Who’s Afraid of Gender?
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)
Judith Butler has been burned in effigy as a witch, and “how many thinkers can say as much?” said Katha Pollitt in The Atlantic. A professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler is the author of Gender Trouble, a 1990 book that spread to universities around the world and popularized the idea that biological sex is socially constructed. Gender Trouble also established its author as a purveyor of “impenetrable jargon-ridden prose.” That can’t be said about Butler’s new book and first for a general audience. Rather than being difficult going, “it’s all too simple”— a lengthy, short-on-evidence argument that fascism is gaining strength worldwide and that its principal weapon is an attack on what this guru calls “the phantasm of gender.” You couldn’t be blamed for raising objections, said James Kirchick in Air Mail. Yet if you do so, “to Butler, you are a bigot, and stupid to boot.”
Butler is clearly tired of such demonization, said Finn Mackay in The Guardian. This admirable public intellectual, who uses nonbinary pronouns, is “still having to explain that they never said sex doesn’t matter,” and never implied that gender is “just some drag costume we choose to take on and off.” Butler instead proposed looking more closely at which aspects of gender are performative and/or imposed, and uses this book to explore how the so-called gender wars of the past decade have been manifestations of conservative forces’ exploitation of anxieties about gender.
“So who is afraid of gender?” asked Dana Stevens in Slate. Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Pope Francis, for starters, plus “many, many institutional and governmental entities.” Butler is warning us that right-wing efforts to stoke panic about gender lines breaking down results first in persecution of people on society’s margins and can lead to authoritarian attacks on all freedoms. Who’s Afraid of Gender? doesn’t promulgate a dogma of its own. In fact,
“it’s Butler’s embrace of the ultimate impossibility of finding one final answer to the question ‘But what is gender?’ that animates their long intellectual engagement with the subject.” This book does, however make a stand for freedom of thought.