Taking One for the Team

Judith Butler must be exhausted. They have always been an admirably (rather than suspiciously) productive scholar, with close to twenty books (plus many articles and essays) since their break-through second book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was released over thirty years ago in 1990. However, as significant as every Butler publication since has been, nothing compares to the publicity or scale of critical interest for their first trade book Who’s Afraid of Gender? released in March this year. Well before the hardcover hit the shelves, Butler was already on the explainer circuit, clarifying and defending the category and analysis of ‘gender’ in various forums, high and low, against wild charges and fear-mongering from the ‘anti-gender’ brigade. It was as though Butler was in training for what was to come: a media blitz taking in everything from obscure podcasts, to dedicated academic panels and roundtables, to a profile in the New Yorker.

Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a phenomenon which includes a book, while extending far beyond it. Given the intriguing combination of Butler’s iconic status, the topicality of ‘gender wars’, and the novelty of one of the world’s most (allegedly) impenetrable prose writers attempting a cross-over book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? was eagerly anticipated on a number of fronts. Butler has always been a philosopher deeply engaged with the world and its problems, tensions, fault-lines and vulnerabilities, evident most recently with regard to Palestine (Butler is one of the world’s most high-profile Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel). But what they call the ‘anti-gender movement’, or ‘anti-gender ideology movement’, is a fast-moving and mutable target. Would Who’s Afraid of Gender? be dated on arrival, outpaced by the speed of anti-LGBTQI+ legislation in United States, for example, or some other unanticipated development? How would Butler take on ‘gender-critical feminists’ – commonly known, if not self-identified, as TERFS (trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists) – some of whom have misappropriated Butler’s earlier gender theorising for their own ends? And what of trans – the category, community, field of study – to which Butler has had a rich and complicated connection? For critics and fans alike, the promise of a more ‘accessible’ Butler text was and is enticing. Butler has routinely written for different audiences, in different registers – take their essays in the London Review of Books – but a whole book on a ‘hot’ topic from a major press is another proposition.

For those of us in the field of gender studies – as contested, rigorous and diverse a field as any, though more misunderstood and scapegoated than most – the publication of any new book by Judith Butler is a big deal. To the ‘anti-gender movement’, Butler may be our lodestar, but the philosopher has – until now, and with occasional exceptions – not really taken gender and sexuality as a direct focus of analysis since Undoing Gender (2004). This is not to say that their influence as a queer/gender/feminist theorist has diminished; if anything, it has increased and spread apace with the ongoing ‘gender revolution’, to quote the title of a 2017 special issue of National Geographic magazine and tie-in documentary – two highly visible entries of so-called ‘new’ gender formations into the mainstream. In this dizzying context, Gender Trouble has found new audiences and been subject to fresh (mis)interpretation, while Butler’s legal adoption in 2019 of the non-binary ‘they’ has been widely read as a sign of the pronoun-obsessed times. Despite their subsequent theorising on ‘excitable speech’, ‘grievable lives’, and much else, Butler has never abandoned feminist and queer politics, which have remained cornerstones of their critical theory. Yet here we have a new book with ‘gender’ in the title and as the main concern. What are we, who are presumably most familiar with Butler’s work on gender, to make of it?

Most of my gender studies students want and expect to study Butler; and it is both a pleasure and a challenge to teach their work – Gender Trouble yes, but also its companion and corrective Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), and key essays from Undoing Gender and elsewhere. I do not set these dense and thrilling texts in their entirety, but in excerpts that are hopefully long and illustrative enough for students to grasp the substance and evolution of Butler’s key theories. ‘Gender performativity’ many already (sort of) know, or guess at, but it makes much better sense in relation to the other ‘trouble’ Butler caused, and what they did next. While entire courses – careers even – have been dedicated to engaging with Butler’s theorising, my modest goal is that students come to see (if they do not already) that the best theorists and theories do not come from nowhere, that they think with others, and that they evolve, including in response to critiques of their work. It would be impossible – or disingenuous – to teach gender studies and feminist and queer theory without Butler at least making a guest appearance. Still, in fundamental respects Butler has moved on from gender studies, and gender studies has moved on from Butler. Does Who’s Afraid of Gender? mark Butler’s return to the fold?

