Abstract
In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler provides an account of the trouble currently being caused around the world by the word ‘gender’, a word that Butler’s own work elevated to an unprecedented academic ‘impact’ at the end of the last century. Butler’s intervention was truly world-changing, even if this particular impact might not be considered as a right kind of ‘product’ by today’s industrialized universities. Although ‘gender’ is a trouble for which Butler cannot be held as solely accountable, they have once again lived up to their reputation as an exceptionally ethical intellectual by publishing a book that is – in many ways–a manifestation of responsibility.
The volume presents an analysis, if not an explanation, of the contemporary phenomenon known as ‘anti-gender ideology’. It asks: what causes the Vatican, authoritarian politicians from Putin to Orban and Trump, and people en masse to unite and organize against the threat presented by the word ‘gender’? From where does this opposition to gender equality, reproductive rights, and horror of any notion of multiplicity of gender derive? Why are equality and choice seen as signs of destruction and not only opposed but vigorously vilified, so that ‘gender’ is ultimately posed as a civilizational threat?
The analysis of ‘anti-gender ideology’ provided by Butler here is a kind of psychoanalysis. More precisely, Butler sees ‘anti-gender ideology’ as a psychosocial phenomenon. What is at the heart of the matter is fear, and as a psychosocial phenomenon, fear acts to produce a powerful phantasm in which ‘gender’ is, out of all proportion, identified as the threatening force. Fear is in the air, it grips our time: fear of ecological disaster, fear of losing one’s livelihood, fear of losing the future. Yet instead of recognizing this fear for what it is, fear, general anxiety turns into this powerful phantasm, in which the ruin of the family, children and everything is caused by ‘gender ideology’.
One could easily miss the point: Butler does not claim that the people who are afraid of ‘gender’ and promote anti-gender are the same ones who would be most afraid of climate change and aware of the loss of security because of neoliberal reforms. At least, I would not think that this is what Butler means. Rather, I would see that in this volume which concentrates on fear, something typical of Butler’s text occurs: the text performs beyond the actual argument. Butler’s foregrounding of fear, this powerful and psychically significant notion, tells of something unique to both our time and to ‘anti-gender ideology’: it highlights that is hard to argue with rational arguments on the matter of gender.
Nevertheless, Butler does also argue in the book. The value of argumentation and intellectual engagement, in fact, runs as a significant theme through the entire book. Intellectual argumentation is explicitly defended, and it is exercised. Butler clearly tries to follow the arguments and understand the mind-set of those who argue against ‘gender’. They thoroughly examine the religious logic of the Vatican and try to disentangle the feeling landscape of those who might, erroneously, think that their own gender is taken away from them when a choice is given to others. They even highlight the almost incomprehensible thought of those who think that ‘gender’ leads to violence towards women, and they provide a fair exploration of the idea that LGBTQIA + is a new form of colonialism and Western cultural domination. Butler’s discussions of these argumentations are supported with admirable density of reference to academic literature on anti-gender ideology. Most importantly, a significant part of the literature covered and discussed originates from elsewhere than the anglophone ‘centre’. It is evident that Butler has written the book with a serious effort to give recognition to the intellectual work that academics and activists all over the globe have done on anti-gender ideology.
The first chapter, ‘Global scene’, provides an extensive global tour of anti-gender phenomena; the second chapter delves into the religious arguments of the Vatican, which is recognized as the original source of the trouble; chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on anti-gender ideology in Butler’s home field, the US, and chapter 5 focuses on the UK. Chapters 6 and 7 take us back to the basic notions of sex and gender, providing re-explications and updates of Butler’s own thought, and Chapter 8 does the same for concepts of nature and culture, crucial in feminist debates on sex and gender. In this chapter Butler reformulates somewhat their previous views and comes up with an argument for the ‘co-construction’ view of the human within nature. As far as I can see, there is nothing here that entirely departs from their earlier work, but their position is explicated and reconstructed in a productive dialogue with many other feminist scholars who have contributed to thinking about nature. Butler appears to write, once again, in the form of a bridge-maker rather than generating any theoretical antagonisms.
