Who's Afraid of Gender?

October 1, 2023

An influential and sometimes controversial philosopher and gender theorist, Butler goes mainstream by asking Who's Afraid of Gender? and responding that anti-gender sentiment is at the core of right-wing movements (75,000-copy first printing). Prepub Alert.

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January 1, 2024
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 Orb�n. 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.

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Starred review from January 15, 2024
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.

Starred review from February 15, 2024
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.

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