This was actually my introduction to Butler’s work; based on other reviews and feedback, I’ve concluded that maybe this isn’t the best place to start…
I enjoyed reading their takes and there’s a lot of potential for me to really enjoy some of Butler’s older books. This one revolves around gender theory, which is what they’re known for, but this one felt less philosophical and more like infodumping. I feel like anyone reading Butler’s work already agrees with their opinions, as they’ve been using non-binary pronouns for quite some time. The takes on gender here are obviously modern but the ideas aren’t really anything special or groundbreaking, and we don’t really get any exploration on the opposing sides of Butler’s very liberal stances.
I’ve heard from others that this is a more watered down version of Butler, perhaps on autopilot, but this made me very curious to check out their iconic previous works.

Resolves a lot of the misconceptions about gender identity that TERFs like to use to scare people from supporting transgender folks.

Judith Butler is known for their work in gender theory, criticism, and activism. They have long established their ethos, and this book is in some ways a much-needed departure into the accessible and mass market - this is a supremely well-researched, argued, and written book on the current state of gender and anti-gender philosophy in contemporary politics. This is a masterful work of rhetoric and should be heralded as such.

I have found that this is an incredibly difficult book to review, partially because it was an incredibly difficult book to read. This is definitely not for the casual reader and requires a lot of thinking, pausing, and rereading. This isn't my first time reading Butler, and I can say this is always my experience reading their writing. I can't imagine going into this book without any background in feminist theory and being able to take anything away from it. It is difficult and academic, sometimes overly so.

That said, this book is so important, especially given the anti-gender climate today. Butler ties this issue to a plethora of historic and contemporary social issues in an interesting, powerful way, showing how hypocritical certain things are and how interconnected different forms of oppression are. Some of these connections didn't hit the mark for me, but overall, it was an intricate, interesting web that I am glad I fought my way through.

Who’s Afraid of Gender is a truly fantastic book. It closely examines the various (often interconnected) groups of individuals who oppose gender freedom & rights — those of women & transgender individuals alike. Whether it’s for religious, political, or simply “radical” feminist reasoning, Butler dedicates a lot of study to these ideologies of hatred.

To be clear: this is not a guidebook for how to combat the lies and harms done by these individuals. (Butler’s only real advice seems to be that we must rally together against everyone’s oppression; a sentiment that is already very familiar amongst leftist circles.) Rather, the focus is on diving deep into these ideologies — including the way that hypocritical and contradicting arguments are used as a tactic to further confuse and scare large groups of people.

I think many folks (myself included) often hope that there is some magical set of words that we could say to stop the escalating hatred towards the trans community. If we could explain the science in the right way, or if we could tell a story that engages with a person’s empathy for other humans… we could change minds. But Butler challenges this notion, pointing out the larger systems that have been using fear as a way to protect patriarchy and capitalism for years. This goes SO much deeper than the recent onslaught of bills against reproductive rights and LGBTQIA+ communities that we’ve seen in the last few years. And this is happening nearly worldwide.

My only complaint about this book is that (like much academic theory) it is very inaccessible. As someone with two bachelor degrees, who reads upwards of 100 books per year (many on sexuality & gender) and even facilitates “Transgender 101” trainings for groups of professionals… Who’s Afraid of Gender was a struggle. I was familiar with all the terms. I understood all the concepts. But still, the writing forcefully demanded all of my attention. Perhaps this is because I have never read anything else by Judith Butler — or any other career philosopher. But I believe that the “average” individual would be in the same position that I was while trying to claw my way through this work.

If you are already familiar with 101-level gender theory and are looking for a challenge, I cannot recommend this book enough. But don’t feel bad if you need (or even just prefer) something a bit less dry.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC of this title.

This was dense, but never impenetrable, and while heady, stays readable rather than veering academic. There's a lot of really good food for thought here as Butler walks through the various groups turning the concept of "g e n d e r" into a boogeyman for larger issues and worries over heteronormative power.

I don't think this is necessarily aimed at me, but it's absolutely the sort of book anyone like me who considers themself an ally _should_ read.

Gender studies, especially in how it pertains to members of the LGBTQIA+ community, has become a very volatile subject around the world in recent years. Judith Butler, a professor at UC Berkeley and an author of several academic books including 1990’s Gender Trouble, has taken it upon themself not to try and define “gender” but instead to take a closer look at what is behind the various movements opposed to it and what their aims might be. It’s a lot to tackle in a relatively small book, but Butler proves to be largely successful.

