Larry Dunn
Who’s Afraid of Gender?, by Judith Butler. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024, 320pp., $30.00
Who’s Afraid of Gender? begins with an observation: When the Right uses the word “gender” or “gender ideology,” it does not refer to internal identity, or even a view of the relation between sex and gender, but refers all at once to Orwelian tyranny and to licentious freedom, to communist Marxism and to imperialist incursion—a far cry from a straightforward signifying term. Something is clearly afoot with how the Right uses and experiences the word “gender.”
Of course, gender is a slippery thing even for the Left: gender means many different things to different people. But on the Left, it at least refers to a particular category of experience, a social object that can be identified and analyzed.
Often, academics refer to politically laden terms like gender, terrorism, or cartel as “empty signifiers,” since there no longer seems to be a real thing that they refer to. But as Judith Butler points out, these signifiers are far from empty. They are overflowing with meaning. Butler instead sees “gender” as an “overdetermined site” where various psychological associations coalesce and reinforce one another. Butler argues that while the Right does vilify transgender and queer people, the actual operative fears when the Right evokes “gender ideology” are really that of destruction, anarchy, the end of patriarchy, molestation of children, loss of national purity, and so on. For the Right, “gender,” whatever it is, must obviously be treated as an existential threat. It is this unconscious schema of myriad interrelated anxieties that Butler takes as the object of study.
For Butler, the phantasmic power of gender is not abstract. The phantasm has come to include Butler themself. In 2017, they spoke at a conference in Brazil at which protestors burned an effigy of Butler that bore red eyes, devil horns, and a bikini. Interpreting the symbolism there is left as an exercise for the reader. In the logic of the phantasm, Butler is the “papisa” (female pope) of gender ideology. And, to be sure, Who’s Afraid of Gender will itself be caught up in the culture war of gender ideology, added to the roster of untouchable, corrupting texts. So, Butler sets out to understand the internal structure and mechanisms of the phantasm, and how the hell on earth they came to be the papisa of gender.
Before continuing: what is a “phantasm?” Though it’s easy to deride the book for so repeatedly using the esoteric psychoanalytic term, Butler does give a neat definition in the introduction: phantasm is “a syntactical arrangement of elements of psychic life,” “an organization of desire and anxiety that follows certain structural and organization rules drawing on both conscious and unconscious material”. The question, then, is not who is afraid of gender. Obviously, everyone is. We all live in constant fear of not fulfilling the gendered expectations and social roles that structure our daily lives. Rather, the question is what is really going on when the Right claims to be afraid of gender, what has gender has come to be psychologically associated with, and what does it represent in the minds of the global Right?
Despite this clearly articulated task, the body of Who’s Afraid of Gender? continually reveals that it actually does not quite know who, or what, it’s for. Clearly, it’s not for academic disciples of Butlerian thought: it presupposes no familiarity with Butler’s work, and in fact, chapters six through eight serve as an effective and accessible crash course in the core of their theory of sex and gender, certainly worth reading if you’ve ever tried and given up on Butler’s seminal work, Gender Trouble. This book is not the latest installment in the Butler gender theory corpus. But oddly, it does presuppose that the reader is familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation” (the transformation of a person from a hunk of flesh into a categorized, recognizable social subject). In contrast, the extensive effort to refute the anti-trans arguments of the Vatican and J.K. Rowling indicates an investment in popular discourse, in appealing to laypeople. But, as the introduction states, they are quite apprehensive about the value of attempting to bridge the Left/Right epistemological gap with well-reasoned arguments as a result of the fear the Right holds that reading “ideological” books will induce confusion in the reader’s mind.
The psychoanalysis at work in Who’s Afraid of Gender asks very interesting questions, but struggles to answer them. We get glimmers of complicated, intriguing claims here and there: the “hallucinatory dimension of moral sadism,” the phantasmically empowered penis in the mind of TERFs, the imagined reliance of social cohesion on repression of gay and trans desire. But these claims are sadly underexplored, perhaps as a result of an inability to answer them in plain language, fearful of alienating a popular audience, perhaps as a result of getting overshadowed by the logical rebuttals of bigoted ideology. Though the answer to whether in fact “gender ideology” is everything the Right claims it is should be obvious, most of the book is devoted to the task of dismantling such arguments and laying bare the abounding contradictions within them. Ironically, Butler’s awareness of this pitfall is not enough to stop them from stumbling into it.
In the introduction, they warn us:
“It is tempting to try and expose and puncture this inflammatory caricature of gender through an intellectual exercise. As an educator, I am inclined to say, ‘Let’s read some key texts in gender studies together and see what gender does and does not mean and whether the caricature holds up. … Sadly, such a strategy rarely works.”
