Who's Afraid of Gender?

by Judith Butler

Judith Butler, the ground-breaking philosopher whose influential work has redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on gender that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed "anti-gender ideology movements" dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous threat to families, local cultures, civilization --and even "man" himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to abolish reproductive justice, undermine protections against violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights.But what, exactly, is so scary about gender? In this vital, courageous book, Butler carefully examines how "gender" has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. They illuminate the concrete ways that this phantasm displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of critical race theory and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us an essentially hopeful work that is both timely and timeless.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Queer, Philosophy, Gender, Politics, LGBT

308 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2024

About the author

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist and feminist philosopher who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. They are currently a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.

Butler received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s they held several teaching and research appointments, and were involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Their research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka and loss, and mourning and war. Their most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy and exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.

Reviews

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.

*******************************************

I seem to have started pretty much every review recently with “I don’t quite know how to talk about this book” but … the thing is, I don’t quite know how to talk about this book.
In the positive sense, given that I basically highlighted, like, the entire thing and have been thinking about what I read since I read it.

I think, honestly, at this point, I’m just relieved that Judith Butler isn’t randomly a TERF now. I mean, I don’t know why I’d think that, given their past work (plus it’d be a pretty weird stance for a nonbinary person to take), but too much of my life at the moment seems to consist of Googling “is [someone I admire] [who was probably born a generation or so before me] randomly a TERF now?” with dread in my heart.

The other thing I find, not complicated necessarily, but worth thinking about, is who a book like Who’s Afraid of Gender is for exactly. Like is anyone who disagrees with the book’s premise (i.e. that trans and nonbinary people deserve dignity, liberty and the right to self-actualise, that anti-gender rhetoric is not only logically inconsistent but harmful, and that gender itself is contextual and philosophically complex) going to read it? And if you do already agree with everything Butler is saying, is there any point in reading it? Are you not then just allowing yourself to live in a comforting echo chamber?

On top of which there’s the fact that attempting to engage sincerely with gender critical discourse often feels like a losing proposition because—and Butler is very very quick to point this out—its neither consistent nor itself sincere. In fact, it’s pretty much the public debate equivalent of mudwrestling a pig. You know, you’ll just get dirty and the pig will enjoy it. For a little while, as I was reading Who’s Afraid of Gender, I genuinely wasn’t sure if I was watching Judith Butler mudwrestling a pig, spectacular though the mudwrestling was. Except then I had a long conversation about it with my partner—and read aloud several sequences from the book—and H said, “no, this is not Judith Butler mudwrestling a pig. This is Judith Butler pointing at a pig going, that’s a pig and it’s covered in mud.”

And you know something? This is completely right.

5 stars. Would share swine identification and filth assessment session with Judith Butler again.

Pig-themed lulz aside, the fact this book is necessary is depressing as hell. We should not be so culturally in doubt of what’s a pig and how muddy it is. Although, as Judith Butler touches upon in the book, one of the problems we’re facing in the world right now is a strain of manipulative anti-intellectualism which promises truth and plain speaking but is actually about control, fearmongering, and obfuscation. So I think what I’m getting at here is that I hate Butler had to write Who’s Afraid of Gender, but I fucking love that they did.

The other thing that’s notable, and intriguing, about Who’s Afraid of Gender is that it’s (I believe?) the first piece of work Butler has published with a non-academic press. And while there’s probably a natural limit to the accessibility of Judith Butler, this very much feels like a book that’s intended to be read, not taught. It is, in fact, very readable. There’s a warmth to Butler’s writing here, alongside the expected intellectual ferocity, that—for me—made Who’s Afraid of Gender as reassuring as it was brilliant.

And yes: if you’d told me at the beginning of 2023 that my comfort read of the year would be Judith Butler I’d have … well, looked at you funny I suppose. But, God, this book ended up meaning so fucking much to me. Because, the thing is, I know the discourse around “gender” is flatly wrong and deeply harmful. It’s just the sheer relentlessness is so exhausting. The experience of reading Who’s Afraid of Gender, then, is sort of like Judith Butler has turned up to hold your hand and explain, straightforwardly, eloquently, and indomitably, why all this is bullshit. It wasn’t something I thought I needed—I thought I understood things pretty clearly—but it was. It absolutely was.

The central conceit of Who’s Afraid of Gender is that gender has become a sort of phantasm upon which all manner of social and global anxieties can be heaped, and then leveraged by fascist-leaning ideologies to advance oppressive and patriarchal agendas. Over the course of the book (which is a slim little number, considering the weight of its ideas), Butler not only exposes the apparently endless contradictions put forth by gender critical thinkers but neatly dismantles … I mean, like, everything? The Catholic Church. The Supreme Court. Donald Trump. Trans people’s participation in sports. TERFs. Kathleen Stock. Biological essentialism. A certain UK children’s author who continues to believe she understands everyone else’s gender identity better than they do. The whole notion that there has ever been an immutable idea of what a woman “is” that could be returned to if we dispensed with gender:

The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many people can participate in the reality it describes, nor does it limit in advance the forms that that reality can take. In fact, feminism has always insisted that what a woman is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.

The book covers a lot of ground, including a chapter on gender as a weapon of colonialism that I personally found super fascinating. The casual but comprehensive murder of JK Rowing that Butler performs in about three brisk pages is also, I must confess, darkly satisfying, but also just kind of sad as well. Like, what are the 2020s that Judith Butler is having to stride across the battlefield of discourse taking down formerly beloved children’s writers like when somebody gets bitten by a zombie in episode of the Walking Dead. In all seriousness, though, Rowling is a good case study for Butler, precisely because Rowling has a highly developed capacity, considering her power and privilege, to occupy spaces of victimhood. For example, while Butler notes that online bullying is, of course, unacceptable they also draw attention to the false equivalence has been tacitly accepted anger expressed at JKR online and the fact that JK Rowling is actively engaged in denying a socially, legally and medically disenfranchised group of people their very existence:

Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian, and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do).Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself.

[…]

Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that lets many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.

Sorry for the long quote. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d highlighted most of the book. Kathleen Stock, another British TERF, who briefly positioned herself as brutally censored by militant supporters of transgender rights, Butler has even less time for, simply on the grounds of flat out poor scholarship.

Stock’s valid concern is that no woman should be subject to possible rape, and I agree that everyone should share that concern. And yet, if securing women against rape in prison were her main focus, should she not [before focusing on violence enacted by trans women in women’s prisons] consult the statistics on male prison guards engaging in precisely that activity, which, given their magnitude, should, according to her logic, lead to a policy in which no man ever works as a prison guard in any women’s prison? Perhaps she has signed petitions to this effect or written on this policy, but I am not finding it in my research

Anyway, I have barely scraped the surface of everything that’s important, incisively reasoned, and decisively communicated in Who’s Afraid of Gender. Butler is a powerful advocate for freedom, feminism, and the right to self-actualise. Not always an unchallenging read, it is nevertheless a vital one for everyone who needs to feel seen and fought for right now.

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 1 out of 5]

The gender wars have arrived and after a 20-year hiatus on gender theory, so has Judith Butler.

Who’s Afraid of Gender seeks to address the various concerns of the “anti-gender ideology movement,” including its manifestations in politics, the church, feminism, and globalization.

Butler lays out several concerns raised by this movement:
-Gender is a fabrication; only natural sex is real
-Gender will bring about a totalitarian regime
-Gender exemplifies hyper-capitalism
-Gender has stolen creative powers from the divine
-Gender is a force of destruction and colonization and harms children

These disparate concerns collapse into one, using gender as an overdetermined boogeyman (or what Butler refers to as the “phantasm of gender”). Their primary concern in this text is establishing the anxieties behind this phantasm as well as the hatred and anger it mobilizes.

This book is best suited for a feminist audience looking to better understand the cultural landscape around the current gender discourse and controversies. It is not necessarily formulated to convert those with the fascist anxieties, merely to explain the flaws in their lines of thought.

It’s honestly impressive how much I disliked this. I have been looking forward to one of the most prominent gender theorists weighing in on the great gender discourse of the 21st century. I spent the majority of my 20s as a huge Butler stan, frequently assigning their work in various classes. Butler touches on everything - gender, sexuality, activism, democracy, statelessness, their work is relevant to any humanities or social science context. At long last, Butler returns to gender theory when everyone could use some clarity on the subject.

And yet this could have been a Substack.

And not one I would subscribe to.

Even if it were free.

For clarity, I will confess my identity (since this work seems to demand it): I’m politically aligned with the far left. I am a white, cis, bisexual, middle-class woman who asserts transwomen are women and that trans and youth rights should be protected. But I could hear incredibly valid counter-arguments from “the other side” in my head each chapter, counter-arguments Butler narrowly avoids by relying on straw men arguments. It takes a hell of a lot for a former idol of mine to get me agreeing with my political enemy.

Yes, “gender” has become a phantasm that stands in for many other anxieties. None of which are quelled in this text.

The first third focuses on high power players like politicians and the Vatican, but does not address the concerns of actual people who support the same policies. The arguments in these chapters are incredibly obvious if you have not been living under a rock: concerns around gender from the church largely have to do with concerns around homosexuality, teaching comprehensive sexual education does not make children gay, and trans affirming healthcare does not harm cis people.

They then proceed to focus large portions of the text on folks like DeSantis and J.K. Rowling, rather than dealing with the intricacies of concerns from regular people. Yes, those heavy hitters are the ones mobilizing the phantasm of gender and keeping people anxious, but how do we realistically address those anxieties held by much of the population in a democratic way? How do we reconcile parental agency and the needs of children? How do we provide appropriate healthcare for children whose parents believe such healthcare is actually violence? Why does the hateful rhetoric employed by right wing politicians work so effectively? Those are the more interesting questions.

While I understand their assertion that critical reading is fundamental to a successful democracy, it’s absolutely hilarious to see a theorist who is very famously and frequently accused of being inaccessible lament that people won’t just read more gender theory before refuting it. Like if only Trump picked up Gender Trouble then he would be better informed. Butler is also making a mistake in that realm with the strange assumption that anti-gender-ideology folks (and other gender theorists) all necessarily value democracy.

Butler has an outstandingly bizarre way of waffling on materialism. They take no materialist approach at all in the first half of the book (or their career), then claim to incorporate materialist elements very abruptly. It’s clear Butler’s discussion of the co-construction of the social and biological aspects of sex is only to pacify their materialist critics. Despite this supposed co-constitution, there remain large portions of the text that continue to uphold a nature/culture binary and speak in pretty traditionally constructivist terms.

In other sections, Butler simply falls into tired liberal tropes. Even if the political right is against both critical race theory and “gender ideology” in schools, these are not equivalent. They are entirely different discourses with different histories and concerns, and yet Butler flattens them as though they are qualitatively equivalent. It seems Butler is contributing to rather than negating this phantasm of gender by treating separate issues as having a singular answer. Butler also appears to root much of the problem with gender in colonialism, as though the history of patriarchal power only begins in recent history. They recognize the concept of gender has an issue of linguistic and cultural translation, but does not adequately historicize the concept. I expected greater nuance from one of the most significant theorists of our time.