They take an in-depth look at the different tactics that various right-wing groups use to try to demonize anyone who exists outside of their preconceived notions of gender norms and provide examples of how they are often derived from a misunderstanding of history, usually done in service of maintaining a preferred power structure. They posit that some of the most vociferous groups and individuals attacking modern ideas around “gender” are all too eager to blame it, along with other allegedly “woke” notions, as the root cause of all of society’s ills, making the notion into a convenient “phantasm” towards which they can direct their fears and hatreds.

Butler is impassioned and convincing in their points and has a plethora of citations to back up their statements, including work by anthropologists, sociologists, and doctors. While this is allegedly their most “accessible” work, most will probably find it rather dense and academic in tone, sometimes being a lot to get through. The insights provided here are worth the work however, especially as they build towards their ultimate point that we must not allow ourselves to succumb to the fears stoked by those who would turn us against each other in their own pursuit of authoritarian power, but instead, “[should] show we are on the side of livable life, love, and freedom, making those ideals so compelling that no one can look away.”

This was disjointing. I went in to this expecting it to be a far more digestible version of Butlers work which is famously dense.
It read far more like an academic paper filled with elitist jargon and sentiment that is difficult to digest without context.
Some of the ideas were really strong and it was incredibly interesting but overall it needed a good edit and simplification.
I appreciate her work and understand its importance but it is simply too hard for a non-academic audience to read.

Who's Afraid of Gender? is the fantastic Judith Butler's newest book. As to be expected with a Butler title, this book is thought-provoking and interesting, but also dense and academic. Butler discusses the anti-gender ideology of the Right, both here in America and in a number of countries abroad. They discuss the Vatican, evangelical Christianity, and TERFs as some of the many entities that are afraid of gender and seek to use "gender" to deflect attention away from real world problems, such as climate change and authoritarianism.

While this book is thought-provoking and the subject matter is timely and interesting, the complex academic writing could be difficult for some readers. This book would most appeal to those who are already familiar with Butler and/or willing to take the time to grapple with the challenging text.

Who's Afraid of Gender explains how the fearmongering around gender have roots in racism, fascism, misogyny, etc. Butler also explains how the Vatican, politicians, and TERFs use that to voice their "concerns" and spread misinformation. I found this book easier to read than Gender Trouble, but it could still be a bit difficult for a general audience. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more or is confused by why there are suddenly a lot of people using the term "gender ideology".

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance e-book copy in exchange for a review. I’ve really been looking forward to this book!

Who’s Afraid of Gender? helped tie together a lot of threads I’ve been trying to puzzle out surrounding the growing anti-trans movement, and how it relates to other current political movements. I’ve witnessed a surge in the use of the phrase “gender ideology,” but what exactly is meant by this phrase? When groups and individuals proclaim that they are against “gender ideology,” what does that encompass for them, and what are the larger implications of this being taken on as a political stance?

In this succinct read, Butler clearly lays out the reasons behind the current political hysteria surrounding the word and concept of “gender” and identifies who the groups fueling this hysteria are as well as their collective motivations. It’s certainly worth noting that many of these same groups also tend to be anti-gay marriage, anti-miscegenation, and anti-choice.

These groups have pushed the discourse surrounding sex and gender to full blown conspiracy-theory level accusations that humanity is on the brink of destruction, and it’s all the fault of gender studies departments and trans people. Butler uses the word “phantasm” to describe this phenomenon and the larger set of untrue beliefs these groups wish to push.

The title Who’s Afraid of Gender?, a riff on the 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” is likely referencing the idea of creating a phantasmic world in which reality is twisted to avoid acknowledging certain truths. The play develops around a couple’s refusal to face a certain reality, choosing instead to create a false fantasy or phantasm to exist within instead. This reversal of reality can be observed in the way anti-trans groups use language like “pro-family” and “pro-religious freedom” in order to justify taking away rights and protections for marginalized groups.

As Butler points out, throughout history and across cultures there have been many different ways of creating and organizing families and creating kinship ties that are outside of a strict nuclear family setting. Yet, in the anti-”gender” phantasm, families made up of same sex couples, muli-adult families, and interracial families, are framed as an affront and a direct threat to the idea of family itself.

In another example, Butler points out how the Catholic Church has accused people living outside a strict heterosexual and gender binary of being deviants, and in the extreme of being sexual predators. Yet, it is the Catholic Church itself that has paid out billions in legal compensation to the victims of its own legacy of sexual abuse. In reality, it has been women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ leaders and groups who have advocated for the right to consent to and/or refuse sex, as well as advocating on many other issues related to bodily autonomy, especially when it comes to sex and gender minorities and underclasses.

Butler demonstrates this kind of reversal over and over again with the various claims increasingly leveled at anyone loosely associated with the word “gender”.

