Who's afraid of gender? / Judith Butler.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 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)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers 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.)

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.

Kirkus Book 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.