Chapter 9, ‘Race and Colonial Legacies’ equally reformulates Butler’s positions. Yet the spotlight is not so much on Butler’s own thought than on the arguments brought forward by scholars who have captured the colonial legacies of the binary gender system, including C. Riley Snorton, Hortence Spillers, Maria Lugones and Oyèrónké Oyewùmí, and others active in decolonizing academia. Butler skilfully deals with the argument that LGBTQIA + is a Western import by reference to this literature, and the idea that homophobia is somehow premodern is proven to be effectively false. Chapter 10 on translations of ‘gender’, and concern over ‘foreign terms’ and on English language colonialism, recognizes the imbalance of languages, makes the point that no-one speaks ‘global’, and promotes ‘co-habitation in a condition of conceptual non-equivalence’.
The volume’s main argument that anti-gender ideology has a psychosocial grounding in fear engages strongly the European experience through marked references to the post-World War II Frankfurt school, as well as today’s London Birkbeck psychosocial studies. The TERFs (Trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and ‘gender critical feminists’ receive quite a lot of attention in the book, perhaps disproportionally so, considering that they are such a UK phenomenon. But TERFs also provide a diversifying counterpoint in the narrative of pro- and anti-gender: some anti-gender and transphobic people also call themselves feminists although, clearly, they are not, according to Butler. The gender-critical feminists are also a good example of the general argument about the fear-created phantasms: how else could you interpret the fantasized scenes of transwomen rapists lurking in toilets and prisons? It is evident that strangely exaggerated fears rule in this approach.
Fear and anxiety produce phantasmatic effects, and throughout the book, Butler’s analysis reveals how this works thorough various avenues that psychoanalysts from Freud to Laplanche have pointed towards and named. Not underlined but discernibly Butler mobilises a range of Freudian operations, such as ‘displacement’, ‘projection’, ‘externalization’, ‘condensation’, ‘association’, and ‘phantasmatic sliding’. Fear and anxiety create ‘gender’ as a phantasmatic enemy through these operations. This theme of fear runs solidly through all the chapters and comes forth again and again.
For me it appears remarkable that it is fear, and not hate, that comes forth so powerfully as the emotion related to anti-gender actors. We have heard a lot of hate and hate-speech around the topic, yet hate is–perhaps significantly–absent in this book. What is the effect of this in terms of one’s relation to those who advocate anti-gender ideology? Are we invited to think of the hate-mongers as fearful? Are we invited to pity them, rather than hate them? Whatever the dangers of this approach are, such as appearing patronizing, at least it is clear that Butler does not agitate for hatred, there is no trace of violence in this book. Again, something that is to be expected from the author of The Force of Non-Violence (2020).
This is not to say that politics is not present in the book. Even if we do not read of an ‘enemy’ we read a lot of ‘resistance’ and ‘alliance’. The conclusion, in particular, is written in quite a political tone, with frequent appeal to ‘us’. This, of course, could make one ask who are ‘us’, and whether the vocabulary of ‘allies’ also implies ‘enemies’ and ‘fronts’, even if they are not present in the text. Butler’s emphasis here seems to be on diversity, although there is no clear or complex thought on political theory or democratic processes in this book.
The book’s theorizing about gender, however, is exceptionally clear, even in Butler’s terms. The volume revisits and updates Butler’s thought on sex and gender, and I would go so far as to say that it provides the best crystallization of Butler’s thought on gender thus far. It is not a popular presentation, as I have heard some suggest, but there is a pedagogical touch to it. In other words, there is a feeling that the author is taking responsibility and being patient in explaining the difficult and complicated thought that is so liable to be misunderstood. Another sign of taking responsibility in the book is how it approaches the ‘global’. Anti-gender ideology is scanned globally, and yet there is the issue of translation, which shows the need for decolonizing intellectual work, the value of which Butler emphasizes.
All these elements make the book excellent for teaching purposes. Within the oeuvre of Judith Butler, this volume does not disappoint: Butler is consistent in their thought, the quality of the work is outstanding, and this is a welcome addition to the oeuvre that is undoubtedly one of the most significant of our times.