The book also addresses the seemingly contradictory nature of the emergence of anti-trans ‘feminism.’ These groups have, in the name of women’s rights, allied themselves with far-right groups, despite the fact that they wish to restrict women’s rights in addition to trans people’s rights. Butler urges those who believe in democracy to pay attention to how this phantasm manifests in the form of authoritarian laws aimed at curtailing freedoms deemed “excessive.”

At the end of the book Butler offers hope in the form of urging the formation of alliances across various left-wing groups. “Even if we cannot put our differences aside, we should carry them along, quarreling as we forge a solidarity for the future…”

I might also add that as someone who has a parent living in ‘the mirror world’, this book struck a personal chord. As I try to make sense of all the various conspiracy theories that have been repeated by my parent over the past several years, this book helped explain why and how our interactions have come to be tinged with a particularly toxic kind of transphobia. On that note I am grateful for the insights Judith Butler offers as I continue to strive for understanding.

Butler at their most materialist! This was a lucidly written, if not super original, investigation of “gender,” the phantasmagorical destroyer of nations as mobilized by right-wing movements around the world. Butler suggests that neoliberal immiseration, exacerbated by climate change and resulting emigration crises, has led to the weakening of social ties and the retreat of the welfare state, leaving the family as the only remaining social safety net. “Gender,” a catch-all phrase that encompasses feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist movements, arises in the conservative imagination as that which unsettles the traditional family just when the family is called upon to support every aspect of the ongoing and worsening global multi-crisis. In the process, the right projects its own hostility and apocalyptic fantasizing upon marginalized groups arguing for freedom, recruiting the state to strip them of their hard-won liberties.

Butler rehearses their argument across a series of logically connected chapters, among them critiques of the Vatican’s reproductive ideology (and its exporting of that ideology around the world), Trump’s Supreme Court, British TERFs, maintaining the nature/culture split, and translating “gender” and all its historical and social affordances into other languages (which reveals, ultimately, gender’s hopeless parochialism). Overall, these chapters scratch the surface of their individual topic clusters but they never reach the wealth of detail and analysis of journalistic or pop feminist writing. Butler remains a philosopher first and foremost.

My favorite parts of the book were those where Butler reveals themselves to be a scientifically literate materialist (I don’t care if it’s just to appease people like me or if their conversion is “real”) as well as the chapter on the imperialist history of gender dimorphism. Butler didn’t go as far as I wanted them to go on the (probably violent) history of sexual dimorphism itself, but the book felt like a timely and detailed snapshot of today’s political landscape. Butler’s call for radical coalition-building is urgent and necessary.

Ultimately, though, I wonder who this book is for—who is supposed to heed Butler’s call for linking gender with anti-capitalist activism? People who are willing to read Butler from cover to cover will agree with them on most of their salient points and find themselves equally distressed at the social and ecological fabric coming apart. Butler themselves point out in the introduction that education, reading, and understanding are insufficient bulwarks against the social disruptions that likely lie ahead. So, is this a book meant to invite coalitional commiseration? Where is the vision? What do we DO???

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

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!

It took me a long time to read this book because it made me think, and also because I was trying to read it at the same time I was going through my first semester of grad school. I ended up having to take notes as I read because I knew a lot of what Butler was saying would come in handy later. This is a very thoughtful, well-put together book. I've complained about Butler's tendency to write five pages when a sentence would do before, but I didn't find I had the same complaint with this book - each part was there purposefully.

It's a very good book if you want to think more, and learn more, about why people have been so deeply weird about gender in recent years, or if you're a big gender and/or social forces of society nerd. A very specific book, but one that is extremely worthwhile when you need something that drills down into specifics.

It was difficult to rate this book. I had never read Judith Butler's work before but was very interested in this one, as it approches some major and actual themes.
Globally, I appreciated it and learned a lot about the moral panic around gender. However, I found it quiet difficult to understand sometimes and it is clearly too difficult for general audience. Which is a shame, as it would be more beneficial to those readers than people who are already familiar with gender studies.

5 stars

It seems like there are two camps of readers who will come to this text: Butler's preexisting acolytes (*raises hand faster than Tracy Flick*) and Butler's detractors. I can't speak to what the latter gets out of this, and I also...don't care.

Butler's work was part of my scholarship throughout all of my undergraduate and graduate coursework, it's foundational in the college courses I've been teaching for decades, and it has helped me better understand the world at large. For obvious reasons, I came in with high expectations, and I'm feeling fulfilled.

