Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

Well, asked and answered: who’s afraid of gender? The answer may not surprise you: it’s all the worst people in the fucking world! To help us understand why, sort of, Judith Butler takes us on a journey that I found to be equal parts mind-expanding, boring, and perplexing, along the way using some variation of the word “phantasmatic” about two thousand times.

“Phantasmatic” is the word that Butler uses to describe the weird, nebulous, rarely consistent but always threatening cluster of associations that fascists, TERFs (but I repeat myself) and regressive close-minded assholes the world over spray in a perpetual miasmic haze around the concept of “gender” to make credulous nitwits think that it, rather than, say, sociopathic billionaires, is responsible for the many problems in the world today. Book reviews should be written from a viewpoint. I trust I have made my position on so-called “gender-critical” ideology clear: it’s not because I disagree with Butler that I found Who’s Afraid of Gender? to be kind of a struggle to get through.

Here is a ranking of the main things covered in Who’s Afraid of Gender? in increasing order of how much I liked reading them:

1. Heavily theory-inflected explorations of gender and sex that I didn’t really understand
2. Lists of bullshit beliefs held and actions undertaken by aforementioned “gender-critical” numpties, who are not actually “critical” in the sense of making any honest effort to understand or thoughtfully engage with gender, and therefore think and act only in exceedingly boring, stupid ways about it
3. Investigations of the inner workings of what passes for gender-critical thought that seemed largely speculative and were pretty uninteresting regardless, since that so-called “thought” seems to be mostly a mishmash of unexamined stereotypes, religious or other superstition, “science” as understood by a third-grader and simple rank bigotry fueled by fear of difference
4. Gender-critical bigot DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC
5. Heavily theory-inflected explorations of gender and sex that I did understand, at least somewhat, and that got me thinking about them, and intersectionality, and language, and other topics in a new way

The book mainly seemed unfocused and I had no idea who its audience was. Obviously no one gender-critical would be convinced by it, not least because they are allergic to complexity and nuance and the theoretical stuff would cause them to throw up their hands and say “Why do you have to make it so COMPLICATED when any THIRD GRADER knows the difference between MEN and WOMEN???” and then probably go and call the cops on a cis woman with a pixie cut in the ladies’ room or whatever they do in their free time. But on the other hand, I think most sympathetic readers would be bored by the belaboring of all the ways that gender is under attack worldwide. I know about a lot of this, and what I didn’t already know wasn’t surprising or interesting.

But let me be serious for a bit and also mention some of the things that were surprising or interesting or thought-provoking to me, a sympathetic reader who is not well-versed in the theory and history of gender. Often they were obvious in retrospect but just not things I’d thought about.

• “Sex” is often thought of as “biology,” dichotomous and cleanly separated from “gender” which is a cultural construct sort of layered on top of it. But even when a child is “sexed” at birth through inspection of their body, that declaration brings along a whole host of assumptions about what that sex means in the surrounding culture. Butler argues for thinking of the relation between sex and gender as “co-construction.” I found this compelling in how it accounts for the complex interplay between “biology” and “culture,” but it was complex and I can’t claim to have understood it well enough to be very effectively summarizing it here.
• When so-called conservatives claim to be defending “the family,” of they are of course shunting aside any modern-day conceptualization of the family that doesn’t fit into their narrow nuclear-family vision. But that vision also comes from a tradition that achieved dominance by steamrolling over plenty of historical alternatives all around the world.
• The same goes for the gender binary, which conservative forces will insist is to be defended against the encroachment of Western gender ideology; in fact, the binary itself is a construct of colonial empires imposed on the colonized people, squashing whatever other conception of gender they might have had previously.
• Financial aid, to “third-world” countries that require financial aid due to the depredations of the “first world,” is often contingent on those countries being tolerant of e.g. homosexuality. But this positions that tolerance as a colonial imposition. This is a compelling angle on intersectionality: one can’t effectively support the right to sexual self-expression without also opposing colonialism.

The last few chapters of Who’s Afraid of Gender, which take this more expansive look at what “gender” means to people around the world in the larger geopolitical context of colonization and imperialism, were some of the most compelling and provocative. As someone with an interest in linguistics and where language fails, I was pretty fascinated by the chapter about translation and how the assumption of monolingualism in English discussions of gender does act as a sort of colonial force: it effaces conceptualizations of “gender” in other countries that fall outside the hegemonic binary but don’t translate cleanly to English terms such as “transgender” or “intersex.”

I read Who’s Afraid of Gender? pretty slowly over the course of about a month. Ultimately I wish I’d distributed that time more unevenly, skimming over the parts about how gender is under attack by regressives and bigots and paying a lot closer and more careful attention to the theoretical explorations of what gender means in different contexts. Some of those explorations were hard for me to follow but they were also where Judith Butler had the most intriguing things to say.