Butler’s targets in Who’s Afraid of Gender? may be easy ones – the intellectual equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel – but the motley crew whose logics are pondered and unravelled are not going anywhere and continue to exert power and influence. A well-argued book by the world’s leading ‘gender theorist’ is not going to stop the various wings of the ‘anti-gender movement’ – among them the Vatican, right-wing evangelical Christians in the United States, gender-critical feminists in the United Kingdom, and authoritarian populist leaders in Europe, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere – from continuing their crusades against ‘gender’ studies, theory, and activism, or ‘gender ideology’. Butler knows this, and presumably so do their readers. Nevertheless, Butler does dutifully offer ‘some arguments against the anti-gender ideology movement’ and chart some of its forms, travels and effects, while insisting in the introduction that the grunt work of counter-argument ‘cannot be’ the book’s ‘primary aim’. Instead, they want to understand ‘what kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears, and hatreds does it collect and mobilize?’ Like their friend Jacqueline Rose (whom they cite), Butler knows a psychoanalytic approach is perhaps most useful when other explanations hit their limits. To this end, Butler adapts the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to define and illuminate the ‘phantasmic scene’ that is ‘anti-gender’ or ‘gender’. For Laplanche, fantasy is not ‘just a creation of the mind’, but ‘an organization of desire and anxiety’ that is both ‘social and psychic’. Once the ‘phantasmic scene’ is set – as it is with claims that gender ideology is harming children – all sorts of fears, anxieties, and cataclysmic scenarios can cluster around it.

The book’s other aim is a collaborative one – ‘it is up to us to produce a compelling counter-vision’ – to which Butler contributes some suitably rousing, if inevitably sketchy, suggestions and starting points (such as ‘we require transnational coalitions that gather and mobilize’ all those targeted by anti-gender ideology). Of these three tasks – counter-argument, psychosocial analysis, and alternative world-building – the first takes up the most space, the second is the most compelling, and the third, the most perfunctory.

Butler devotes the first five chapters to global coverage of anti-gender ideology, by way of Laplanche’s situation of ‘ideology’ at the convergence point of ‘cultural codes’ and ‘primal fantasies’. Though Butler has since 9/11 increasingly turned their attention to global politics, the treatment here is distinct – they are one part journalist or contemporary historian; another part academic patiently providing guidance on how to make sense of nonsensical or irrational claims; and more familiarly, a theorist and philosopher working through things. Like the ‘anti-gender’ arguments that Butler scrutinises, these personae do not always cohere, but still capture attention. Judith Butler taking on the anti-trans agenda of best-selling author J.K. Rowling? Yes please.

The three Butlers come together most seamlessly in the opening chapter where they offer a panoramic survey of the transnational spread of the ‘phantasm called “gender”’. In many countries, as Butler shows, ‘the attack on “gender ideology” is as much an attack on feminism, especially reproductive freedom, as it is on trans rights, gay marriage, and sex education’. Panning out from the Vatican’s pitting of ‘gender’ against natural law and the family in the 1990s, Butler tracks the transmission of anti-gender ideology across continents through key figures and organisations and its increasingly high profile in political campaigns. There’s real value in how Butler brings it all together (without claiming to be definitive), especially when they slow down to ponder what’s at stake, or what lurks beneath, specific anti-gender campaigns. For instance, in contemplating what gave rise to the ‘intensely anti-gay laws’ in Uganda (including a law passed in 2023 reserving the death-penalty for acts of sodomy), Butler stresses the complicity of neo-colonial conditions of economic dependency: the ‘World Bank is not the messenger we need to communicate the importance of LGBTQIA+ rights, for the message gets obscured by the carrier’. On-the-ground examples and analyses nestle convincingly within Butler’s overarching account of ‘gender’ circulating as a ‘psychosocial fantasy’ or ‘phantasm’ that operates to conceal or detract attention from powers – whether neoliberalism, global financial institutions, or the continuing legacies of colonialism – which would, or should, otherwise be named.

