In their most recent work, Judith Butler is interested in understanding Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024). More specifically, this book undertakes a double task: first, Butler’s aim is to present a rebuttal to several arguments made against the destructive powers of “gender ideology;” second, and perhaps most crucially, Butler’s goal is to formulate ideas about the ways in which we may collectively resist – and organize against – the rising tide of fascist passions and authoritarianism that threaten our possibilities for “livable lives.” When it comes to performativity studies, Butler offers a significant contribution to scholarship with their work on (counter)imaginaries and phantasmatic syntax. Thus, it appears that Butler’s newest release is a departure from their earlier works on gender and performativity, insofar as it shifts focus from the ways in which ritualized performances constitute gender (Butler, 1990) within a largely heterosexual frame (Butler, 1993). In Who’s Afraid of Gender? they examine why and how “gender” becomes a nexus through which fear and anxiety about the future coalesce. To me, as both a queer scholar and a feminist who is interested in affect and the ways storytelling can shape our (relationship to) possible future(s), this book offers a needed perspective shift. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler explored how “gender” and “sex” were made to seem normal and natural: how they operated within a coherent internal order – or a syntax – which structured and organized our sense of self. The “story” of gender (and sex), thus, could be taken apart – and it was – to reveal how even the “natural” is constantly (re)constructed. In a similar vein, Bodies that Matter (1993) explored the ways in which bodies were the “material reality” upon which heterosexual desires and scripts were inscribed and negotiated. In that sense, gender was what enabled us to think about our bodies: gender was the “constitutive constraint” against and through which we might make sense of how we moved, how we loved and how we lived. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler considers the power of affect: how it sustains and animates stories about gender and the future. Instead of showing how stories come to “make sense,” Butler shows how, in fact, stories do not always need to make sense to work. What they can hinge on, instead, is how they make us feel. Therefore, in their latest release, Butler presents gender as a “phantasmatic scene”: a space where fear and anxiety weave (oftentimes contradictory) stories about bodies, sex and desire and the possibilities of life. It is their goal, then, to pull at the fabric of those stories, to unravel them and to suggest other stories for the future.From the outset, Butler identifies the ways in which “gender” is constructed as a phantasm. The term itself is a stand-in for a plethora of threats: the destruction of the traditional family, the indoctrination of children into homosexuality, pedophilia and other paraphilias, the end of “true masculinity”, just to name a few. It seems that the lexical, political and theoretical flexibility of the term serves – at least in an affective sense – to stoke the fires of “multitudes of modern panics” (p. 5). Furthermore, if “gender” becomes the figure through and against which most fears and anxieties are articulated, the actual myriads of reasons to be fearful and anxious become obscured: “those fears lose their names” (p. 6). This orchestrating of fear enables states and other sites of consolidated power to breed compliance and pull people “back into the fold,” as it were. Butler borrows the concept of “phantasmic scene” from the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to engage with “anti-gender” (p. 10). In this context, fantasy is “an organization of desire and anxiety that follows certain structural and organizational rules, drawing on both conscious and unconscious material” (p. 10). Following this conceptual framework, fantasy has material bearing on the world – how it is made, unmade and inhabited.This articulation of gender is not completely removed from Butler’s previous works, especially when it comes to considering the ways in which it is imbued with certain structures of (heterosexual) desires for the future (1993). However, whereas Bodies that Matter may have been more concerned with understanding what specific desires, such as marriage and reproduction, structured gender and gendered life, Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024) seeks to understand how varied affects (fear, anxiety) themselves are focused contingently at the site of “gender” to influence what constitutes a “possible life.”It is worth mentioning that the anti-gender movement is not opposed to gender per se but has a vested interest in imposing a certain “gender order” (p. 18) on the world. Furthermore, their willingness to “eliminate gender” is born from a refusal to engage with scholarship that would enable them to enter public debate. In this sense, Butler argues that reading and sincerely engaging with what is at the heart of the debate is not merely a luxury or a hobby: it is the prerequisite for a productive democratic life. “Informed debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute” (p. 18). It seems that the anti-gender movement does not value having a shared understanding of “what” is at stake. For Butler, the work, then, is not to deconstruct an argument—or to construct an entirely new one. It is, rather, to neutralize a “gender-as-Hydra” – a collection of nightmare sequences that feed off fear – which seeks to destroy certain possibilities for queer, trans and feminist lives. Therefore, Butler is interested in constructing a counter-imaginary to oppose the ways in which the anti-gender movement acts “as a part of fascism” (p. 25).According to the “anti-gender” movement, the many