‘I put my thinking into the world, and there’s a circulation of thought,’ the author of 1990’s seminal book Gender Trouble told an audience at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid this past September. For years Butler’s ideas on gender and queer identity have coursed through artist studios and curatorial thinking, fuelling art’s more recent instinct towards autobiography, the constructed self and the dissection of the othered body. Yet the means by which those ideas can circulate are under attack. An advocate for Palestine, the Jewish academic was one of the 160 student and staff names provided by their employer, UC Berkeley, to federal investigators in ‘potential connection to reports of alleged antisemitism’. ‘We are witnessing the restoration of patriarchy, nationalism, racism, and capitalist individualism,’ Butler warned at the Spanish event. Yet the writer retains their platforms for now: the 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender? was published in paperback in the UK this year, with more territories and translations rolling out, the thinker backing the book with talks and conferences internationally.