Butler’s chapters on the United States and Britain, ground already extensively covered and dissected elsewhere, offer comparatively fewer new insights, however valuable. Butler is at their most impassioned defending the right of young people to proper sex education, and if they are trans and so desire it, to trans-affirmative health care; thereby adding their important voice to many others making the same pleas in the face of escalating threats and legislation. At such times, Butler verges on the ‘op-ed’, before returning to more fruitful analysis – of the parallel and sometimes intersecting campaigns in the US against ‘gender ideology’ and critical race theory, for instance. A chapter on a failed attempt by Trump in the last weeks of his Presidency to officially define ‘sex’ as an unchangeable feature of a person, and thereby to exclude trans people from sex discrimination legislation, reanimates Butler the gender theorist, while also drawing attention to the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Here Butler returns to an important point which, while not new, is especially significant coming from one of the world’s leading feminist and queer theorists: ‘it makes no sense to separate the struggles of trans and queer people from the struggle that is feminism and the rights of women to social and economic equality’.

What then to make of ‘gender-critical feminists’, or ‘gender abolitionists’ as some describe themselves, who argue that sex is immutable and binary, and on this basis cast trans women outside of the bounds of their feminism? Butler’s position is already somewhat established, following The Guardian’s infamous censoring of an interview with them shortly after it was published back in September 2021. To paraphrase Butler: by espousing anti-gender ideology, the TERFs are part of the problem, rather than part of the struggle against fascism. As The Guardian example shows, perhaps more than anywhere else, trans-exclusionary feminism has taken root in Britain, becoming disproportionately influential with footholds in academia, the mainstream press, and politics. While key spokespeople for the gender-critical position such as J.K. Rowling and philosopher Kathleen Stock routinely reject charges of transphobia, their arguments, actions, and activism suggest otherwise. Butler persuasively draws this out with a tang of righteous exasperation at how gender-critical rhetoric and logic aim to deny and erase trans identities:

To similarly generative effect, Butler lingers on the charge sometimes made by gender-critical feminists that anyone born with a penis presents a threat to the safety of ‘natal girls and women’, to quote Rowling. Butler’s framing of such claims as an ‘organising phantasmic scene’ is where their psychoanalytic lens is most effective. Its application to trans-exclusionary feminism with its fixation on the genitals of trans women is apt. The cultural significance of the phallus has long preoccupied psychoanalytic thinkers, for better or worse, and in this case, Butler’s analysis helps both to identify and diffuse the ‘phantasm’ of the penis as it functions in trans-exclusionary or ‘gender critical’ feminism. When Butler goes on to make connections between Rowling’s trauma as a survivor of domestic and sexual assault and her anti-trans stance, they are on shakier and less convincing ground.

Having established the contours, contradictions, and cross-pollinations of anti-gender ideology, Butler dedicates the book’s final five chapters to gender studies. This part of the book may be what some readers imagined, or hoped for, when news of Butler-goes-mainstream broke: a primer of sorts on key developments in theorising around gender, sexuality, feminism, and the body. Butler’s own theorising is the axis around which much gender theory has rotated since the early 1990s, and long-time readers will not have trouble detecting where Butler – humbly – explains, recalibrates, and updates their earlier work. Almost from the moment Gender Trouble was published, Butler has been responding to critiques and vulgarisations of ‘gender performativity’ – and once again we find them arguing that, no, the theory of gender performativity – or gender theory in general – does not ‘deny the materiality of sex’, but also that ‘sex’ is not outside of culture or history. In insisting ‘that being born female and becoming a woman are two different trajectories’, they, and other influential Anglophone feminist theorists like Gayle Rubin, initially reified the sex/gender distinction along the lines of a nature/culture binary. In their more recent work, they no longer do – ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are co-created.

What’s most interesting to me, a gender studies teacher, is reading Butler catching up on a couple of decades of gender studies scholarship, where trans, decolonial and critical race approaches have moved to the fore. In the second half of the book, Butler makes their greatest contribution to contemporary debates about gender – by taking a back seat. As ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are co-created, so too are ‘gender’ and race’, as Hortense Spillers hauntingly laid out in her 1987 account of slavery’s ‘ungendering’ of women. Among the many scholars Spillers has influenced is C. Riley Snorton, author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), one of the most significant gender histories published in recent years. Butler showcases them both, as well as others who have distinctively upended Western conceptions of gender to expose their colonial, heteronormative, and racist and racializing dynamics, including the late Maria Lugones and Nigerian feminist scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. (Butler does not cite Australian literature, but here I can direct Butler and interested readers to the work of Sandy O’Sullivan and Madi Day, among other Indigenous scholars, who expose what O’Sullivan labels the ‘colonial project of gender’).

