Judith Butler’s status in the world of gender studies is nothing short of legendary. If philosophy can be considered a series of footnotes to Plato, gender studies is a series of footnotes to Butler. Her first book, Gender Trouble, hit the scene in 1990 and became a feminist classic, reshaping the conversation about gender in the academy and, arguably, the wider society. Though written in dense theoretical prose, Gender Trouble was nonetheless original, internally coherent, and interesting to read. Butler’s new missive Who’s Afraid of Gender? is, sadly, none of those things.
In this latest effort, Butler abdicates the role of theorist for that of armchair psychoanalyst. Much of the book is spent on a sweeping, straw-manned account of what she calls “the anti-gender movement”—in other words, the sundry voices who, for varying reasons, oppose the deconstruction of sex as a stable, objective reality. She condenses these diverse critics into one composite antagonist, a monstrous chimera rather like Dante’s three-faced Satan, but adorned instead with the visages of Pope Francis, Donald Trump, and J. K. Rowling