Butler answers their titular question, and they also provide a lot of context for where we are now and how we got here. I got a lot of out of this, but the most important benefit is the counteracting of so much gaslighting. I'm fortunate to be mostly in environments where that's not happening, but I still live in this society, where a lot of the issues Butler digs into here are the subject of constant f***ery, and there's only so much of that one can take before they start asking what the heck is even going on anymore.

So, Butler is showing up here not only with a well devised exploration of the central subject but also with some important, grounding reminders from the premier expert. It turns out there are still some folks afraid of gender (*sighs forever*), but Butler is still here to help the rest of us keep fighting for the obvious: basic human rights. I'm not sure there's a higher endorsement available.

This is - as anticipated - more foundational content from one of the greatest theorists of our time.

Major thanks to NetGalley and FSG for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:

*DNF

Not in the proper headspace for this and won't be until I find myself in the classroom where this is assigned.

Strong in its introduction with "left good, right bad" with guarded language, I wasn't eased into this with the kind of welcome that I thought the queer community was supposed to provide. I get it. Our people are hurt. Especially for those whose voices are lost to a government that ceases to acknowledge the rights of minorities. But with Aunt Charlie's or Mood Ring, or any used bookstore in the Castro or Hillcrest, we come welcome with open arms. Here the arms are folded across the chest, wanting not to create a space for communication. It's really just a campus soapbox to loop in echo chambers.

Given that this is being released in election year, I see no use in staying guarded. I'm here to talk. I'm here to have a conversation. I'm here to form community. Given opposing views, I'm here to really sit with the people and talk through with what we can do to keep people safe.

I really could just read Judith Butler chewing up and spitting out JK Rowling and her TERF crew all day long. This book is not for a mass audience necessarily, but it's not so academic as to be incompressible. If you're up for the challenge, it is very worth it -- Butler dismantles all the anti-trans arguments without breaking a sweat, and shows just how rooted that movement is in colonialism and the right wing. It does get repetitive occasionally, but overall, a fantastic addition to the literature.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

I seem to have started pretty much every review recently with “I don’t quite know how to talk about this book” but … the thing is, I don’t quite know how to talk about this book.
In the positive sense, given that I basically highlighted, like, the entire thing and have been thinking about what I read since I read it.

I think, honestly, at this point, I’m just relieved that Judith Butler isn’t randomly a TERF now. I mean, I don’t know why I’d think that, given their past work (plus it’d be a pretty weird stance for a nonbinary person to take), but too much of my life at the moment seems to consist of Googling “is [someone I admire] [who was probably born a generation or so before me] randomly a TERF now?” with dread in my heart.

The other thing I find, not complicated necessarily, but worth thinking about, is who a book like Who’s Afraid of Gender is for exactly. Like is anyone who disagrees with the book’s premise (i.e. that trans and nonbinary people deserve dignity, liberty and the right to self-actualise, that anti-gender rhetoric is not only logically inconsistent but harmful, and that gender itself is contextual and philosophically complex) going to read it? And if you do already agree with everything Butler is saying, is there any point in reading it? Are you not then just allowing yourself to live in a comforting echo chamber?

On top of which there’s the fact that attempting to engage sincerely with gender critical discourse often feels like a losing proposition because—and Butler is very very quick to point this out—its neither consistent nor itself sincere. In fact, it’s pretty much the public debate equivalent of mudwrestling a pig. You know, you’ll just get dirty and the pig will enjoy it. For a little while, as I was reading Who’s Afraid of Gender, I genuinely wasn’t sure if I was watching Judith Butler mudwrestling a pig, spectacular though the mudwrestling was. Except then I had a long conversation about it with my partner—and read aloud several sequences from the book—and H said, “no, this is not Judith Butler mudwrestling a pig. This is Judith Butler pointing at a pig going, that’s a pig and it’s covered in mud.”

And you know something? This is completely right.

5 stars. Would share swine identification and filth assessment session with Judith Butler again.

Pig-themed lulz aside, the fact this book is necessary is depressing as hell. We should not be so culturally in doubt of what’s a pig and how muddy it is. Although, as Judith Butler touches upon in the book, one of the problems we’re facing in the world right now is a strain of manipulative anti-intellectualism which promises truth and plain speaking but is actually about control, fearmongering, and obfuscation. So I think what I’m getting at here is that I hate Butler had to write Who’s Afraid of Gender, but I fucking love that they did.

The other thing that’s notable, and intriguing, about Who’s Afraid of Gender is that it’s (I believe?) the first piece of work Butler has published with a non-academic press. And while there’s probably a natural limit to the accessibility of Judith Butler, this very much feels like a book that’s intended to be read, not taught. It is, in fact, very readable. There’s a warmth to Butler’s writing here, alongside the expected intellectual ferocity, that—for me—made Who’s Afraid of Gender as reassuring as it was brilliant.