I have saved my critique of the TERF chapter for last because I understand it’s the chapter in which we are most expected to snap our fingers and nod in agreement. Yes, TERFs are bad. I think it’s a bit of a misnomer as not all “gender critical” feminists that very intentionally exclude trans women take perspectives that align with radical feminism, but that’s not really the point so we can leave it aside. Butler comically refuses to use “gender critical” because TERFs misuse the term “critique.” As though sex can be reassigned and gender can be reconstituted throughout one’s life, but the definition and application of “critique” must be stagnant. To define gender would be epistemic violence, but to define critique is within Butler’s authority.

The entire chapter on TERFs and “gender-critical feminism” didn’t address a huge underlying issue: the mutual dependence between the categories of “woman” and “lesbian.” Much of the TERFish emphasis on “sex” is rooted not just in the idea that penises rape (more on that in a moment), but that many lesbians consider the evolving definition of gender to be an affront to their sexual identity. If there is no substantial validity to this argument, then why doesn’t Butler address it? It would be an easy takedown, and yet the glaring omission remains.

Butler uses this chapter to make a “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” style argument regarding rape. As though it is entirely unreasonable someone might associate rape with traditional male anatomy. This is not to say that women don’t rape, that all men have penises, that transgender women are predatory, or that sexual dimorphism is a natural fact - it is simply to live in reality; certain tools and the socialization around them enable violence. You can understand there is a relationship between penises and rape without believing trans women are rapists or denying their womanhood. Instead, Butler makes this ridiculous claim:

“If the implicit point is that someone who has a penis, or even someone who once had one, will rape, because the penis is the cause of rape, or the socialization of those who have penises is the cause of rape, then surely such claims should be debated. Rape is an act of social and sexual domination, as many feminists have argued, arisen from social relations that establish masculine domination and access to women’s bodies without consent as a right and a privilege.”

Let me get this straight: Butler does not agree that the socialization of those who have penises is a cause of rape but does assert that social relations which establish masculine domination are a cause of rape (in the same paragraph, no less). Is the socialization of those who have penises not relevant to the social relations which establish masculine domination? Especially within the psychoanalytic framework Butler claims to draw from? In lieu of an explanation Butler merely states that masculine domination is not biological, upholding the culture/nature binary they later claim to be against. A consistent argument would require Butler to address the co-constitution of the biological and the social as they relate to power. Butler instead opts for self-contradiction.

Every chapter is essentially Butler disagreeing with a claim that they purport exists in society, while misrepresenting that claim in order to make their counterarguments. You could weave an Etsy shop full of baskets with the dearth of straw.

Butler concludes the text with a call to arms for all who have been harmed by these anxieties around gender to take up an ill-defined strategic alliance, rather than developing strategies for mitigating or refuting those anxieties. With decades of experience in theorizing both gender and democracy, Butler is uniquely positioned to propose such strategies yet fails to do so. Who’s Afraid of Gender is wildly bad theory: academically dull, intellectually lazy, and politically tired.

I thank NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the e-arc in exchange for my unfortunately honest opinion.

[Justin Tate · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the 2008 general election, Barrack Obama won California by over 3 million votes. At the same time Prop 8, a constitutional amendment designed to ban and annul same-sex marriage in the state, passed by 600,000 votes.

I remember that day vividly. In my college dorm at the University of Oklahoma, I was visited by a classmate who I didn't know well. With tears streaming, she said she didn't know who else to talk to. Oklahoma is not known for open minds and I was probably the only other gay person she knew. We were both concerned about the same things. What did this mean for the thousands of couples who were already married? More broadly, what did it mean that the most liberal state in the union could overwhelmingly support Hope and Change, and also be against equality?

Meanwhile, conservative rhetoricians salivated over the results. Sure, Obama had won the election, but they had configured a scare tactic which convinced liberal parents to think that same sex marriage would confuse their children, turn them gay, or force them to learn about anal sex in pre-K. The advertisements were lurid and full of false comparisons, but effective. If their "protect the children!!" campaign could win in California, it could win anywhere.

Fast forward to recent elections, and you see the same playbook from Prop 8 being used to demonize CRT, DEI, trans rights, drag, literature and even American history. Candidates on the right rush to paint their opponents as anti-parent, pro-pedophile and other bizarrity. That their logic is conflicting, nonsensical, and sometimes a projection of their own crimes doesn't matter. As Judith Butler writes, the more imprecise their claims become the larger their audience grows. "Woke" can be blamed for anything a receptive ear doesn't like under this umbrella. Not everybody has the same distaste for all of the above, but many can be reliably enraged by at least one. After the Prop 8 technique’s repeated success in the 2021 Virginia governor's race, Republicans scrambled all over themselves to replicate it in 2022 and beyond.

Butler, an acclaimed scholar of gender studies, uses this book to tackle much of today's hottest issues relating to gender, including political stratagems and misguided fears from the general populace. We get their researched opinion on J.K. Rowling and the "TERF" perspective, trans athletes in sports, and the religious institutions funding gender bogeyman campaigns. It's wonderful that this book exists and I think Butler is an excellent voice to weigh in on these topics.

That said, readers should be aware of what they're getting into. The tone is very academic, which is great, but I almost gave up every time she uses the word "phantasm". The scholarship can also be round about, taking its sweet time to get to a point, and then often reconfiguring that same point in a variety of ways. If you're looking for a streamlined, concise evaluation of many topics on gender, this is not it. If you're okay with an intensive analysis of a few hot topics, you're in the right place.

As for me, I'm really okay with either. I find the book highly readable and enthralling, generally, even if there is admittedly some pomp and bloat weighing it down. This is my first time reading Butler, FYI. For fans, I'm sure you already know what to expect.

I appreciate that the book feels very rooted in 2024, even managing a reference to IVF which I don't remember being a controversy until very recently. There's little to no discussion about the long history of anti-gender sentiments over time. There's no mentioning the biblical tall tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, and its strangely lasting influence on the religious populace, who literally think gay marriage will lead to a similar apocalypse. It's probably for the best to leave such details out. The book is long enough as it is, and Butler’s target audience is probably informed enough to not need the history lesson. There's no mention of the 2008 election either, however, which I see as a direct correlation to today's political environment that many people might have forgotten about.

By no means should this book be considered the definitive take on gender. That's a lot to expect from anyone, even Butler, and readers should not expect them to cover every angle, every historical vantage, or call out every population who's "afraid" of gender. The good news is that the missing qualities in this book mean there's an opening for many more books on gender. It's unlikely the fight against misguided beliefs and political trickery will cease any time soon. Judith Butler is a wise mind who we definitely want in our corner. But this is a big tent and there's lots of room for more voices. I hope other scholars are out there working on their own books on this topic, because I'd love to read them.

[Willow Heath]

Non-binary feminist philosopher Judith Butler needs no introduction. Their work as a writer and teacher is legendary; their career as a great academic voice spans decades. Who's Afraid of Gender? is their first attempt at writing something that goes easy on the academese and presents itself as something more palatable to the general public. It's a book that sets out a clear question in its title before spending ten chapters answering it.

Unfortunately, Who's Afraid of Gender? proves to be incredibly frustrating as a work of nonfiction. It is not a manifesto, nor is it a piece of philosophy. Instead, it is a collection of facts about the ideologies and actions of those disparate conservatives and bigots around the world who wish to remove the rights and freedoms of not only trans people, but also cis women and others within the LGBTQ+ community.

This book is proof that Butler has their finger on the button; they understand the enemy well. But they rarely offer any useful or actionable arguments against this rising authoritarianism (they even admit in the introduction that this is not really their intention). So, we come to the elephant in the room: who the hell is this book for?

Given that those who fear gender are referred to throughout this book in the third person, we know that this book isn't for them. They won't read it, and Butler knows that. But is it really for us? Most of what Butler covers in this book is information we all already know. If you're trans (as I am) and a feminist (again, as I am), you will already be privy to all of the facts and details covered here, and you'll also hold the same opinions and ideas that Butler does.

The best thing this book does is to reframe many of the arguments that we already hold, phrasing them in useful and sometimes enlightening ways. Aside from that, there is little here to inspire or inform the reader. Those who would most benefit from this book will never read it, and those who are attracted to this book will learn little from it. So, I ask again: who the hell is it for?

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

‼️AMENDMENT TO ORIGINAL REVIEW‼️

After engaging in some lively conversation about this book (see comment section). I reread my original review (see below). I realized it’s actually kind of LAME (it happens). As such, I am going to amend it (as one does). And actually talk a little more about the content of the book (go figure). Which has become a bit more clear to me in retrospect (so good).

WHAT THIS BOOK IS (AND ISN’T) ABOUT

This book is about (a) the historical and current cultural norms, practices and discourses on the topic of gender. And (b) how recent changes in how people perceive, experience and express gender have sparked a highly contentious and politically consequential debate in our culture.

This book is focused on the MORAL PANIC that the issue of GENDER is eliciting in our CURRENT PUBLIC DISCOURSE.

THIS BOOK IS NOT: (a) comprehensive, (b) rigorous, (c) academic, (d) prescriptive (self help) text.

Butler is not a therapist, or a pundit. Butler is a scholar. Butler is critical theorist. Early in the book. Butler states that their concept of the function of critical theory is to OPEN DIALOGUE AND ENHANCE THE QUALITY OF DISCOURSE.

Butler observes that manny of the most INFLAMMATORY propositions (from both sides) are in essence, uninformed.

Butler refers to numerous CRITIQUES on their work, wherein it is obvious that the critic has not ACTUALLY READ their work.

Butler also refers to equally INFLAMMATORY propositions that are untestable because they are UN CITED.

Butler is CRITAL of UNINFORMED, and UN CITED propositions from both LEFT and RIGHT. Butler assert that these types of exchanges (a) shut down DIALOGUE, and fail to produce productive DISCOURSE. And are as such TOXIC.

Butler urges readers to:

- READ SORCE TEXTS
- CITE OUR SOURCES

Not to BE A MARM about it.

But rather.

So that the we can better understand the concerns of each other. And actually have productive conversations. And perhaps cut back on the bad faith ed homonym attacks and divisive inflammatory rhetoric that makes this (and close to every other politically charged conversation) SO TOXIC.

This very comment thread contains just such a conversation. I’m not sure I was able to live up to Butlers vision. But I will say. Some of the more contentious exchanges seem to illustrate many of Butlers points. And it has been very productive and clarifying (at least it has been for me).

CLARIFICATION OF TERMS

Butler observes that the term GENDER is distinct from SEX and SEXUAL ORIENTATION. Butler observes that MUCH of the CONFUSION and CONFLICT in the current cultural discourse on GENDER is due to conflating these terms.