A few chapters later, they’re wrestling with the proverbial pig: “If gender-critical feminists wish to be critical, then they should give some thought first to the history of the term ‘critique’ and its place in struggles for social transformation …”
Generously interpreted, trans-exclusionary “radical” “feminists” (TERFs) worry that the “abolishment of sex” will put innocent women in danger going to the bathroom. Butler contends that this argument is founded on a misconception of trans women as male predators in disguise, and relies on veiled sliding between “of course, not all trans women would do such a thing” and using singular examples to vastly generalize and fearmonger.
TERFs also worry that gender ideology will make it impossible to litigate discrimination based on sex, but as Butler explains, anti-sex discrimination does not rely on the “reality” of biological sex. Dispelling preconceptions about sex, they argue, is in fact the very aim of anti-discrimination law.
The Vatican argues that people cannot be free to constitute themselves as they like, and must embrace the essential biological characteristics that define man and woman. The Pope warns against “ideological concepts” of the family, and invokes the tautology “family is family!” as though it were obvious. But as Butler points out, this tautology itself is an ideological move, denying the existence of alternative kinship bonds that already exist in the world.
Greg Abbott calls gender-confirming care “abuse” that must be outlawed, and demands that parents seeking medical care for transitioning children should be identified and prosecuted. Butler discusses how denial of gender confirming care leaves queer and trans children isolated and stigmatized, consequently at greater risk of mental health concerns and suicidality. Censorship of ideas and denial of care, far from protecting children, puts them at greater risk.
Butler’s arguments in these engagements are all well-articulated, and certainly true. But, to quote the book itself, “it is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments.”
One can imagine a different version of this book which focuses solely on the public debate, and allows itself to fully indulge in a thorough deconstruction and humiliation of fascist and bigoted arguments. That book is perhaps 75 pages long. It does not use the word “phantasm,” it does not use the word “interpellation,” and there is nary a mention of “material-semiotic generative node.” It’s marketed to centrist fence-sitters as a rational argument in favor of LGBTQ rights against the Right’s “gender ideology” war, and marketed to nonacademic progressives as a handbook of talking points against the Right in public discourse. This book is titled Countering the Culture War: The Ruse of Anti-Gender Ideology, and it is sold in progressive coffee shops across America.
One can imagine yet another different version of this book which eschews the public debate, and undertakes a jargon-laden psychoanalytic construction of the phantasm of gender. This book, titled The Phantasm of Gender: Psychosocial Anxiety and Political Fantasy, makes no concessions in the name of an “open dialogue,” digs much deeper on psychoanalytic case studies, and elaborately reconstructs the feeling and psychology of being caught in the phantasm. It is read by psychoanalysts, gender theorists, and various other academics. Either of these books would be preferable to Who’s Afraid of Gender?, in which both of the potential approaches are hampered by Butler’s attempt to hold them at the same time.
To be a public intellectual is an odd balancing act. On the one hand, there is a sense of obligation, almost a moral burden, to have real social impact with one’s research, and on the other hand, the desire to maintain the integrity and complexity of one’s academic work. One way to strike this balance is not to dilute academic theory, but rather to subordinate it to drawing conclusions. Such a public intervention presents insights made uniquely possible by a theoretical approach without importing the entire theoretical apparatus into the intervention itself. Theory should be applied in the work of a public intellectual, but the theory should not be visible in the final product.
Unfortunately, Who’s Afraid of Gender? does the opposite, making largely non-psychoanalytic claims while asking the audience to apprehend the psychoanalytic framework to engage with the work. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the analysis of contemporary politics is not meaningfully changed by the importation of Butler’s psychoanalytic theory. The arguments about phantasm function almost exactly the same if you replace every instances of “phantasm” with “subconscious association,” and any unique insights that might arise from the invocation of this psychoanalytic terminology are kneecapped by Butler’s unwillingness to connect the dots past a singular definition. Butler’s attempt to restrain the overt presence of their theoretical apparatus does tone down the infamous density of works such as Gender Trouble. They generally strike a more conversational tone, but ultimately, there is too much of the theoretical apparatus and not enough of how the theory should change how we view politics.
All this said, I have great respect for Butler as a philosopher and canonical figure of queer theory and I have sympathy for how this book ended up in this confused, mishmashed state. It is incredibly alluring, even for intellectuals that haven’t been unwillingly sucked into bigoted discourses, to logically dismantle and outright humiliate wrong and harmful arguments, to enter the colosseum of public discourse and mercilessly destroy your enemies. If I devoted my life to understanding and operationalizing new visions of gendered living for political liberation, and in response was relentlessly and willfully misinterpreted by TERFs and rightists who refuse to touch the books they claim are destroying Western civilization, I’m not sure I could resist the bait either. Perhaps such rigorous argumentation would even be a useful exercise for the few remaining fence-sitters. But for both well-read Butler-heads looking for a work of provocative theory and for the general public looking to understand the political issue of “gender”, Who’s Afraid of Gender? fails to deliver.