And yes: if you’d told me at the beginning of 2023 that my comfort read of the year would be Judith Butler I’d have … well, looked at you funny I suppose. But, God, this book ended up meaning so fucking much to me. Because, the thing is, I know the discourse around “gender” is flatly wrong and deeply harmful. It’s just the sheer relentlessness is so exhausting. The experience of reading Who’s Afraid of Gender, then, is sort of like Judith Butler has turned up to hold your hand and explain, straightforwardly, eloquently, and indomitably, why all this is bullshit. It wasn’t something I thought I needed—I thought I understood things pretty clearly—but it was. It absolutely was.

The central conceit of Who’s Afraid of Gender is that gender has become a sort of phantasm upon which all manner of social and global anxieties can be heaped, and then leveraged by fascist-leaning ideologies to advance oppressive and patriarchal agendas. Over the course of the book (which is a slim little number, considering the weight of its ideas), Butler not only exposes the apparently endless contradictions put forth by gender critical thinkers but neatly dismantles … I mean, like, everything? The Catholic Church. The Supreme Court. Donald Trump. Trans people’s participation in sports. TERFs. Kathleen Stock. Biological essentialism. A certain UK children’s author who continues to believe she understands everyone else’s gender identity better than they do. The whole notion that there has ever been an immutable idea of what a woman “is” that could be returned to if we dispensed with gender:

<blockquote>The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many people can participate in the reality it describes, nor does it limit in advance the forms that that reality can take. In fact, feminism has always insisted that what a woman is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.</blockquote>

The book covers a lot of ground, including a chapter on gender as a weapon of colonialism that I personally found super fascinating. The casual but comprehensive murder of JK Rowing that Butler performs in about three brisk pages is also, I must confess, darkly satisfying, but also just kind of sad as well. Like, what are the 2020s that Judith Butler is having to stride across the battlefield of discourse taking down formerly beloved children’s writers like when somebody gets bitten by a zombie in episode of the Walking Dead. In all seriousness, though, Rowling is a good case study for Butler, precisely because Rowling has a highly developed capacity, considering her power and privilege, to occupy spaces of victimhood. For example, while Butler notes that online bullying is, of course, unacceptable they also draw attention to the false equivalence has been tacitly accepted anger expressed at JKR online and the fact that JK Rowling is actively engaged in denying a socially, legally and medically disenfranchised group of people their very existence:

<blockquote>Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian, and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do).Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself.

[…]

Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that lets many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.</blockquote>

Sorry for the long quote. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d highlighted most of the book. Kathleen Stock, another British TERF, who briefly positioned herself as brutally censored by militant supporters of transgender rights, Butler has even less time for, simply on the grounds of flat out poor scholarship.

<blockquote>Stock’s valid concern is that no woman should be subject to possible rape, and I agree that everyone should share that concern. And yet, if securing women against rape in prison were her main focus, should she not [before focusing on violence enacted by trans women in women’s prisons] consult the statistics on male prison guards engaging in precisely that activity, which, given their magnitude, should, according to her logic, lead to a policy in which no man ever works as a prison guard in any women’s prison? Perhaps she has signed petitions to this effect or written on this policy, but I am not finding it in my research</blockquote>

Anyway, I have barely scraped the surface of everything that’s important, incisively reasoned, and decisively communicated in Who’s Afraid of Gender. Butler is a powerful advocate for freedom, feminism, and the right to self-actualise. Not always an unchallenging read, it is nevertheless a vital one for everyone who needs to feel seen and fought for right now.

I've never read Judith Butler's work before (at least not in full) but the cover and title really drew me in. I love nonfiction centring on gender and find it incredibly fascinating so knew I had to give this a read.

Butler does an incredible job expanding upon gender as it is concieved of as phantasm. The idea of gender as a place in which the sense of fear generated by a great many other issues (such as the climate crisis and economic troubles) can be coalesced to benefit certain political factions was very well-articulated and provided a clear lens through which certain behaviours can be understood.

Furthermore, their discussions on the intersectionality of gender at large had a great deal of depth and nuance. The act of examining gender within the colonial setting (both historically and presently) was particularly interesting. As was the discussion on the challenges surrounding understating gender in terms of linguistics, especially across languages.

I found the overarching point of solidarity and understanding gender as part of the bigger picture that demands intersectional action in order to achieve liberation and refute the phantasms created by those who are anti-gender deeply compelling. Very glad I read this and would recommend (just was very dense at times so did take me a while).