Who's Afraid of Gender?
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • Harper's Bazaar • W • Esquire • From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.
"A profoundly urgent intervention.” —Naomi Klein
"A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in re-imagining collective futurity.” —Claudia Rankine
Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, the "anti-gender ideology movement" has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their right to pursue a life without fear of violence. Here, Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic Gender Trouble redefined how we understand gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on "gender" that have become central to right-wing movements today.
Who's Afraid of Gender? examines how "gender" has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In this vital, courageous book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways in which this phantasm of gender collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction, resulting in a movement that 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 who fight against injustice. Imagining new possibilities for 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.
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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.
