The Week (US)

Who’s Afraid of Gender?

- by Judith Butler

(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.

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