migration, war, capitalism and neoliberal economic policies that deprive people of basic necessities, misogyny, the rollback of reproductive freedoms, and systemic racism. QTBIPOC and women “are murdered at appalling rates” (p. 5).

In this setting of annihilation anxiety, anti-gender advocates have turned gender into a “phantasmatic scene” where “intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions” (Butler, 2024, p. 9) and “hatred is stoked and rationalized by moral righteousness” (Butler, 2024, p. 11). In an attempt to understand this anti-gender phantasmatic scene, Butler uses dream theory and the ideas of Jean Laplanche:

For when the scene is set, and something called gender is imagined to be acting on children or affecting the public in nefarious and destructive ways, “gender” substitutes for a complex set of anxieties and becomes an overdetermined site where the fear ofdestruction gathers. (2024, p. 10)

This authoritarian campaign of projection and reversal, used to deny the rights and the existence of others, raises the questions, “Who is out to destroy whom? And how do forms of shared and escalating moral sadism pass themselves off as a virtuous order?” (Butler, 2024, p. 11).

The articles in this issue elaborate a multiplicity of queer perspectives on psychoanalysis. All the authors value the radical possibilities of psychoanalysis, even in the face of hostility and hatred within psychoanalysis and the larger cult