faces of “gender” can be as terrifying as the Hitler Youth, nuclear warheads, or those who think they may usurp the power of God (chapter 1). When gender isn’t presented as the aforementioned threats, it can also take the form of indoctrination. The interesting thing, then, when it comes to performativity studies, is the way in which gender becomes a site for a variety of simultaneous embodiments – in which it is not the repetition of a variety of gender acts that coalesce into a coherent performance. How may we think about gender when the anti-gender movement has so clearly pushed aside any consideration of coherence and consistency?On the matter of “gender-as-harm,” Butler also explores the way in which the Vatican presents “gender” as a danger to the complementarity of man and woman, marriage, the family and children (chapter 2).It seems the Church is trying to make queer lives – or any type of lives that exist outside of heterosexual marriage – completely unthinkable and unsayable. In that sense, queer partnership or parenthood is presented as a threat to children both in terms of indoctrination and sexual abuse. In other words, the Vatican is trying to enact a form of effacement – or at the very least is trying to limit the conditions of possibility for different (queer) embodiments – by conjuring up a reversed fantasy where “gender ideology” is what lurks in the shadows, waiting for innocent and easily influenced children.More specifically, Butler explores how “anti-gender ideology” movement manifests itself in the United States. Chiefly, Butler analyses the ways in which “the deprivation of health care and the censorship of education” are disenfranchising LGBTQIA + communities and increasing their vulnerability (chapter 3). By multiplying the legislative bans and restrictions, the United States’ Right is effectively forming a “state-backed form of thought police” which seems to target the apparent corruptive and indoctrinating power of reading and books. It seems that not only do words such as “gender,” “gay” and “trans” have the power to indoctrinate whoever encounters them, but it also appears that the minds of children and young adults are “fully porous or helplessly responsive” in such scenarios. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), Butler had analyzed a similar dynamic when it came to the military and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. By trying to fix the meaning of certain words as contagious and dangerous, the State and its various apparatuses were trying to make them unsayable in the context of self-declaration.The study of performativity – and much of the scholarship that has been developed in and around this concept – has to do with what is enacted and constructed through our practices and our speech. The “what” that is performed is often a semi-unified – and hopefully – coherent thing. What is interesting then is that in this case, the thing that “gender” performs, insofar as the Right is concerned, has less to do with one singular thing and more to do with an affective state of fear and anxiety. That affective state leads to policy and legislative action such as bans of healthcare and censorship in education, but seems secondary to the importance of the specific affective wavelength. If Butler is concerned with the “phantasmatic scene” and the imaginary that “gender” can conjure, there is something to be said about the different types of coherence that can be built upon. That is to say that the dream sequence – or nightmare sequence, more aptly – is not beholden to the same laws of coherence as that of the waking world. If the Right has tapped into our collective fears and anxieties, they are potentially operating on the level of the dream sequence, against which logic and rational argument seldom are enough to change paths.When it comes to fixing the meaning of certain terms, the Right and more specifically the Trump administration have taken it upon themselves to try to ensure that “sex” should be considered immutable (chapter 4). Aided by the Supreme Court, which has taken a particularly “literalist” approach to matters concerning human rights and personal freedom, any definition of “sex” that would allow for the evolution is presented as a threat to national order. For Butler, this visceral opposition to freedom is a matter of concern. “Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is it rather: How has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?” (p. 129). However, amongst those who insist that “sex” is/should be fixed, there is another notable group that finds itself aligned with the “anti-gender” movement. Indeed, “gender critical feminists” argue that bodies and “sex” produce hors tout a set of experiences – and ways of being read, signified, and interacted with – that have nothing to do with specific sociopolitical and historical context (chapter 5).A point of interest is the idea that there are categories – ways of approximating, naming and enacting lived gendered experiences with language – which “let many of us live” (p. 151). In this sense, gender and its ritualized performances are normative: they can be (and are) coercive and oppressive, but they may also be life-affirming. For some of us, thinking within and against the boundaries of gender is not only a question of what constraints “weigh” on life, but a question of the possibility of a life worth living. Naming our various gendered embodiments may very well be a practice of survival in the face of the organized violence of erasure and denial. If our understanding of “sex” is broadened when we consider that it is not a fixed and ahistorical feature of a person, does that mean the realities that “sex” articulates are therefore erased? For Butler, that is hardly a convincing argument.Furthering their argument, Butler challenges the assertion that feminists are denying the “facts” of sex (chapter 