A review by readthesparrow
Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

This review is based on an eARC provided by the publisher.

REVIEW

I’m a bit ashamed to admit this was the first of Butler I’d read. I’ve been meaning to read Gender Trouble for ages (despite the fact it is a little outdated, as Butler themself admits), but haven’t managed to get around to it yet.

That said, I feel Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a book that anyone interested in the emerging authoritarian right-wing movement globally needs to read. Butler’s discussion of gender as a phantasm is a really useful tool for discussing the weaponization and demonization of gender broadly. In their acknowledgements, Butler discusses the scholars who helped them with this book–even without seeing the list of names, though, it was very clear that this text was written with real nuance and care and conversation with a global scholarly community.

Butler breaks down the mass of the gender phantasm, examining the ways different institutions and movements utilize contradictions within the phantasm as ways to displace very real fears about war, cultural change, the climate, and colonialism onto vulnerable populations. 

 My personal favorite chapter was “Foreign Terms, or the Disturbance of Translation Conclusion: The Fear of Destruction, the Struggle to Imagine.” I’m someone who loves talking about and thinking about language and translation, so this chapter was right up my alley. Butler discusses the interaction of language and gender as an English/Western construction that exists as both a colonialist and anti-colonialist concept. They also question the very act of gendering as an act of translation--how do we translate ourselves to each other? How do we translate the performance of others? And how does our translation of that performance change over time and context (and, yes, language)?

If you want answers for any of this, you won't get it here. With Who's Afraid of Gender?, Butler is more interested in examining the construction and weaponization of the gender phantasm. The only 'answer' offered is the only one that I think is necessary for this text: a call for broad coalition that encompasses everyone who fights for equity and against injustice. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a vital crossroad that I see as becoming a new cornerstone in how we discuss gender as a political, social, and cultural phenomenon.

That said, it is nonfiction written by a scholar. That means the text can be difficult to get through at times, even if you are someone who does like academic writing. Be prepared to possibly have to look up a lot of terminology. 

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing a digital ARC via Netgalley. If you are interested in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the book releases 19 March 2024.

Find more information from the publishers [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374608224/whosafraidofgender]. If possible, support indie bookshops by purchasing the novel from your local brick and mortar or from Bookshop.org!