Judith Butler, _Who's Afraid of Gender?_

READING JUDITH BUTLER in the early 1990s felt a bit like reading Derrida in the 1970s, in that neither writer seemed inclined to make concessions to the reader. The implied message: if you can't keep up, go home. By the nineties, though, Derrida's sense of an abiding audience led him to relax a little bit, to render his arguments a little easier of access. Butler, too, aware of having a sizeable potential audience, has for quite a few years now been willing to intervene in public questions with arguments that do not rely on the daunting apparatuses they used in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. ("Is Judaism Zionism?" from 2011, can serve as an example.) 

Who's Afraid of Gender? counts as a public intervention, I would say, as it deals with topics being debated in courts and legislatures all across the country and all across the world; in fact, and unfortunately, it is even more urgently timely now than it was on its publication in 2024. The answer to the title's question is "a whole lot of people," including the Catholic Church, the Trump Administration, and certain British feminists, except they name their enemy not "gender" but "gender ideology." The battleground is sometimes sharply defined--public bathrooms, locker rooms, medical care for minors--but sometimes might include anyone and any topic found in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, and sometimes might even include the desire to roll everything back to the days of the trad wife.

Butler's arguments are composed, rational, lawyerlike, their rhetoric temperate and judicious--which must have taken them some doing, for, as they point out, there is little that is rational or temperate or even evidence-based in the manifestoes of those trying to destroy "gender ideology" root and branch. As Butler emphasizes throughout, these culture warriors are battling a "toxic phantasm," an imaginary monster conjured out of their own fears and anxieties, a bogey that has nothing in common with actual LGBTQIA+ people.

But this leaves us with a tough question. Can the phantasmatic be countered with rationality, evidence, logic, as Butler is trying to do? Its sources may be more unconscious than that (as Amia Srinavasan has recently suggested in a London Review of Books essay, "The Impossible Patient"), something way down in the humid boiler room of the id. 

Butler gave us a psychoanalytic map to homophobic anxiety long ago in The Psychic Life of Power. Perhaps they are guessing that those who have declared war on "gender ideology" would not sit still for a psychoanalytic account of their own motives, and so are hoping to get a hearing with clear-light-of-day public accountability kinds of arguments. Will those be enough? One hopes so.