SEX

Refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define humans as male, female, or intersex. These characteristics include chromosomes, hormone levels, and reproductive/sexual anatomy (YOUR JUNK).

GENDER

Refers to the roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for MEN/WOMEN/OTHER gender identities. GENDER encompasses identity, experience expression, and societal norms (YOUR LIVED EXPERIENCE).

SEXUAL ORIENTATION

Refers to a person's enduring physical, romantic, and/or emotional attraction to others. It includes identities such as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, and others, based on whom one is attracted to (WHO YOU LOVE/BONE).

THE PHANTASM OF GENDER

Butler posits that the gender has become a PHANTASM wherein people have projected an inordinate level of FEAR, ANXIETY, and LOATHING into the topic of GENDER.

Just as Communism was the PHANTASM of 1950’s cold war area paranoia. Wherein Communism was reified as EVIL incarnate. And any affiliation or sympathy with the ideas and values of Communism was equated with being UN-AMERICAN. And just as McCarthyist political witch trails ruined the lives and careers of thousands of good people.

The specter of GENDER seems to be the NEW one of those. Gender is the new BOOGEYMAN. With similar reactionary, anti-intellectual, oppressive and (yes) dangerous effects.

Butler deconstructs many of the historical factors for this sad turn of events. And Butler is in many ways uniquely qualified to comment on this history, as they themselves are an important contributor to that history. In other words.

Butlers work is HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT.

Butlers 1990 book Gender Trouble introduced MANY of the key concepts at the center of the current cultural debate.

Including:

GENDER AS CULTURAL CONSTRUCT

Butler challenged traditional notions of gender, arguing that gender is not a fixed or innate quality but rather culturally determined.

GENDER AS PERFORMANCE

Butler argued that gender identity is performed via the repetition of gender normative behaviors, rather than a natural or fixed, innate or essential attribute.

NONBINARY GENDER

Butler critiques the binary(male/female) view of gender, and argues for a more fluid understanding of gender identities.

IF ANY/ALL OF THE ABOVE SEEM OBVIOUS.

You can thank Judith Butler for that.

BECAUSE NONE OF THIS WAS OBVIOUS in 1990

Back when they published Gender Trouble.

ALL of this was EXTREMELY controversial.

Butler LOBBED this conversation into the mainstream.

Nearly 35 years later.

We’re LIVING in a post Butler ERA.

Gender Trouble, and Butler's subsequent work has had a HUGE impact on feminism, queer theory, and gender studies.

And on our culture at large.

So YASSS QWEEN WERK!

And if you read Gender Trouble.

You better be ready to work.

Because it’s REALLY HARD WORK.

Gender Trouble, and Butler's work more broadly, is INFAMOUS for being DENSE, HARD READING.

WHO’S AFRAID OF GENDER ?

This is Butlers (not altogether successful, but in my humble opinion still excellent) attempt to make their work ACCESSIBLE to a (non academic) POPULAR AUDIENCE.

WITHOUT sacrificing the INTEGRITY/IMPACT of their IDEAS.

I say not altogether successful because many of the criticisms of the book are that it is either TOO DENSE, or
NOT RIGOROUS ENOUGH (see original review below).

Much is the criticism of this book (that I have read) coming from the old guard fans of Butlers academic work focuses on how this book addresses POP CULTURE issues that maybe more relatable to a non academic audience. But somehow seem like pandering and/or preaching to the CHOIR.

I didn’t share this sentiment.

As mentioned in my original review (see below).

I think Butler threads that needle quite skillfully.

Some of the current issues Butler addresses in Who’s Afraid of Gender (WAOG) include:

TRANS EXCLUSIONARY RADICAL FEMINISM

Butler dedicates quite a lot of time/energy/pages discussing the trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) perspective. For those of you who are unaware of the TERF WAR.

A TERF is a person who advocates for radical feminist, but does not accept transgender women as “real” women.

According to Butler. TERFs typically believe that gender is based strictly on biological sex and that transgender individuals are reinforcing traditional gender roles or stereotypes.

Butler is HIGHLY critical of this assertion.

Butler argues (quite convincingly) that sex and gender are not binary. Biologically speaking or otherwise. Butler discusses (at length) a Trump era SCOTUS ruling where all of the Justices (with the exception of a minor descent from Thomas) refuted the validity of sex/gender binary categorization due to the COPIOUS precedents rulings finding discrimination of intersex individuals as unconstitutional.

Butler implicitly argues that if the conservative af SCOTUS can’t deny the fact of intersex individuals, and the rights of gender nonbinary people to not be discriminated against base of their gender identity. Then how (exactly) are TERFs able to justify their evidence/arguments.

I will not PERSONALLY weigh in on this issue, as I am not well informed on the TERF WAR beyond what was discussed in the book. But I was personally convinced by Butlers argument.

J. K. ROWLING

Butler also discussed Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling’s (strange/disturbing) anti trans stance.

Butler asserts that Rowlings arguments against granting trans women access to restrooms out of fear that they will rape other women is unjust and unsupported by evidence.

Butler asserts that J. K. Rowling citing her own sexual assault as justification for her aversion to trans women, as a harmful projection of personal trauma onto trans individuals.

Butler cites this as one example of how people and organizations are projecting their anxiety, fear, and loathing on to trans individuals and onto the broader issue of gender.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Butler discusses the ways the Catholic Church have projected of the specter of child sexual abuse (CSA) on to the issue of gender. Butler asserts that there is no evidence linking trans gender, and gender nonconformity to CSA.

This is an issue that came up in the discussion thread of this review. The conflation of sexual orientation and gender is problematic. Gender nonbinary, gender nonconformity and trans gender are all distinct from sexual orientation.

The conflation of pedophilia and homosexuality is also HIGHLY problematic. As should be obvious. Those are VERY different things.

But the GRAND SLAM conflation of all three of these issues is BEYOND WHACK. And the fact that the Catholic Church (of all organizations) is accusing trans people of being at high risk of CSA. Without evidence. Is frankly astounding.

DESCRIPTIVE NOT PRESCRIPTIVE

Many of the criticisms of WAOG lament the lack of advice.

This book aims to describe the problem.

And enhance the level of discourse.

But it does not claim to have a solution.

If you’re looking for a prescriptive text.

This one isn’t it.

CHANGE

Despite the current PHANTASMAGORIC nature of the GENDER conversation. Butler remains optimistic.

Butler asserts that high quality discourse is remedial.

And Butler and their work affirm that good theory, and good scholarship, and good faith can open DIALOG, enhance DISCOURSE and create new opportunities for CANGE.

‼️ORIGINAL REVIEW‼️

Real quick.

I’m not an expert in GENDER STUDIES or CRITICAL THEORY.

Not even CLOSE.

I’m a FAN.

But I’m a NEOPHYTE.

So everything offered below is offered with humility and respect for those of you who have invested a lifetime of work understanding and contributing to the field. None of this is intended to disparage you or your informed opinions.

I’m learning as a go.

So there will be mistakes.

And I will change as a learn.

So I may retract what I say here/now later.

I am a therapist.

I work with LGBTQ people.

I LOVE/CHERISH my queer brothers and sisters and nibblings.

I have been LOVED/NURTURED by the queer community for my WHOLE LIFE. And I am in immense DEBT and GRATITUDE.

I also work with a LOT of trans and nonbinary people.

And their families.

And if I can say ANYTHING with any sort of certainty on the issue of GENDER. It is that it is a PAINFUL and POLARIZING subject for a lot of people. Particularly RIGHT NOW.

Sadly, but undeniably so.

As such.

This is inevitably going to be a polarizing text.

Given the EXTREMELY heated debate the topic of GENDER.

And given critical acumen of readers of critical theory.

It is no surprise that there are LOTS of critical reviews.

Some understandably AGNOSTIC (no stars).

Some that are only MODERATELY critical (4/5 starts).

And a few that are REALLY unhappy with the book (1/5 stars).

It’s not surprising, and also kind of disappointing that very few reviewers express unrestrained JOY and APPRECIATION and LOVE and PRAISE for this book, and for its author.

So I’m DEFINITELY going to buck the trend here.

‼️ TRIGGER WARING ‼️

I ABSOLUTELY LOVED this book.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE Judith Butler.

And I WILL give this book a 5/5 stars ⭐️

If that is somehow offensive or uncool for you.

I respect that.

Honestly.

But you may not wish to read any further.

‼️ END OF TRIGGER WARNING‼️

This book is FUCKING AMAZING!!!

I read a lot of the critical reviews.

Some of the CRITICISM is that it’s too DENSE/DIFFICULT.

Ok.

That’s legit.

This book is marketed and intended for a mass audience.

And that is a very common criticism of JUDITH BUTLER (JB).

I haven’t read a TON of JB.

I read their CLASSIC GENDER TROUBLE (GT) only recently.

While I did find GT rigorous and challenging.

I don’t view that as problematic, or as a flaw in the text.

Books like GT are difficult out of a necessity.

Academic writing tends to be dense.

It tends to use very “low level” (technical) language.

It needs to be economical, rigorous and precise.

It’s not fun.

Not on purpose.

But kind of out of necessity.

And…

This is a FUCKING HARD subject to deconstruct.

I think most philosophical texts that identify and articulate something previously unknown or unarticulated have to carefully operationalize their language and topic. And as such, they tend to be technical and challenging to read.

Historically, those who attempt to understand and write about a topic in a new way, for the first time, and who also wish to be taken seriously, tend to write LONG/DIFFICULT books.

FREUD, MARX, DARWIN, DERRIDA, DUBOIS.

To name only a few.

All wrote LONG/DIFFICULT books that CHANGED THE WORLD, and that other SUPER SERIOUS people spent lifetimes studying, unpacking and elaborating upon.

GT is DEFINITELY one of those BOOKS.

JB is definitely one of THOSE AUTHORS.

Additionally.

Because the audience is expected to be EXTREMELY critical.

Academia tends to roll like that.

The arguments need to be thorough and well supported.

This is out of necessity.

Thats how philosophy works.

Plus.

The topic is CONTROVERSIAL.

Again, sadly but undeniably so.

JB’s writing had to be bullet proof.

They were CLEARLY bracing for a HUGE backlash.

AND BOY DID THEY GET ONE.

Most of us mere mortals couldn’t withstand even a FRACTION of the HELL that has been HEAPED onto JB from ALL SIDES.

Think of the ENDLESS hours of TicTok featuring people sobbing into the camera because someone misgendered them. Now (imagine if you will). Being JB and dropping GT in 1990. Imagine the outrage. The death threats. The risk of reputation. The discrimination. From the LEFT and RIGHT.

In the epilogue.

