| Gender identity -- Political aspects. |
| Sex |
| Sex identity (Gender identity) |
| Sexual identity (Gender identity) |
| Gender (Sex) |
| Human beings -- Sexual behavior |
| Human sexuality |
| Sex (Gender) |
| Sexual behavior |
| Sexual practices |
| Sexuality |
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Summary
Summary
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Kirkus, Literary Hub, Autostraddle, The Millions, Electric Literature, and them.
"A profoundly urgent intervention." --Naomi Klein
"A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in re-imagining collective futurity." --Claudia Rankine
From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.
Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble 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" that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization--and even "man" himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.
The aim of Who's Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how "gender" has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of "gender" collects and 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 refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and 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 a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless--a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Gender studies pioneer Butler (Gender Trouble) argues in this trenchant polemic that in recent years the "phantasm of gender" has been "scapegoated" by "anti-gender" ideologues who seek to stoke fears based on misinformation and falsehood. In Butler's telling, the political right uses gender to "deflect from... forces that are, in fact, destroying the world," such as "climate destruction, war, capitalist exploitation." Analyzing how various groups--including political leaders in the U.S., the U.K., the Global South, and the Vatican--use gender to achieve their aims, Butler is particularly biting about anti-transgender feminists ("Anti-trans feminists seek to still the category of women, lock it down, erect the gates, and patrol the borders"). Urging a view of gender as co-constructed--meaning it is not purely the result of nature, nurture, or culture, but a combination of all three--Butler puts forth a philosophy of gender expression as a basic human right and astutely observes that members of the anti-gender movement "are not opposed to gender--they have a precise gender order in mind that they want to impose upon the world." An illuminating final section discusses the historical uses of gender by colonial regimes, leading to an impassioned plea to the left not to dismiss gender as a sideshow bugbear of the far right, but as fundamental to all political struggle. Thoughtful and powerfully assured, this is an essential take on an ongoing political battle. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
For the purposes of this review, I read a work by Judith Butler. That might seem like a banal statement, but it already sets me apart from almost everyone who has an opinion on the US philosopher. It's not quite a joke to say their latest book could have been called Who's Afraid of Judith Butler, because many people are; all the fears and fantasies poured into the idea of "gender", which this new work explores, are also poured into its author. Butler's work has been defined as diabolical, and the professor as some sort of she-devil - or rather they-devil - a convenient vessel for current anxieties about the stability of sex. When I was in my 20s doing women's studies as an undergraduate, Butler's 1990 book, Gender Trouble, was relatively new and already hugely successful. In it, they brought classic radical feminism, psychology and poststructuralist philosophy to bear in the analysis of gender and sexuality. But though they were a rock star in academic circles, Butler was hardly mainstream. Known for expounding the theory of gender performativity, they were also infamous for deploying exceedingly long sentences, dense prose, and the postmodern style that people either really love, or really hate. Their ideas are now much more widely discussed, at least partly because of a backlash against the increased rights and visibility of trans and gender-diverse people. This seems like the kind of impact and level of public engagement that most academics can only dream about, but when theory travels into popular discourse it is often damaged on the journey. It arrives late, very much changed, sapped of nuance, simplified, misapplied and misunderstood. This is particularly the case with gender performativity, continually misrepresented as "performance" in order to accuse Butler of declaring that sex doesn't matter, and that gender is just some drag costume we choose to take on and off. Rather, they argue that it is performative insofar as it comprises the stylised repetition of acts, the doing of which brings gender into being. And it isn't exactly voluntary, but required - and policed by society. More than 30 years after Gender Trouble, Butler is still having to explain that they never said sex doesn't matter, as they do again here: "What if, in fact, no one has said that sex is not real, even as some people have asked what its reality consists of?" Butler is frustrated and angry; or as frustrated and angry as famous philosophy professors get. I know because this is the most accessible of their books so far, an intervention meant for a wide audience. Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni has warned that gender ideology will strip everyone of their sexed identity Unless you have been avoiding coverage of social issues for the last decade or so, you may have a working knowledge of the so-called "gender wars", which are particularly vicious here in the UK (and seen globally as an embarrassing exemplar of sex and gender conservativism). Butler explains that "gender" has become a phantasm, representing multiple human fears and anxieties about sexuality, bodily attributes, sex and relationships. These anxieties have been stoked and manipulated by rightwingers in positions of religious and secular power to more effectively project the harms they are complicit in on to women and minorities. Butler offers various examples. In 2015, Pope Francis compared gender theory to nuclear weapons, claiming it was an annihilating force that refused to recognise the order of creation. Italian prime minister Georgia Meloni has warned that gender ideology will strip everyone of their sexed identity. Vladimir Putin refers to Europe as "Gayropa", saying that gender is a western construct that will destroy the concepts of mother and father. This should rightly sound bizarre; affirming trans rights is not comparable to nuclear annihilation. LGBTQ+ history month is not about erasing mothers and fathers. Anti-gender movements are, however, erasing my rights; and they are erasing lesbian, gay and trans parents, quite literally in some cases. In Italy right now, lesbian mothers are being removed from their children's birth certificates and denied legal responsibility for their children. Who is going to stand up for these women? Butler points out that what is happening is an inversion. Rightwing forces take rights from, and harm, some women, children and families, justifying their actions by saying they are preventing harm to others. And there is a horrific irony, of course, in the Catholic church contributing to the rights-stripping of LGBTQ+ people and their families under the guise of protecting children, while the Catholic church itself has been responsible for decades of child sexual abuse. This is a "moralising sadism", and the only answer, Butler says, is to form an axis of resistance; to "gather the targeted movements more effectively than we are targeted". People who may not be friends, who disagree, need to work together, because they're all in line for the same persecution, sooner or later - all women, all minorities, all those minoritised. Solidarity is not home, Butler reminds us, using a well-known phrase coined by feminist Bernice Johnson Reagon. It doesn't have to be cosy. Because Butler is a human rights activist, as well as a theorist, the urgent point conveyed by this book is the same as it is in all their work: why are so many people seemingly happy to give away their power to increasingly authoritarian forces? And why are they so confident that this power will never be used against them?
Kirkus Review
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions. In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject "sex" as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a "phantasmatic scene," they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology's presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology's roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as "male predators in disguise." For the author, "the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed." They imagine "a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable" and calls for alliances across differences and "a radical democracy informed by socialist values." Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology's core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy. A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A brilliant writer and thinker, Butler (What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, 2022) offers a long-needed text clarifying confusion by design. As figured by the "anti-gender ideology movement," gender isn't a clear concept. Rather, it's a phantasmic aggregation of fears positioned as a destructive force--a fatal virus, a nation- and family-killer--that serves to strategically invert, twist, and project the actual destruction taking place in the lives of people who are of color, women, queer, trans, and intersex. "For gender to be identified as a threat to all of life, civilization, society, thought, and the like, it has to gather up a wide range of fears and anxieties--no matter how they contradict one another--package them into a single bundle, and subsume them under a single name." The book is a chapter-by-chapter takedown, proving the ineffectiveness of logic to uncloak the gender phantasm--because logic was never the point, fear is. Butler's legacy of transformational work extends back decades, and their newest offering is urgent, returning breathable air into a toxic cloud. Readers will find the material dense and challenging and are encouraged to keep a dictionary close by. The result is exhilarating and life-changing.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: Gender Ideology and the Fear of Destruction | 3 |
| 1 The Global Scene | 37 |
| 2 Vatican Views | 73 |
| 3 Contemporary Attacks on Gender in the United States: Censorship and Rights-Stripping | 93 |
| 4 Trump, Sex, and the Supreme Court | 112 |
| 5 TERFs and British Matters of Sex: How Critical Is Gender-Critical Feminism? | 134 |
| 6 What About Sex? | 170 |
| 7 What Gender Are You? | 188 |
| 8 Nature/Culture: Toward Co-Construction | 204 |
| 9 Racial and Colonial Legacies of Gender Dimorphism | 212 |
| 10 Foreign Terms, or the Disturbance of Translation | 229 |
| Conclusion: The Fear of Destruction, the Struggle to Imagine | 245 |
| Notes | 265 |
| Acknowledgments | 289 |
| Index | 293 |