In Madrid, under the vaulted ceilings of the Reina Sofía Museum, a climate of quiet dread rippled through the crowd as philosopher Judith Butler—nonbinary scholar, feminist radical, gender theorist—made a solemn declaration: we are witnessing the resurrection of patriarchy, racism, nationalist fervor, and capitalist individualism. It’s a warning, not just for academia, but for every body rendered vulnerable by the structures that claim to define us.

Butler, whose groundbreaking Gender Trouble argued that gender is performative, not innate, leaned into that legacy in their address. They didn’t mince words as they named the forces currently clawing at social progress: “the nostalgic fury of right-wing movements that want to return to an idealised past, one that perhaps never truly existed, and to re-establish hierarchical orders.”

A Call Against Regression

Butler’s speech was both diagnosis and rallying cry. They urged a revival of Marxist analysis as a tool to dissect the entanglements of capitalism with patriarchal and racial domination. Critique, in Butler’s telling, isn’t optional—it’s necessary for resisting the drift toward a brutal status quo. To underplay the urgency, they insisted: “we must commit to saying what we want to see realised, and not just complain about what is going wrong.”

With unflinching clarity, Butler turned to trans issues. They rejected the notion that trans rights are ancillary or optional, stating that “abandoning transgender rights … [is] tantamount to operating within a fascist logic.” The idea of gender assignment as coercion, they said, must be named and resisted. They warned against insisting that young people “can’t experiment or imagine how to live [in] their bodies in the world.”

To abandon that openness is to risk reinforcing the very walls queer theory has long resisted. To close the door on possibility is to surrender to the same forces that demand conformity, order, and exclusion.

Intersectional Critique & Courage

Butler—who is Jewish—did not shy away from citing their own entanglement in political firestorms. After condemning Israeli actions in Gaza, their name surfaced on a “blacklist” tied to antisemitism investigations during the Trump era. Butler described the experience as Kafkaesque: accused without seeing the complaint, silenced without a chance to defend.

They framed it as part of a broader climate: the conflation of dissent with criminality, of critique with violence. “If you denounce genocide … you are a terrorist,” they said. “If you denounce violence … you are violent.” That kind of rhetorical capture is the very terrain where closing the space for critique becomes normal.

Why This Matters

In an era defined by populist backlash, shrinking civil liberties, and resurgent identity politics, Butler’s admonition feels less like prophecy and more like urgent instruction. For queer people, nonbinary folks, trans youth, and those whose bodies defy norms: the stakes are not abstract. They are visceral.

The crisis isn’t only political—it’s ontological. To live in a world that actively attempts to “restore” order is to risk erasing the experimental, uncertain, vibrant ways of being that culture and communities have fought to preserve. Butler’s call is a reminder that resistance isn’t just external, against laws or regimes. It’s internal, against the scripts we absorb, the limits we accept, the doors we let close.

They ask us: What if we refuse to look back? What if we reject nostalgia and instead commit to multiplicity, to “bridges being built” between identities, struggles, geographies, and bodies? What if we insist on the radical openness of becoming?

So in Madrid, under the gaze of art and history, Butler planted a warning and a seed. The restoration they decry is underway. But so is the possibility of reimagining. If we choose to meet that future, we’ll need to name, resist, rebuild—but above all, to keep widening the space for what’s possible.

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