JB reflects on the experience of seeing their EFFIGY burned in ANGRY PROTEST. That’s only a sliver of the HATE that has been focused on JB. Most of us armchair critics would be ABSOLUTELY terrified and devastated to be the target of that type of VIOLENCE and HOSTILITY.

JB steps into that role willingly.

For the absolute benefit of the WORLD.

As such.

I would just like to heap MASSIVE PRAISE and LOVE and RESPECT onto JB. And thank them for BRAVING all of that.

So that young and old people today can be who they are.

In a MUCH less dangerous, MUCH more tolerant world.

Here’s to BRAVE SMART DIFFICULT PEOPLE!

Here’s to LONG SMART DIFFICULT BOOKS!

More please.

This book WHOS AFRAID OF GENDER (WAOG) is long, yes (again out of necessity) but it’s MUCH less difficult than GT.

It’s retains MUCH of the rigor and power of JB’s academic writing. But it’s VERY GENEROUS in that it offers LOTS of timely explanations, and examples, and invitations to go to source materials. It’s a nice introduction to a difficult filed.

And it works.

At least it WERKED for me.

On the FLIP.

Other critics assert that it PREACHES TO THE CHOIR.

And that it LACKS RIGOR AND PRECISION.

Ok.

That’s legit too.

But…

I think this book does so (again) out of necessity.

It needed to be less precise/rigorous than GT.

It’s NOT academic writing.

It’s intended for a broader audience.

It needs to TRADE rigor for accessibility without totally loosing the integrity of the sources. And (again), I think this book achieves that to an EXTRAORDINARY degree.

It threads that needle.

Like AMAZINGLY well.

We also NEED someone to PREACH to this CHOIR here. You may not. You may have found all the clarity and support that you need. But LOTS and LOTS of confused and abused and utterly isolated and alone people do need it.

And JB is kind of PERFECT for that role.

FINALLY:

Some of the critique is centered on JB’s choice of EXAMPLES and OPTIONS. JK ROWLING, the TERF movement, and the CATHOLIC CHURCH. Some argue that these are not useful or relevant to the conditions and challenges of most people. Duly noted. And. This book seems to be somewhat personal for JB. In the epilogue thy talk about being targeted and violently attacked in an airport. While they don’t explicitly say it. They intimate that the attack was fueled by some of the ANTI-GENDER agitprop that has emerged from these (and other) sources (probably too numerous to address).

WAOG feels like (at least in part) an attempt to process and refute (AT LEAST SOME) of that nonsense. In plain view. With sources cited. Not as an attempt to necessarily slam the lid down on those lines of discourse and debate. But rather, to enhance the quality of those conversations. And to give the willing uninitiated a quick/easy cheat sheet for checking out some OTHER, MORE AFFIRMATIVE, MORE ROBUST texts.

Anyway.

I could go on.

But I absolutely shouldn’t.

So I don’t think I will.

I don’t know much about which I speak.

And so.

Will not continue.

I will however continue to educate myself on this matter.

And to go to the sources.

And that will be (at least in part) facilitated by this book.

I FUCKING LOVED THIS BOOK.

I ABSOLUTELY RECOMMEND IT.

I BELIEVE IT WILL SAVE LIVES.

AND CHANGE MINDS.

5/5 SUPER GRATEFUL/APPRECIATIVE STARS ⭐️

[Sandra · Rating 1 out of 5]

The emperor has been naked all along and now the jig is up, its uppness is just not equally distributed. Words fail me with this anti-common sense brain scrambler and I'm opting for an exhibition in lieu of a review.

Exhibit A
"Referring to neuroscience in an interview, Stock claimed that the perception of two sexes is something the brain simply does. This I did not know."
Exhibit label: 🤡🌎

Exhibit B
What is Judith Butler afraid of? by Kathleen Stock https://unherd.com/2024/03/what-is-ju...

Exhibit C
"It's curious that Butler lumps together gender-critical feminists (or ‘TERFs’) with the Pope, Orbán, Erdoğan, Trump...given that one of her favourite projects...is recognizing & trying to make comprehensible people who...fall outside a simple ‘binary’"
https://quillette.com/2024/04/12/whos...

Exhibit D
Not everything is about gender
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/arc...

Exhibit E
"In her new book, Judith Butler seems obsessed (and not in a good way) with the Catholic Church. The Church is her primary antagonist, even as she counts Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive movements." - Nina Power https://www.compactmag.com/article/th...

Exhibit F1
The Guardian in 1997: The world’s worst writing awarded to Judith Butler: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Exhibit F2
The Guardian, this time 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/j...

[Elle (ellexamines on TT & Substack) · Rating 4 out of 5]

To manufacture fear for the purposes of stripping trans people of their rights of self-determination is to mobilize the fear of having one's sexed identity nullified in order to nullify the sexed identities of others.

Who's Afraid of Gender is a fantastic book about the modern anger towards any discussion of 'gender' and a treatise arguing that those of us concerned with issues of gender must create a coalition to work towards a multitude of concerns — reproductive freedom, women's political equality, the freedom to express gender noncomformity and queerness, sexual freedoms, and models of queer kinship.

There is a lot of fantastic work done in this book. Butler spends significant pagetime discussing the role of nationalism as an opposer of gender, the defense of the nation going hand in hand with a so-called defense of the family. When looking at the history of fascism, it is impossible not to notice the huge focus on the heterosexual family (with all that implies, including rigid gender roles and a lack of reproductive freedom) within its politics. I appreciated that highlight.

Butler discusses that sex assignment is both a type of imagined future and an "iterative process" which progresses through the future, with each individual continuing to be gendered by society, "the girl continu[ing] to be girled... by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and norms to be embodied."

I loved the chapter “Racial and Colonial Legacies of Gender Dimorphism” which cites authors such as Catherine Clune-Taylor, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spiller, and Maria Lutones to argue that scientific racism and colonialism is a key part of how we’ve developed our concepts of gender. Rather than the idea of gender politics as a colonizing force, these authors would point to our current understanding of sexual politics as itself created out of a colonizing force enacted on Black and brown bodies. Indeed, many non-Western countries have their own historical terminology for what in English might be called gender noncomformity, though many of these terms do not directly translate — just as the term 'gender' itself does not translate from English to other languages (see: the terms unongayindoda and gogo in South Africa and hijra in India.) Many of these authors also make the point that outside of whiteness, gender was often taken away altogether in white colonial spaces. This argument is excellent.

One other note I have is that it continues to make me laugh seeing Zohran Mamdani's father cited in academic work. Nothing else to say about this, it's just fun.


Other Quotes that Resonated With Me:
▷ To manufacture fear for the purposes of stripping trans people of their rights of self-determination is to mobilize the fear of having one's sexed identity nullified in order to nullify the sexed identities of others.

▷ A sexual scene forms the background of reading and thinking and speaking, as if the body itself is entered and inhabited by the ideas that a child learns about. Young and guileless children are being penetrated against their will by ideas about sexuality, ideas that are transmogrified into abusers. The problem, then, is not that children will read about gay sexuality and become gay. Rather, the critics of sex education are already caught up in a phantasmatic scenario in which children are being violated and taken over by what they read. Here again, the allegations of indoctrination and pedophilia tend to blur, based on the belief, and the fear, that to take in an idea is to be subject to unwanted penetration.

▷ There are different ways of loving and harming, but placing restrictions on other people's ways of loving, if they do no harm, is itself harmful. We will doubtless disagree about what "doing harm" means, but then let us have that discussion openly rather than decide it in advance by dogma. There is no discussion, because dogma rules out discussion.

▷ Indeed, a transphobic feminism is no feminism, and it allies with forms of coercive gender norms that call for paternalistic or authoritarian enforcement.

▷ A site of laceration and death, flesh also bears the potential to elude the established ideals of whiteness and gender to become the vital condition of freedom.

▷ ...the problem is getting free not just of imposed white gender norms but also of the brutal demand to become the surface on which those genders were inscribed and produced.

▷ "Gender" crosses borders, makes its way inside, and is in that sense insidious. But is it insidious like a foreign power, or has it become anyone's word, a strange transnational democratization at the level of vocabulary? Unfortunately, when reflections on gender take place in English as if everything said is translatable, that does constitute an arrogant presumption, one that can be countered only by thinking about gender as a scene of translation

▷ So, I not only speak this language, but this language is my way of inhabiting the world and may even seem to be, or to furnish, the very essence of who I am, the sense I make of the world and, hence, the sense of the world itself. And yet the language in which I affirm my gendered life is not always one that I myself have made. I was, as it were, entered into a language I never chose, dispossessed in the very language that makes my life possible. And when I seek to say who I am, I do so within a language that proves to be untranslatable or that is, in important respects, already foreign to me.

▷ Once gender, in its phantasmatic and abbreviated form, comes to include abortion rights, access to reproductive technology, sexual and gender health services, rights for trans people of any age, women's freedom and equality, queers of color's freedom struggles, single parenting, gay parenting, new kinship outside of heteronormative models, adoption rights, sex reassignment, gender-confirming surgery, sex education, books for young people, books for adults, and images of nudity, then it represents a wide range of political struggles that its opponents seek to shut down in their effort to restore a patriarchal order for the state, religion, and the family, an authoritarianism for the present.

And one quote from Lugones reproduced here:
Sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call "the light side" of the colonial/modern gender system.Those in the "dark side" were not necessarily understood dimorphically. Sexual fears of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites of intersexed, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk. But as [Paula) Gunn Allen and others make clear, intersexed individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and in Euro-centered global capitalism. If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that the sexual division is based on biology.


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[Cait]

a _____ read, for which I cannot seem to find the right adjective. valuable? sure. meaningful? sure. worthwhile? sure. interesting, simultaneously thought-provoking and validating? yes. entertaining? yes (one of the great pleasures of getting to hear butler read this themself is to hear their voice, dry yet saturated with disdain, giving intense emphasis to the numerous words in scare quotes), although that doesn’t quite seem the intent.

this is a book in which I agreed with almost every assertion, even as it introduced new thoughts and interpretations for me to chew over.

regardless, the question I keep coming back to is the one so many others have asked as well: who is this book for?

and I don’t know the answer. the audience is obviously not those who are “afraid of gender” themselves, since the book seeks to analyze but not directly address or reach out to them. I don’t think I (a shrug-emoji/nonbinary lesbian already poised to agree with butler’s thoughts) am really the target audience either, though. the primary purpose of this book does not seem to be to persuade—again, it’s more an analytical exercise than anything—but I think the people in whose hands this book ideally should find itself are really the people who would consider themselves middle-of-the-road on questions of “gender,” like my friend m. [I HAVE MANY FRIENDS WHOSE FIRST INITIAL IS M., I PROMISE THAT IF UR READING THIS IT’S NOT U], who supports queer and trans people in theory but does not have a lot of queer friends and who maybe at times struggles to connects the pieces of the interconnected nature of all the Horrible Things in the world (god bless butler for explicitly being like yeah no capitalism. it’s capitalism. capitalism is the issue it’s capitalism that connects it all), or my mom, who loves me and my wife with all her heart but fails to recognize (or accept when pointed out to her) homophobic and transphobic dogwhistles in the rhetoric of politicians in the state in which she now resides—but will they read this book? unlikely, even if I were to beg and plead. butler makes the case that those who outright oppose “gender” will never read a book like this because they consider it to threaten a genuine taint to themselves, but when it comes to the “middle-of-the-roaders,” I’m not sure how to contend, societally, with how to engage them, or get them to engage of their own accord. I am a teacher, so perhaps this is an unforgivable failure of imagination on my part.

bleh. anyway. what this IS, certainly, is butler’s most, uh, accessible work lol, for better or worse. (it’s more comprehensible, but it also feels a little more...unfocused? although I think that’s intended to reflect the sprawling and diverse nature of the “anti–gender ideology movement” itself.) I also like (among other things—there’s a lot to like!!) that butler is self-critical, acknowledging the ways in which their previous seminal work on gender, everyone’s favorite abstruse friend gender trouble , does not hold up as a perfect text.

