“We are not born a woman: we become one. This sentence from Second sex (1949), by Simone de Beauvoir, may well reflect the beautiful density of French classicism, it announces that the woman, more than a biological being, is becoming a cultural revolution which, embodied since 1990 by the theorist Judith Butler, terrifies the male Emanuel Todd. The French historian and anthropologist does not digest that the lady changes sex to gender!
His essay Where are they? A Sketch of Women’s History looks like a pamphlet, thinly disguised, against the book Gender Disorderby the American philosopher Judith Butler, published in English in 1990, translated into French under the title gender disorder (The Discovery, 2005). For him, “this text as fundamental as it is obscure” pushes “to its most absurd consequences” the concept of genre.
The obscure style of the theoretician, born in 1956, would even be effective. Thanks to him, “we are, dares to write Todd, born, for his part, in 1951, prepared for this world in which lesbians have denounced, during turbulent Gay Prides in San Francisco or London, transgender women as submissives. – male sailors infiltrated into the feminist movement”.
The historian and anthropologist associates Judith Butler with “more than half a century of decomposition of identities” marked, according to him, “around 1965” by “the final fall of religion”, followed “between 2000 and 2020” by this which he describes as “an active self-destruction of all identity”. He recalls that the American theorist who obsesses him is “Jewish” and queen of the paradox by her “anti-Israeli and pro-Arab positions, therefore in solidarity, for Todd, with countries where the status of women is one of the lowest. “.
What he deplores as Judith Butler’s “multidimensional identity crisis” curiously leads him to startling reflections. Admittedly bold, they are not lacking in interest, if only because they temper his resentment towards the theoretician. According to Todd, “the fascination with transgender people is perhaps just a revisiting of the old Christian dream of overcoming the human condition”.
In his vast work, which is full of statistics, maps and graphs, the austere anthropologist explores the convergence and differences between men and women. But it is, by far, his considerations, on the margins of the criticism of the work of Judith Butler, which hold our attention by their originality.
Todd believes that the appeal of transgender people, wholly unforeseen models of the superhuman, would be, especially in the United States, “the apotheosis of zombie Protestantism” in a desperate resistance to encroaching religious unbelief. Despite the fierce attack he inflicts on her, Judith Butler will have managed, as if by magic, to breathe this fragile inspiration into the essayist.