by John M. Fredericks

During a 2017 conference in Brazil that Judith Butler helped organize, a group of protestors burned the world-famous philosopher in effigy. They claimed that Butler’s work threatened to dissolve the meaning of gender and undercut cultural values, responding to ideas presented more than twenty-five years earlier in Butler’s career-defining book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). Amidst the constant oversimplification of the book’s arguments outside academia, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, has been maligned by many in the conservative movement, often unfairly cast as a feminist agitator out to destroy concepts like biological determinism not only at UC Berkeley where they teach, but around the world.

In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler addresses the general public as one of the leading thinkers in gender studies: They attempt to reclaim their own work, reposition themself within public discourse, and advocate for the rights of transgender and genderqueer people. Butler wants to understand how the term “gender” has come to represent all that is evil, malignant, and subversive in popular culture, as well as how national governments, political parties, and sometimes even other feminists are attempting to erase the rights of others.

For Butler, the term “gender” has become a phantasm, an emotionally charged and misdirected catch-all used to incite fears, both psychological and material, about the world around us. Butler argues that “this phantasm, understood as a psychosocial phenomenon, is a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” Showing how this phantasm morphs into an “anti-gender ideology movement” around the world, Butler maps how gender has become weaponized to “call for the elimination of gender education, the censorship of texts concerned with gender, and the disenfranchisement or criminalization of transgender or genderqueer people.”

Butler’s previous works on gender can be hard to understand; their poststructuralist approach leads to occasionally impenetrable prose and a style of reasoning that is, perhaps intentionally, difficult to parse. Butler seems to be aware of this critique, however, and Who’s Afraid of Gender? is clearly written for a wider audience. Especially in the first half of the book, Butler tries to be as approachable as possible in discussing the phantasmatic effects of gender studies, using a vast constellation of research across disciplines to describe it in various contexts. The first four chapters take on global politics, the Vatican, attacks on gender studies in the United States, and the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County.

In each of these chapters, Butler presents arguments against gender studies, then uses their expert command of rhetoric to provide detailed counterpoints to (and contradictions in) the logic of the anti-gender movement. Readers might wish at moments for a more structured argument; while the phantasmatic interplay between the fears surrounding gender studies and the material consequences for transgender and genderqueer people around the world is important, Butler sometimes employs straw man arguments to stand in for entities trying to restrict our ideas about gender. This polemical approach leads Butler into uneven territory, appealing to a wider audience at the cost of complexity.

Nowhere is Butler’s argument more impassioned and polemical than when discussing trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) and the movement’s attempt to contain gender under a narrow definition of biological sex. In their chapter on TERFs, Butler runs through the argument that biological sex is immutable and that transgender people, specifically those assigned male at birth, are a threat to society, taking advantage of the gender spectrum to visit violence upon women in bathrooms. Butler invokes author J.K. Rowling, an outspoken TERF in British cultural discourse, and weaves a fascinating argument about the symbol of the penis, patriarchal frameworks of being, and the need to disavow TERFs as anything but feminists: “Feminism has always been a struggle for justice, or is, at its best, precisely such a struggle, formed in alliance and affirming difference. Trans-exclusionary feminism is not feminism or, rather, should not be.” This is an important argument for Butler, because the term “alliance” is central to their argument throughout the book. According to Butler, instead of casting gender as a nightmarish phantasm that negates transgender and genderqueer people’s lived experience, feminism should be allying with everyone who investigates how gender as a framework for social, historical, and cultural discourse can help us understand our material existence.

The most interesting chapters in Who’s Afraid of Gender? come directly after Butler’s discussion of TERFs. In these chapters, Butler investigates the idea of biological sex as immutable, which forms the intellectual and ideological basis for most arguments against transgender identity and expression. Here, Butler seems to be doing a bit of rehabilitation of their arguments in Gender Trouble. They argue that biological sex and gender are not opposite ends of the spectrum, as though biology is only immutable and gender is only performative, but that both biology and the term “gender” (a troubling word that is not easily translated in every language) are products of a set of cultural processes, forever entangled. This entanglement forms the basis for how we understand both biological sex and gender in our particular social and historical moment in time; nature and culture, the environment and the body, dialectically create the processes by which we understand ourselves. As Butler writes:

The “environment” is, thus, not just “over there” at a distance from our bodies. We take in the environment as it takes us up and the environment is fundamentally altered by human interventions and extractions—and climate change is a stark testimony to how those interventions can become destructive. None of us can be formed without a set of interventions, and those external impingements become the conditions of our emergence; they become part of who we are, intrinsic to our forms of becoming, which follow no one trajectory.

Passages like this abound in the book’s later chapters; the ease with which Butler is able to present an entire field of research and apply it to another, equally complicated, field to draw conclusions about our lived experiences prompts some of the most satisfying moments in the book. Whether discussing biological sex, feminist materialism, marxist ideology, colonial power, racial theory, climate change, or the nature/culture dichotomy, Butler displays a remarkable clarity and nuance.

While the reader gets the sense throughout Who’s Afraid of Gender? that one of Butler’s main objectives is to encourage feminists to seek alliances with anyone fighting for social justice, this plea to open up the tent and encompass multiple lived experiences is also what complicates the book. Butler’s ability to tackle so many topics—some of which seem only tacitly connected to the gender debate—can make this volume both challenging and rewarding. An important work within Butler’s own canon and the field of gender studies as a whole, Who’s Afraid of Gender? will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on cultural discourse.