So far, judging by the roundtable in the feminist journal Signs, Who’s Afraid of Gender? has been generally well-received by the gender studies crowd. There is a palpable sense of gratitude to Butler for undertaking such an urgent and arduous task – expressed by Clare Hemmings as a thank you for ‘the thirty-five years of refusing to let us all fall away’. We know that Butler did not have to write Who’s Afraid of Gender? and no doubt there’s other work they would rather be getting on with. And, indeed, since the book was published, Butler has been combining promotion for it with their opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza, which they recognise as genocide.

But Butler is not above criticism; and nor would they – a theorist of critique, as well as gender – want to be. Paisley Currah, whose book Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (2022) Butler praises as ‘extraordinary’, sees in Who’s Afraid of Gender? a now-familiar strategy of employing ‘transgender’ as a ‘device for exposing the contingency of sex assignment’. But what of actual trans people, writes Currah in the Boston Review, many of whom ‘would prefer to stay out of disputes of dangerous phantasms and dismantling the gender binary’? In The Baffler, historian Jules Gill-Peterson is taken with the psychoanalytic framing of anti-gender ideology, but less enamoured with how Butler’s discussions of trans youth and trans adults move in different directions. Above all, Gill-Peterson laments what the valuable but dreary work of ‘careful and critical contemplation’ demands of both reader and writer: more writing, reading, and appeals to reason, common sense, and base-line humanity; not enough calls for action, revolution, or celebration. Flipping Butler’s animating question around, Gill-Peterson asks instead: ‘What are we, who oppose the anti-gender phantasm, so afraid of that we must write diligently first, before collaborating on a compelling alternative?’

At a launch event for Who’s Afraid of Gender? earlier this year, Jack Halberstam (the queer theorist who I find the most fun to read) asked Butler about their ‘imagined’ audience for the book. ‘I didn’t want to write a book that was academic’, shared Butler, ‘although obviously I can’t help but be academic in some regards, and there are a few truly nerdy sentences, but none like in the earlier work’. Without missing a beat, the audience laughed, knowingly and affectionately.

Back in the 1990s, when I was an undergraduate student, Butler’s prose became notorious for being ‘difficult’, with critics lambasting their writing as symptomatic of the worst excesses of postmodernism, deconstruction, and academic sophistry. In 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature awarded Butler their annual bad writing award for a characteristically long sentence from an article published a year earlier in the scholarly journal Diacritics. While easily mocked for Butler’s word choices (‘hegemony’ was used twice), the sentence was hardly indecipherable for the specialist reader it was written for. With postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha a runner-up, and Marxist literary scholar Fredric Jameson a two-time winner, the Bad Writing Award became an easy and predictable target for culture warriors eager to mock ivory-tower academics and then-new or newish ‘trendy’ fields like postcolonial studies, queer theory, cultural studies and women’s studies.

Some of the most vituperative critiques came from other feminists, notably philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who in 1999 labelled Butler ‘the Professor of Parody’. Exasperated with what she called the ‘thick soup of Butler’s prose’, Nussbaum even rewrote the prize-winning bad sentence. She opined that if Butler represented contemporary feminism (and alas, it seemed as though they did), it was in dire straits, with younger feminists captive to Michel Foucault’s ‘fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways’. Following this logic – and Nussbaum was hardly alone in that decade in despairing over what she perceived to be a potentially fatal or irreparable generational schism among feminists – writing and reading ‘theory’ were antithetical to political action. And more specifically, deconstructing and challenging the category of ‘woman’ as the unified subject of feminism as Butler did (not to mention the many black, lesbian, Indigenous, Third World and otherwise not-white-and-or-straight feminists before them) was either a discursive side-show or a real threat to women’s lives. This ‘new’ feminism of which Butler was the avatar, it was argued, turned its back on ‘real world’ issues like violence against women, reproductive rights, and the feminisation of poverty.

