The private and the public On women, bodies, and social justice

In an unsurprisingly lengthy executive order, Donald Trump, on January 20th 2025, declared that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. .. My Administration will … recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” In my lecture, I am not concerned with questions of biology, but rather with the question: Why is it so important in the current political climate to insist on the binary biological definition of gender as two opposite sexes? The political and social function of this invocation of binarism is the re-establishment of the unquestioned traditional role assignments - and at the same time denounces and marginalizes all those who do not fit into this graphic clarity. The ideological rehabilitation of seemingly biological facts fits into a framework shaped by power relations and political, cultural, and economic interests, and aligns with the gender model and the separation of the respective social roles of far-right populism. The discourse on bodies, gender, and gender roles can then be seen as a vehicle for political and social programmatic setback and oppression. This is at the same time a restitution of the traditional bourgeois separation between a private and a public space, of the bourgeois family, and of the gender-division of labour. In arguing against the new reactionary sexual binarism and biological separation, I’m also arguing for a different conception of the public and the private and for an idea of social justice which conveys, shapes, expresses social justice beyond two ideological social spheres.