——————————————

important ideas for me, some new, some otherwise:

- thank uuuuuuuuuu pether* butler for your astute argument about how like, yeah, if europe & the world bank shake their finger in your face and say ‘no no no u must accept ~gender~ or we won’t give u money or recognition!!!’ it makes perfect fucking sense that some (formerly and/or currently) colonized countries might be like...fuck you and your patronizing system of debt bondage through which you have now rendered something perfectly reasonable into a horribly twisted and bitter pill to swallow. not something I have thought about a lot before tbh and I’m glad I’m thinking about it now:

the structuring of uganda as a debt economy not only undermines its autonomy but also makes social issues into financial demands. that is, it makes the acceptance of nondiscriminatory policies a precondition of its debt repayment plan. at which point can one rightly distinguish to the objection between gay and lesbian sexuality or transgender identity and an objection to being subjugated by international banking systems? the world bank is not the messenger we need to communicate the importance of lgbtqia+ rights, for the message gets obscured by the carrier. similarly, countries that apply for entrance to the european union and its markets must also show compliance with its anti-discrimination policies. the opposition to gender that emerged in countries dependent on the eu almost always indexes a financial situation of dependency. compliance with nondiscrimination policies is a form of coercion imposed by lenders which can lead to the perception that accepting gender is a form of unacceptable coercion and even extortion: no entrance without gender. no loan forgiveness without gender. it is surely hard to embrace a policy freely, no matter how reasonable and right, if one is compelled to do so from a position of debt bondage or unwanted financial dependency on brokers of financial power.

- good critique of imperialism and white supremacy in general; if nothing else I feel so incredibly grateful for butler as a level-headed elder who is good at, again, Seeing The Systems (and there is also so much else!). might be a low bar to clear but goddamn a lot of people (of all ages, that was just coming from a place of respect for butler) don’t clear it

- I know jkr is an easy person to dunk on, but truly, there are so many people whom I would love to have read the chapter on british terfs because it articulates, so clearly and plainly, such good responses to the arguments of people who are like, yes terfs are bad but what about [insert thorny, hard-to-unpack fear about trans women here]. level-headed, easy-to-follow rational takedowns!!! (and don’t get it twisted, butler doesn’t actually waste much time on jkr but rather coolly and briefly dismisses her before moving on.) I don’t have the ability to intelligently, compellingly, and convincingly telling people whose beliefs infuriate me why they’re wrong without resorting to angry hysterics and the shouting of swear words, but butler certainly does, and I admire that ability in them and would do well to learn from it.

- feels a little silly to have to come to you all with egg on my face and admit, “this book reminded me of how bad the catholic church is,” but mmmm I feel like I have grown lazy over the years with being like, yeah catholicism is bad but get a load of [gestures at evangelical christianity] this guy! this book was a helpful and much-needed reminder for me of the fact that....uh.....yeah...catholicism is kind of the og bad guys for a reason (and has also in recent decades aligned itself politically with evangelical christianity in ways I hadn’t realized), and just because they’re my pet religion-in-which-I-was-raised-and-no-longer-believe-in-and-feel-entitled-to-mock-in-a-very-particular-and-personal-way-as-a-result doesn’t mean that I should, uh, let them off the hook in any goddamn shape or form. (and indeed now that I think about it, yes, obviously, “my bad religion is bad but at least it’s not that other one” has some pretty obvious parallels to something, a something that I have criticized vehemently, that some people have been doing with regard to a certain upcoming political event. fuck.) even though I don’t think I will ever fail to laugh at (homophobic slurs @ the link) vinny thomas’s pope videos.

- “nonbinary in california” (or the full “becoming nonbinary in california,” which is something that butler did [in terms of their legal gender marker] :’’’’’’’’)) does I will admit sound like something that would be used as a right-wing talking point slash source of mockery BUT ALSO has the capacity to serve as an extremely funny and good name for something, like, idk, a band or something

- goes hard in criticizing fascism while also acknowledging that the term has become somewhat nebulous and perhaps bandied about too freely

——————————————

at the end of the day, “we make a mistake by imagining that critiques of gender are simply cultural conservatives[...] they are[...] actually responding to the displacement and insecurity that result from neoliberalism” and the very real threats of climate change and other life-threatening, world-threatening materialities [brought on by capitalism]. helpful framework for thinking about this stuff. which again brings me back to my (unstated) question as to how to rate this book: I clearly got a lot out of it, but how many “stars” does it really “merit,” given the (again, perhaps intentional but also frustrating) ambiguities surrounding both audience and purpose? lucky for me that past me built myself an easy escape hatch by making a habit of frequently not giving nonfiction books a star rating at all!!!

——————————————

*I have landed on this term after considering and rejecting both mother and father, for obvious reasons (and for perhaps less obvious ones, like the fact that I kind of think the trend of calling everyone mother is annoying as fuck lol but that’s okay, I can be old and grumpy and the youth can do as they will); from ‘mother’ -> ‘thenks mather’ + a corruption of a jocular ‘pater’ I have settled on pether. thank u for appreciating the CARE AND CONSIDERATION THAT WENT INTO THIS. maybe if I ever have children (I will never have children) this will be the deranged term I will bestow upon myself. much 2 ponder, etc.

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judith Butler's scholarly writing is infamous for being ponderous, obscure, and generally difficult to grasp – it has (rather hilariously) catapulted several critical debates later dismissed on grounds of both detractors and acolytes misunderstanding Butler's base arguments, and in 1998, it won them first place in the academic journal Philosophy and Literature's Bad Writing Contest. I myself have been less than generous about their style in my review of Gender Trouble, a book that transformed the way I think but also gave me plenty of headaches in the process. To me, the idea of Butler writing a trade book for a lay audience has long been a necessity so seemingly unrealisable it morphed into a sort of joke, but Who's Afraid of Gender? shows us that the gap between ivory tower intellectual exercises and material reality can in fact be bridged – and that Butler is the right person to do it.

Who's Afraid of Gender presents the feminist scholar and activist at their most acerbic and accessible. Here, Butler breaks down how “gender” is deployed as a psychosocial phantasm by emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists in quite the same way as immigration, critical race theory, decolonialism, reproductive rights, and critiques of neoliberalism are scapegoated to displace prevailing anxieties and fears of destruction onto an identifiable cause. All these ‘causes’ are seen by paternalistic conservatives and ‘gender-critical’ movements as foreign excesses of freedom, and are made identifiable in contradictory terms – for instance, as “gender ideology” as both Marxist and hypercapitalist – in a tactical move that allows them to be linked to any and all fears prevalent in a time of “selective Europeanisation” by the World Bank and its neoliberal, neocolonial policies, the withdrawal of social services by cash-poor governments, the depletion of fulfilling jobs and standards of living, and the increasing social influence of religion as it fills the gap left by the state, to name a few.

The unstable environment of our realities allows authoritarianism to emerge from democracies by stoking fascist fears, such as those about national “purity,” which are based on a (white) heterosexual family ‘tradition’ that has historically been defined in opposition to the way people of colour live, and are. This book explores global perspectives, scholarly and otherwise, to emphatically assert how this dimorphism – the primacy of the male-female binary and the heteronormative framework for thinking about and living gender – was established by colonialism and the kind of market expansion upon which it relied, displacing other indigenous arrangements of kinship and language that already made room for gender-non confirming and intersex people.

Here, Butler is not rejecting the idea of biological sex (as many have incorrectly assumed since they postulated their theory of gender performativity in the 1990s), nor are they asserting that gender is a voluntary ‘performance’ that can be switched at will. Instead, they explore how sex and gender are co-constructed in a dynamic system of exchange where embodiment – biology itself – is acted on and formed through the way an organism interacts with its environment over time (take, for instance, the ways in which the food we eat – what is available, what and how much of it we ingest, how it reaches us, etc – impacts our bodies and affects our hormones, which are a characteristic of ‘sex’). Gender, according to Butler, is the site where biological and social realities work in concert to shape our behavioural conditioning.

Indeed, sex is not a natural ‘fact’; and ‘sex assignment’ is repeated throughout the course of our lives as the biological sex identified at birth creates a series of expectations about what a person will undergo and turn out to be, according to which we are each socially conditioned to behave:

"Rather than regard gender as the cultural or social version of biological sex, we should ask whether gender is operating as the framework that tends to establish the sexes within specific classificatory schemes. If so, gender is then already operative as the scheme of power within which sex assignment takes place. When a designated official assigns a sex on the basis of observation, they rely on a mode of observation generally structured by the anticipation of the binary option: male or female, They do not answer the question "What gender?" Rather, they answer the question "Which gender?" The marking of sex is the first operation of gender, even though that obligatory binary option of "male" or "female" has prepared the scene. In this sense, gender might be said to precede sex assignment, functioning as a structural anticipation of the binary that organizes observable facts and regulates the act of assignment itself"

"The gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never fully be closed, which is why even those who happily embrace their sex assigned at birth still have to do performative work to embody that assignment in social life. Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal."

"…to the extent that the reference to sex is enveloped in norms and conventions about what sex should be, what limits are implied by sex, and what forms of appearance should go along with sex, sex is already in the process of being gendered. If sex is framed within cultural norms, then it is already gender. That does not mean it is fake or artificial, but only that it is being mobilized in the service of one power or another. The claim that sex is immutable invokes a religious and linguistic frame for thinking about sex. Wherever there is such a frame, gender is at work. To say that there is a cultural construction of sex in such an instance does not mean that culture produces sex out of thin air. It does mean, however, that the matter of sex is being framed in a certain way and for a political purpose."