Fast forward thirty years and prose style is part of how the wider culture talks about ‘Judith Butler’, albeit with much less of the heat than in the 1990s. My students are far less trepidatious about reading Butler than I was when I was an undergraduate. Last year, in my third-year Feminist and Queer Theory class, most had already read and assimilated Butler in some form, unlike the work of the late literary scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick or Hortense Spillers, both of which they found – at least initially – more ‘difficult’ to read than Butler. We have learned to read and think with Butler, to some extent thanks to their help. The preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble is an exemplary Butler ‘explainer’, where they reflect on the book as a work of cultural translation: of something called ‘French theory’ to feminist thought, and vice versa; and of queer subcultures and activism to the academy, and back again. On the oft-raised issue of style, Butler described it as ‘complicated terrain, and not one that we unilaterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend’. Here the increasing influence of psychoanalysis on Butler’s thought was evident, but so too that of Monique Wittig and other feminists who had previously alerted them to the naturalisation of gender through grammatical norms. Language, style, grammar, ‘writing’ – none of these are politically neutral; demands for ‘clarity’, ‘plain speaking’ and ‘transparency’ should be interrogated. ‘Who devises the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve?’ asked Butler. ‘What does “transparency” help obscure?’ Nussbaum railed against Butler’s frequent use of questions, taking it as evidence of ‘mystification’ and resistance to a ‘final view of things’, as though the latter is a bad thing. But many of Butler’s admirers have appreciated the interrogative mode that has propelled their thinking and ours.

With the title taking the form of a question, Who’s Afraid of Gender? signals business as usual for Butler, but with a nod to pop culture. Butler dedicates the book to ‘the young people who still teach me’ and several reviewers have commented – favourably and otherwise – on Butler’s patient, pedagogical approach. But, to return to Butler’s conversation with Halberstam, the intended audience for Who’s Afraid of Gender? are not the ‘people who already agree with me’ or the ‘extreme right wing’ whose arguments they document and pull apart. Instead, they have in mind: ‘a whole group of people in the middle who are intelligent, but […] are confused and […] don’t know what to think. They’ve heard this stuff that gender is a problem, or stuff is happening at schools or their kids or their neighbours are being asked to be called by a different pronoun suddenly and some are stumbling and they don’t know how to handle it.’ Butler writes about the futility of aiming directly to reach ‘anti-gender advocates’ who are ‘largely committed to not reading’, while presumably their imagined audience of ‘people in the middle’ are. Accordingly, Butler’s tone is mostly measured and reasonable, so much so that it can induce an ‘oddly tiring’ effect as Gill-Peterson put it. A more direct and personal style, explicitly addressing the concerned middle’s reservations and fears, may have made for a more entertaining and educative read. Then again, it may also have taken the book in another direction, towards addressing what Andrea Long Chu calls ‘trans-agnostic reactionary liberals’ or TARLs, who are, according to Chu (and she’s not alone in this view) the ‘most insidious source of the anti-trans movement.’

An abiding impression I have had watching this project play out, from genesis to dissemination, is that Butler feels somehow obligated to carry this burden. They have written a book unlike any they have written before – the kind that you can buy at airports and find reviewed in capsule form – not because they want to, but because they somehow have to. After all, it was an effigy of Judith Butler – not of anyone else – that was raised and burnt by right-wing protesters outside of a conference held at the SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, Brazil back in 2017. It is only at the very end of the book, in the acknowledgements where they thank ‘the young man who threw his body between an attacker and me’ that Butler mentions, so very briefly, where the book began.

In their interview with Halberstam – a long-time friend and colleague – Butler shared that they would have ‘been really happy’ writing an academic book using Freud and Laplanche. Their face lit up just talking about going down rabbit holes, about reading work in the original French or German. That joy is not palpable in Who’s Afraid of Gender? It is a serious book, which succeeds in Butler’s aim ‘to slow the entire public discussion down’ – but I think we can let them be now, so they can go back to doing the kind of work they enjoy most and do best.