Biological sex is mutable, and cannot be defined by reproductive capacity alone, which changes across the course of a lifetime and may not even exist for some. Binary sex is further complicated by hormonal, anatomical, biological, and chromosomal differences between members of the same sex. Further, 'corrective' surgery enforcing dimorphism on intersex people shows that sex is not a natural fact but a normative ideal. Butler also shows us the problem with the nature/ culture differentiation, which is often used to justify homophobic rhetoric and has historically been used quite literally as a basis for racial subjugation of black and brown people – who were seen as ‘closer to nature’ – towards developing a ‘cultured’ white heterosexual ideal in opposition to their ‘natural’ sexual deviance.

Equally important to the arguments made in Who’s Afraid of Gender? is the linguistic component of ‘gender’ as an idea in the Anglophone world, seen in relation to the role language plays in making and unmaking subjects. Butler argues that the “version of binary "gender" imposed by colonial authorities cannot be effectively countered by a human rights framework that understands itself as a universal" – coinage and translation are key to expanding our vision of freedom across transnational lines, and untranslatability can often be a tool in thinking beyond lexical and normative control. At one point, Butler writes that “those who prize the purity of a language imagine the expulsion of foreign words, but they would have to redo their entire histories to achieve the "purity" they imagine", which strikes a powerfully poignant note about queerphobia and as xenophobia, both causes linked metonymically and taken up by authoritarian groups.

In the end, Who’s Afraid of Gender doesn’t merely answer the titular question, it also makes a case for the need to link gender with a broader struggle for emancipation from the various social and economic forms of precarity enforced on us today. Though I wish Butler’s exploration of the links between colonialism and dimorphism had been more detailed and that her analysis engaged more meaningfully with the contemporary politics of the Global South – I took a star off for this reason – I found this book impressively comprehensive (scale and scope) for such a slim volume.

Finally, unlike the defense of ‘bad writing’ in Gender Trouble (which, in retrospective, makes sense when considering how languages shape and constrain normative thinking), this book offers a more accessibly reasoned perspective on the need to listen to, read, and engage with the other – not just their theory, as some may take away from this, but their materiality – as a necessary component of both productive democratic discourse and the practice of imagining – and embodying – Otherwise. This is a timely, powerful book, and indeed Butler’s writing herein is more approachable than any language in which myself or another reviewer can attempt to describe it.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition.
—Bernice Johnson Reagon

The debate around gender is so insanely fraught and acrimonious at the moment that we desperately need some clear, precise voices on the subject. And naturally, if one wants clarity and precision, one's first thought is to reach for some Judith Butler.

This is Butler’s first book aimed at general audiences; I fear that their constant talk of ‘phantasmatic scenes’ and ‘gestic performativity’ is not likely to thrown much light on the debate for most people, but by their standards I suppose it’s a step forward in trying to communicate these ideas to a wider public.

My problems with Butler have been and remain primarily linguistic, not political. This is perhaps worth stressing, since this is an area which attracts a lot of bad faith and where ‘just asking questions’ is frequently used as a fig-leaf for trying to undermine the whole debate. So, to be clear from the start, let me say that I fully support the work to break down patriarchal and heteronormative social assumptions, and I think we should all be doing our best to build a world in which everyone of every identity is free to live and love however they wish. In my view, no other ethical position is possible.

So Butler and I agree on that much, but I seem to disagree with them on almost everything else, from the ideological ideas underpinning this vision to the descriptive language used to explain and promote it.

HIDDEN AGENDERS

I thought this book started really well. The early chapters, which cover global campaigns against ‘gender’, are full of new perspectives – I was fascinated to see Butler's argument that groups like the World Bank and the EU should stop insisting on gender equity because it associates such ideas with a form of neo-imperialism. I'm not sure I agree, but it's a very sharp and interesting argument. And unlike in their earlier academic work, it's all supported by quotes from actual politicians and newspapers, and feels genuinely connected to the real world.

Increasingly, though, Butler does succumb to a tendency to woolly abstraction, which intensifies as the book goes on. Part of the problem is that many very different opponents to ‘gender’ are being conflated here in slightly confusing ways. Butler sees an uneasy union of right-wing lunacy with various strands of feminism, called ‘gender-critical’ by its supporters and ‘trans-exclusionary’ by its opponents. The problem is that very little really unites these disparate groups. When conservatives like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán or the Vatican object to ‘gender’, such objections are part of a programme opposing everything from reproductive freedom to gay marriage to deviation from traditional gender roles. But the second-wave feminism Butler objects to does not oppose any of that – quite the contrary. It's only really the issue of trans rights where there is any hint of crossover with the right.

So trans rights and trans identity are central to this book, albeit in a strangely unacknowledged and undefined way. Actually, almost everything here is undefined. As they say themselves, the whole problem with this debate is precisely that ‘there is no text in the room, no agreement on terms’, and I'm afraid Butler's particular brand of learned incomprehensibility is not really part of the solution there.

Or perhaps that's by design? There's sometimes an uneasy sense that the vagueness might be deliberate, that the heavy semantic fog under which Butler's discussion takes place is in the service of an expedient muddying of terminology. Nuances of language have (for reasons I cannot understand) always been central to this debate. Slogans like ‘transwomen are women’ put a semantic claim in place of a political one. Transwomen may be women, but transwomen are by definition not ciswomen, and the difference between the two is precisely in those areas of physiology that the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ originally served to delineate. So let's not pretend to be outraged that people are slow to detach the terms from matters of biology. You can't make changes to basic vocabulary by fiat, or not without antagonising people.

What is really meant by such a slogan is that we insist on a broader, more inclusive sense of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. But that is a position that needs to be argued and won on its own considerable merits, not just defined into existence. It is not an acceptable way of winning an argument to simply redefine the terms of debate in your favour.

The same goes for the distinction between sex and gender, which is completely dissolved here. Butler uses the two terms interchangeably, sometimes switching mid-sentence, and does not define either of them, which, given the state of debate, is maddening. The most we get is a comment that ‘there are a variety of accounts of what [gender] means…these are knowledge projects with open questions’. The question of what ‘sex’ might mean is ignored. ‘Sometimes,’ as Maggie Nelson has written elsewhere, ‘the shit stays messy.’ If only Butler were so up-front, instead of just allowing everything to exist in a fog of indeterminacy.

There's been a lot of attention paid to the complexity of intersex conditions in recent years, but it still seems to me that biological sex is about as binary as anything gets in nature. If you're a vertebrate, you either have a body designed to produce large gametes, in which case you're female, or a body designed to produce small ones, in which case you're male. There aren't any other options, and they correspond very closely with physiological traits like genitals. By all means argue that this biology doesn't matter. Argue that it's irrelevant, that it shouldn't have any bearing on people's lives. I will follow those arguments enthusiastically. But don't pretend that it's something insubstantial. I really think it's plainly apparent that arguments for a ‘spectrum’ of biological sex are putting a lot of pressure on the science for the sake of political expediency.

This is why I personally find it disingenuous to talk about sex as something ‘assigned at birth’, as though sex assignment were an opaque and arbitrary process, like putting on the Sorting Hat. JK Rowling rears her baleful head again… In well over ninety-nine percent of cases, as everyone understands, sex is not assigned, it's just uncontroversially observed. You can certainly argue that no observations are truly neutral within a society governed by heteronormative binaries, but I think that's a tough argument to push given the unanimity on this subject across all human societies everywhere in the world and at every point in history.

But such language, again, is used to give the argument a helping hand. After all, if sex can be ‘assigned’ by a doctor or judge, in some shadowy ‘complex act’ (as Butler describes it), then why can't it just be ‘reassigned’ by someone else?

If we want to say that sex can be self-assigned on the basis of strength of feeling (which is Butler's position), then we are detaching ‘sex’ from biology altogether and moving it closer to what we mean by ‘gender’. This doesn't seem to me to be either necessary or strategically helpful in terms of promoting inclusion, actually rather the reverse. If someone considers themselves a man or a woman, I believe they should be accepted as such, referred to as such, given all appropriate healthcare and legal protection, and granted access at least in principle to relevant single-sex spaces. That doesn't mean their biology has changed, nor should anyone care whether it has or not.

The fact that some people don't like their biological sex, and do not want to be constrained by its implications, is not a reason to construe it as a mutable quality. It is a reason to say that everyone should have the right to ignore it and to define their own identity and ways of living, whether gendered or un-. But clarity matters, because there are areas of debate here that overlap with a strain of anti-intellectualism which to me is fundamentally no different from opposition to vaccines, or climate denialism. Trans rights should be based on good politics, not bad science.

PHANTASMATIC PENISES

Some of the places Butler goes to in discussing the implications of all this are fascinating. Because transwomen share certain physiological traits with cismen, for instance, Butler is very concerned to downplay any ‘phantasmatic [what else?] reduction of men not only to their penises, but to attacking penises’. To the idea that men are ‘potential rapists’, Butler asks: ‘all of them, really?’

So yes: here we have Judith Butler literally giving us the ‘not all men’ argument, which is really quite something to see. ‘Should we be given license to ascribe guilt by association because we were harmed?’ she asks. ‘I think not […] none of us were violated by an entire class, even if it sometimes feels that way.’

This may be an ungenerous reaction, but part of me can't help feeling that it's a bit fucking rich, after so many years of belabouring the problems of male violence and rape culture, to be suddenly concerned – now that women can be the ones with penises – that we might be maligning a group unnecessarily. Or rather, in Butler’s terms, that we might be dealing with ‘phantasmatic projections that rely on generalizing a first-person account to all women, and to cast all people with penises on the model of the rapist’.

The message for women dealing with trauma is actually pretty blunt here: just because you’ve suffered abuse from someone with male physiology, Butler says, ‘that is not reason enough to generalize’. It’s a logical point of view, but we could, I think, show more understanding here for those who find this difficult. Given Butler's stress on the inherent harmlessness of men as well as of penis-owners more generally, one is entitled to wonder what they think the justification is for having women-only spaces at all.

FILIOQUE

Still, the real differences underneath all this tussling over terminology are, I feel, pretty insignificant in the grand scale of things. Looking at the fury of these debates online sometimes puts me in mind of studying one of those medieval religious wars, where thousands of people are fighting to the death over the correct inflection of a Greek verb. The way people refer to me in their own heads is not, I would suggest, very important compared to how they treat me in practical terms; and as Butler says,

We may understandably feel disrespected if we are referred to in the wrong way, but why have we asked people to enter into our own frame of reference?

It is nice to see them, in the final chapter or two, arguing precisely for this sense of commonality and alliance which is so needed. And when Butler cuts the lofty theorising and concentrates on real goals, they can be almost inspiring:

My own view is that we should seek to bring about a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable, and people generally become more open to the ways that gender can be done and lived without judgment, fear, or hatred.

What reasonable person could disagree? But I do wish there had been a little more in the way of practical suggestions for how to get there – legal issues, social projects etc. – rather than so much epistemological wankery. From reading this book, you could be forgiven for thinking that gender theory is an area in which nothing is defined, concepts are interchangeable, nothing can be known for sure, and real people's lives are a remote detail. In fact it's a matter of urgent pragmatic attention (as Butler understands much better than I do).

As they point out, the concern over gender, as voiced by right-wing regimes around the world, is not really a culture war in the direct sense, but a kind of proxy for underlying worries around economic instability and political weaknesses – a knee-jerk reaction, perhaps, to rapidly changing times. Maybe this offers some strategy on how to address it, a task which will certainly require groups to work together across differences of opinion. It's an area in which vast reserves of sympathy and clarity are always called for; Judith Butler has plenty of the former but, alas, precious little of the latter.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upea, turhautunut, hieman toisteinen ja tiivistystä kaipaava, ja silti jälleen yksi aikamme tärkeimmistä feministisistä, yhdenvertaisuuteen tähtäävistä ja ihmisoikeuksia puolustavista teoksista. Olisipa tämän kirjan teesit pakollista luettavaa ihan kaikille.

[Victoria (Eve's Alexandria) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judith Butler is an absolute legend and I find their insights into the ‘anti-gender ideology’ movement incredibly valuable. Here they develop an analysis of current discourse that shows how gender has become a ‘phantasm’, a site onto which the fears and insecurities that arise out of neoliberalism, capitalism and climate crisis can be displaced. They take on the principle arguments of the anti-gender movement - ‘sex is real’; gender hurts kids etc - but really the contribution of this book is in showing why the Left should be really concerned about the phenomenon of anti-gender/transphobic/critical feminist movements more generally. We need to understand how attacks on the notion of gender are connected to a constellation of regressive and oppressive ideas.

That said, this isn’t a perfect book: Butler is repetitive at times; there are moments where the text gets off-topic; and, even though it’s more accessible than their earlier work, the writing is still opaque. It’s not necessarily a good place to start with combatting anti-gender thinking, that’s for sure (or even a good place to start with Butler). If you don’t want to read the whole thing though - or want a crash course before committing - Butler has some fabulous shorter pieces that explicate their thesis. I recommend their Guardian article ‘Why is the idea of gender provoking backlash the world over?’ from 2021, as well as their recent interview appearance on Novara Media, which you can find on YouTube.

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Who’s Afraid Of Gender” is an exploration of the rising animosity towards gender, a word that has come to embody everything from reproductive freedom, changing roles for women to different sexualities and transgender rights. Butler discusses this phenomenon from a multitude of view points: the origins of the antigender movement within Catholic circles, its global spread and how gender has come to encompass so many ideas, the legal disputes it has raised in Trump’s America and the rise of the TERF movement especially in the UK. But the work also deals with the philosophy and science of gender itself, its relation to sex, as well as the racial and colonial legacies tied up with our understanding of both and even what it means to talk about gender in a multilingual world.

Having watched the rise of “gender panic” in the last few years I was eager to read this book. Butler’s work is timely, level and often compassionate. They manage to pack an incredible breadth of topics into a relatively thin package. As someone who has been following these issues always only in isolated national instances, the summary of the development of the antigender movement and current trends is especially interesting, showing the full scope of the problem we face.
Looking at the topic of gender from so many different lenses was perhaps even more illuminating. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions Butler draws, opening yourself to thoroughly questioning your own assumptions is certainly worthwhile, and the thorough notes provide a springboard for further research.

An often mentioned issue with Bulter’s writing is that it can be rather difficult to navigate. And indeed, much of the text, especially the repetitions, could probably have been shortened without losing the meaning. This was a shame, because many of the points were both clear and poignant and, if the text had been a little tighter, might have been that much stronger.

This is not a book that is going to change anyone firmly on the anti-gender side’s mind. There’s too much reference to Marxism or psychoanalysis for anyone who is already staunchly opposed to “leftist academia” to be open to. But this also isn’t a book for them. It’s for those of us who see the growing trends and have been asking ourselves how we can counteract them. As Butler concludes, only together.

I thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Jason Pippi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a manifesto and should be required reading to help usher in a next generation of cooperation and global understanding.

I loved how Judith Butler methodically set up her argument and supported each point with great detail - defining terms and ideas. This scholarly approach made for a thoughtful read.

One of my favorite quotes illustrates Butler’s excellence in supporting her position while delivering the message with a tongue-in-cheek voice: “ The opposition to “gender” as a demonic social construct culminates in policies that seek to deprive people of their legal and social rights, that is, to exist within the terms that they have rightfully established for themselves. Stripping people of rights in the name of morality or the nation or a patriarchal wet dream belongs to the broader logic amplified by authoritarian nationalism”

[Bella Moses · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh what the hell is going on?? How is this where “global feminist icon” Judith Butler is thinking from? This honestly makes me sad. I read only the first few chapters, which were so intellectual flimsy, reductive, and obvious I couldn’t make myself go further. Perhaps this is a topic that some people need to give serious energy to but this book is preaching hopelessly (and boringly) to the choir. Every page I had to restrain myself from yelling DUH!

To me it’s clear that Butler has caved to their critics in terms of both their writing style and the depth of their critical analysis :((

Clearly I’m in a mood but Jesus Christ I was not feeling this.

[Donatas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hm, įdomiai :)

- Pradėkim nuo to, kad turėti naują Butler knygą lyčių/seksualumo tema yra šventė. Po legendinės "Gender Trouble", išleistos, ojezau, tais pačiais metais, kai gimiau, Butler dar ilgai kitose knygose aiškinosi, ką ir kaip pirmojoje norėjo pasakyti, ką papildyti, ką paneigti. Paskui, matyt, pabodo, tyrinėjimai sukosi link kitų socialinio teisingumo temų, o lyčių studijose, universituose ir viešojoje erdvėje Butler idėjos buvo aptarinėjamos toliau. Vis fragmentiškai pasirodydavo interviu lyčių temomis, kuriuos su malonumu paskaitydavau. bet atskiros knygos neleido. Iki dabar. Ir dar tokia svarbia tema - siekiant išpreparuoti "antigenderizmo" judėjimus ir perspėti apie antidemokratiškas tendencijas naikinti žmogaus teisių laimėjimus (pirmiausia JAV).

- Pradžioje tikrai didžiausias dėmesys tam ir skiriamas - apžvelgiamas Vatikano vaidmuo, kuriant ir keliant baimes apie "genderizmo agendą", atpainiojami Vatikano ryšiai su įtakingomis politinėmis ir pilietinėmis organizacijomis, kurios tas baimes platina visur, kur netingi. Paskaičius akivaizdu, kad tos organizacijos padirbėjo ir Lietuvoje, nes ir čia lankėsi jų pranašai (labai įtakinguose kontekstuose - pvz., knygoje minima genderizmo paniką platinanti Gabriele Kuby net buvo pakviesta į Seimą). Butler nekelia sau tikslo pateikti kontrargumentų sąvadą šiems judėjimams, o labiau koncentruojasi į jų vidinius prieštaravimus, nevykusią logiką, argumentavimo klaidas. Paskui knyga nukrypsta į psichoanalitinę "gender" kaip viešo fantazmo analizę: destrukcijos baimė (klimatas, karai etc.) -> netikrumas dėl ateities -> poreikis rasti "atpirkimo ožį" -> vengiant sudėtingų, painių ir sisteminių sprendimų, kova su "genderizmu", pažeidžiamiausiomis visuomenės grupėmis, kurios taip lengvai neapsigins, kaip visuotinės destrukcijos šaltiniu. Nu maždaug taip, supaprastinus dešimt kartų. :) Analizė pasirodė svarbi, tarsi niuansuota, bet neapleido jausmas, kad tai tik dalis kažko platesnio - kad gavau paaiškinimą tik apie nedidelę dalį fenomeno, tarsi psichoanalitinio modelio čia nepakaktų. O gal tai tikrai tik dar viena sąmokslo teorija, kurių čia privisę nesuskaičiuojamas kiekis, ir jų visų aiškinimo modelis daugmaž vienodas?

- Gal keistai nuskambės, bet man daug įdomiau šioje knygoje buvo Butler santykis su savo braižu - įprastu rašymo stiliumi, naudojamais autoriais, feminizmo ir queer teorijomis, kurias nagrinėjo anksčiau savo knygose. Nes ne paslaptis, kad Butler braižas turi nevienareikšmę reputaciją dėl savo sudėtingumo ir sunkaus prieinamumo, galbūt dėl to ne kartą ir ne viena Butler idėja buvo klaidingai suprasta ir perfrazuota. Jaučiau azartą paskaityti, kaip Butler stengiasi rašyti tekstą, skirtą pirmiausia ne akademiniam skaitytojui (ši knyga kaip tik tokia ir yra). Tai kad stengėsi - faktas, bet pavyko visaip. Net truputį sujuokino šis sakinys iš paskutinio skyriaus, kuriame stengiamasi paaiškinti, kaip žmogaus sąmonė įsivaizduoja ateitį: "Imagining the future is more like the release of a potential through a sensuos medium, where the medium is not a simple vehicle for an already formed idea, but an idea that takes hold and assumes shape, sound, and texture, releasing a potential of its own" (p. 245). Ačiū už paaiškinimą, bet gal nereikėjo. :) Tačiau absoliuti dovana buvo rasti gerus, iliustratyvius pavyzdžius apie sex/gender ir nature/culture sąveiką, nors labai pritrūko, kad būtų prasiplėsta apie "choosing gender" mitą ir dar kartą užtvirtinta, kad Butler niekada neteorizavo, kad lytį gali keisti kaip kojines - vieną dieną pasirenki vienokią, kitą - kitokią. Taip, Butler jau tą aiškino dar "Bodies that Matter" (1993), bet neprošal priminti, kai tai yra tapę viena iš dezinformacijos ašių. Ir, pabaigai, turbūt nustebino tai, kad Butler remiasi tais pačiais autoriais, kuriuos naudojo ir pirmoje savo knygoje, nors viename interviu minėjo, kad rašydama šią, turėjo perskaityti daug naujos literatūros, suprasti, ką tyrinėja ir kuo kvėpuoja šiuolaikiniai autoriai. Todėl dalinuosi abejone, ar ta jungtis su šiuolaikiniu lyčių studijų lauku šioje knygoje yra tikrai (į)vykusi.

Šalia knygos rekomenduoju desertą - maždaug prieš metus pasirodžiusią HARDtalk laidą su Butler apie šią knygą. Daug nepatogių klausimų ir įdomių atsakymų. :)

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

dnf @60%

This was actually my introduction to Butler’s work; based on other reviews and feedback, I’ve concluded that maybe this isn’t the best place to start…

I enjoyed reading their takes and there’s a lot of potential for me to really enjoy some of Butler’s older books. This one revolves around gender theory, which is what they’re known for, but this one felt less philosophical and more like infodumping. I feel like anyone reading Butler’s work already agrees with their opinions regarding this topic, as they’ve been using non-binary pronouns for quite some time. The takes on gender here are obviously modern but the ideas aren’t really anything special or groundbreaking, and we don’t really get any exploration on the opposing sides of Butler’s very liberal stances.

I’ve heard from others that this is a more watered down version of Butler, perhaps on autopilot, but this made me very curious to check out their iconic previous works

[Sacha · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars

It seems like there are two camps of readers who will come to this text: Butler's preexisting acolytes (*raises hand faster than Tracy Flick*) and Butler's detractors. I can't speak to what the latter gets out of this, and I also...don't care.

Butler's work was part of my scholarship throughout all of my undergraduate and graduate coursework, it's foundational in the college courses I've been teaching for decades, and it has helped me better understand the world at large. For obvious reasons, I came in with high expectations, and I'm feeling fulfilled.

Butler answers their titular question, and they also provide a lot of context for where we are now and how we got here. I got a lot of out of this, but the most important benefit is the counteracting of so much gaslighting. I'm fortunate to be mostly in environments where that's not happening, but I still live in this society, where a lot of the issues Butler digs into here are the subject of constant f***ery, and there's only so much of that one can take before they start asking what the heck is even going on anymore.

So, Butler is showing up here not only with a well devised exploration of the central subject but also with some important, grounding reminders from the premier expert. It turns out there are still some folks afraid of gender (*sighs forever*), but Butler is still here to help the rest of us keep fighting for the obvious: basic human rights. I'm not sure there's a higher endorsement available.

This is - as anticipated - more foundational content from one of the greatest theorists of our time.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

[nathan]

Major thanks to NetGalley and FSG for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:

*DNF

Not in the proper headspace for this and won't be until I find myself in the classroom where this is assigned.

Strong in its introduction with "left good, right bad" with guarded language, I wasn't eased into this with the kind of welcome that I thought the queer community was supposed to provide. I get it. Our people are hurt. Especially for those whose voices are lost to a government that ceases to acknowledge the rights of minorities. But with Aunt Charlie's or Mood Ring, or any used bookstore in the Castro or Hillcrest, we come welcome with open arms. Here the arms are folded across the chest, wanting not to create a space for communication. It's really just a campus soapbox to loop in echo chambers.

Given that this is being released in election year, I see no use in staying guarded. I'm here to talk. I'm here to have a conversation. I'm here to form community. Given opposing views, I'm here to really sit with the people and talk through with what we can do to keep people safe. I'm tired of pointing fingers and telling people that they're wrong.

I want to talk with people. Not at people.

And this book is really just talking at me.

[Sohum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Judith Butler is good at writing about Western conceits of gender and rhetoric, and thankfully, that's a big chunk of this book. But what is left is a shallow engagement with Black feminist and anticolonial critiques of Western feminism, which felt more perfunctory than engaged.

[Emily Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

So so interesting, especially good on terfs and colonialism! Definitely the most accessible and up to date way to understand Judith butler

[Eilish Gilligan · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant and complex, makes me sad to think that the people who need to read this book the most will probably never pick it up

[Lawrie Wigham · Rating 1 out of 5]

1) I was really dissappinted with this book. I was hoping Butler would clearly set out the arguments of gender-critical feminists and clearly and rationally dismantle them. For me, this would deal with two specific contentions: 1) what is a man\woman? 2) how does one 'identify' as a gender? Regardless of the validity of arguments, that's what I believed the book needed to cover.

2) Instead, Butler creates the weakest strawmen I have ever read in a philosophy book, alongside throwing in broad assertions without any evidence or further argument to back them up:

" although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti-gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as "born female at birth", resume their natural and "moral" positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremecy." (P14-15) - quite a claim that gender-critical feminists are driven by a wish to restore white supremecy, and yet there is zero build-up or subsequent argument to defend this significant claim.

3) I imagined that a book focusing on gender and sex would at the outset clarify workable definitions which can be consistently used throughout. Instead, only vague and unclear definitions are provided near the end of the book - I know that's part of Butler's theory, but it makes the first half of the book very unreadable and unclear. Then, when stating a definition, Butler doesn't acknowledge that *this* is where the disagreement is!

"As long as we agree that the category of sex arrives in our lives with an imaginary, a mandate, a complex frame, an implicit set of criteria {*what are they?*}, then there is from the start a phantasmatic condition that informs the fact of sex, actualized in its delimination, and this means that gender is already doing its work."

But what if, as many second wave feminists argue, there is no mandate or implicit set of criteria that follows from biological sex? The crux of the argument Butler should be addressing, is that gender critical feminists think there is no 'performance' of gender: they think there is not a checklist of behaviours or actions which define being male or female. What could this checklist of performance be outside of rigid stereotypes? Does this by definition exclude the possibility of tomboys as 'females' performing masculinity. Or does performing masculinity by definition mean they are 'male'? These are the arguments against Butler but are not discussed or acknowledged.

4) Butler doesn't deal with what self-identification means - but comes out strongly against any state involvement in gatekeeping. This then poses the question, without defining 'man' or 'woman' how stable are internal identities? Can one be one in the morning, another at lunch, and neither in the afternoon? What would this mean for public policy in prisons, schools, sports etc? Without a usable definition of the categories, how can we tell? This is another crucial argument that Butler barely addresses - without criteria and external gatekeepers, how can bad-faith actors be detected? In prisons, the argument GC feminists have made is that men, not trans-women, could claim to self-identify as women and therefore be treated as such to gain access to vulnerable women. How should we contest that claim if it is self-identified? The closest we get to that point, again does not explain what 'self identification' actually is, why it is difficult, or how it is assessed:

"Lets be clear: transition and self-identification are not whims, and even if a person chooses to take the step of self-declaring on legal forms, that does not mean that the lived reality of gender is a whimsical choice, a strategic way for that person to get into women's spaces and to have their way with those they encounter."

But if legal forms are not required, as Butler argues they should not be, then why is self-declaring not a whimsical choice? What does it actually entail? This is nowhere clarified or set-out.

It's not so much that Butler's arguments are wrong, it's that after reading the full book I am not any closer to understanding what the arguments actually are. Maybe the argument is too subtle for me, but I came away no wiser on Butler's position or the objections to those who oppose.

[Lily Heron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A blistering attack on the political right, Butler explores how fearmongering around the concept of gender has deep roots with racism, fascism, homophobia, antisemitism, and misogyny. From the hypocrisy of the Church to the gaslighting faux concern of well-known celebrity figures, Butler offers a searing takedown of the ease with which the political right exploit fears surrounding trans and gender nonconforming individuals. The author provides moments of fierce burns that had me wincing, demonstrating their firm grasp on complex material and their visceral ability to cut through to the heart of the matter and reject ignorance, manipulation tactics, and prejudice. Reading this book confirmed to me the importance of knowing where one stands on contemporary political issues, and to consider whose political company I wish to associate myself with. If "protecting family values" means keeping wives barefoot at home chained to a stove; restricting abortion access to encourage more white babies and more BIPOC fodder for the industrial prison complex; withdrawing hard-won rights for LGBTQIAP+ parents; restricting healthcare access for LGBTQIAP+ children and adolescents, thereby increasing suicide risks and rates amongst this population; blaming the Jews in general (standard); and essentially hating anyone who represents a different worldview to oneself, then I'm out.

I am grateful to have received an ARC of this book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[dobbs the dog · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a fantastic look at intersectionality and gender. However, I must say, that I didn’t find it overly accessible. I haven’t read anything else from Butler, but I’ve heard that their writing tends to be quite high level. This was by no means an easy read, but it was worth it.

Some of the bits that I found to be most interesting:
• how colonization is at the root of A LOT of anti-gender laws/attitudes
• that the pervasiveness of the English language has negatively impacted on non-western gender identities
• sexual discrimination actually also covers queer folks (if you think about it logically)
• how terrible TERFs are (obvs I already knew this, but Butler really digs into this topic and it’s fascinating)

I listened to this as audio, and Butler narrates it themself, and I’ve got to say, I don’t know if I was entertained or mildly offput by the number of times this mid-60s non-binary person said the word penis. SO MANY TIMES. It was in the section about TERFs and how it basically boils down to the fact that they blame penises for rape, and it was an excellent take down of TERF rhetoric. But, so many penises…

Overall a fascinating read, though quite academic.

If you want a more thorough review, I highly recommend this one, which is the entire reason I picked this book up in the first place.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ziggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 - 4 stars

A thorough description of gender with a strong focus on the anti–gender ideology movement with many new insights for me (e.g., the atrocities by John Money).

At times the author tries to include too much, making the text packed with side paths linking gender, climate change, racism and other (mostly) left-wing ideals. However, Butler makes a compelling argument showing we cannot study all these topics in a vacuum.

Oh, and the Catholic church being so worried about LGBTQIA+ people because they will have sexual interactions with children is about the stupidest shit I’ve heard from these idiots.

[Andrew Eder · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOVED!!! Very dense, very thoughtful, very well written and defended! Definitely not an intro or step one type book. This bordered into textbook territory (which could be good or bad). I almost wish it wasn’t AS long or it was a little more accessible because it does take a lot of mental energy to read and understand. I’d like to read this again, chapter by chapter, and really dig into it with others to discuss!

[saml · Rating 2 out of 5]

difficult to be critical of this book, as i think its almost entirely true. but i think this kind of book, far from being distant theorising, is closely involved in the public debate in which it intervenes, and thus should be criticised on strategic grounds. butler presents a description of the phantasmic scene of the anti-gender movement, which, in simple terms, seems an attempt to catalogue lots of unsupported premises in the anti-trans and anti-feminist political discourse. that's all well and good. i almost expected early in the book that the solution to this tangle would be recession from the concept of gender itself, in a quietistic move. but no, butler wishes to affirm gender, and if this is the project the task must be to show not only that anti-gender premises are false, not just unsupported and absurd-sounding to us. this would ideally be a complex statistical case. instead, it feels as if we are being asked to participate in our own phantasm, we genderists. this is most glaring when i find butler's unsupported premises false: for instance that anything is, in a strong sense, untranslatable (which i think we have good davidsonian reasons to contest), or the attempt to present sex as gendered by presenting the appearance of sex as gendered, as if the possibility of there being a reference for a given sense is contested by the fact the sense is a sense. similarly with the case against the nature-culture distinction, which seems useful, despite their protests. finally, this book is quite dull because it is presented with the scrupulous care of academic writing, but without the interesting academic conclusions that make that care worth fighting through. hate to bash on butler so hard. i'm a defender i promise!!

[Frieda · Rating 4 out of 5]

save me, judith butler...judith butler, save me....judith butler...

[peach · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic intro to their work. i listened to the audiobook, which made this dense topic more digestible. judith butler made such good arguments, imo, about how and why gender theory is becoming increasingly vilified. they also shared profound insights into gender theory from a non-western lens, which included new lines of thinking for me. y'all is it just me or is colonialism kinda bad..