6). Namely, they call upon John Berger’s intervention to remind us that “what” we see is always conditioned by our ways of seeing, which are themselves “laden with presuppositions about the meaning of what there is to be known” (p. 181). How we understand “sex” – and where we are willing to look for it – is already saturated with ideas and political inclinations. Then, it stands to reason to say that neither nature nor the body reveals itself plainly, when they are always in the process of being constructed and captured.To enrich the articulation between “sex” and its imaginary, Butler examines the “corrective” surgeries performed on intersex children by John Money in the late sixties and seventies. Thus, Butler presents the ways in which fear is built into the practice of sex assignment (chapter 7). In this case, the fear of not living up to expectations of social normalcy overrode considerations about the self-determination and agency of intersex children. It can be said, then, that sex assignment summons an imaginary and a set of expectations for the future of children. The projected failure to live up to those expectations has compelled cruel and inhumane medical procedures, such as those conducted by Money. However, for Butler, Money’s contributions to gender studies – even as we may be required to think against his contributions – are still relevant. He identified a gap between bodies and the projected trajectories of a life, which remains a productive space for thought. “At every stage in this process of becoming gendered, a persistent incommensurability exists between the lived body and the category under which it is to be understood” (p. 201). However, that very space between the lived body and the category that aims to capture it is often eschewed in the name of what is considered “natural.” In that regard, Butler explores the ways in which the nature/culture dichotomy has influenced sex/gender binarism (chapter 8).In turn, for many proponents of “anti-gender” ideology, “sex” is the essential and “natural” fact of the material world, upon which we have imposed the fable of “gender.” Through a co-constitutive approach, which has come to be favored in many fields of science such as biology and immunology, we may understand the material reality of sex and its bearings on possible embodiments. Speaking of such varied embodiments, Butler explores “when and how gender was forcibly imposed” (p. 212), specifically focusing on how “colonial powers, imposed gender norms on Black and brown bodies that naturalized and idealized heteronormative white and (mainly) European norms” (p. 212). In fact, Black and brown bodies were considered the anomalous bodies against which “normal” (and desirable) femininity and masculinity could be defined (chapter 9). Thus, gender dimorphism was negatively constituted against Black and brown “flesh” – which was considered a site where beings became “ungendered” – and insofar as “gender” may be a framework through which we can try to understand the relations we form with each other and the world, it is of crucial importance to understand how specific (racist, colonial and imperial) practices of “gendering” were/are at work in our very understanding of “sex.” Moreover, in many (white) feminist works that sought to understand patriarchal gender arrangements in racialized and subalternized cultures, the prism of “gender” was applied without consideration for the ways in which it writes over structures of kinship and intelligibility that may have organized social relations before colonization. This is not to say that inequality, oppression or violence were absent prior to colonization, but rather, it is an invitation to turn towards non-Western epistemological foundations when it comes to understanding different gendered embodiments and collective life trajectories.To situate and contextualize the concept, Butler explores the ways in which “gender” has been presented as an imperialist intrusion in non-English-speaking countries (chapter 10). “Although the anti-gender ideology movement often opposes the foreignness of gender on nationalist grounds, it oscillates between figuring the foreign as an imperialist power and an unwanted migrant” (p. 230). In this sense, the phantasm of “gender” becomes a synecdoche for what is foreign—imperial or otherwise. Moreover, issues of translation seem to be at the heart of this question. “If no one language monopolizes a word or idea, if there are other words that try to get at the same or a similar phenomenon, then asking what we refer to with the term “gender” can initiate an extremely interesting conversation among users of different languages” (p. 234). Indeed, Butler suggests that through paying attention to a variety of languages and formulations of gendered life, we may become attuned to different possibilities for embodiment. In this sense, language does not co-constitute an easily translatable concept of universal “gender,” but rather, language points to a contingent dimension of gender and gendered life. It is then not enough to simply find an adequate translation for an English concept of “gender”: we must open the floor to a plurality of gendered experiences and ways to name them if we wish to find more possibilities for livable lives.In their closing remarks, Butler reminds the readers that the aim of the book has been to encourage and foster potential alliances between different marginalized groups, despite the struggles that come with forming coalitions to fight against the phantasm of “gender.” Although Butler seeks “neither to provide a new theory of gender nor to defend or reconsider the theory that (p. the interest of this book is the way in which it with In the face of material fear and anxiety about the future have been made to coalesce around the “gender” by proponents of an “anti-gender” In that sense, Who’s Afraid of Gender? does something different previous works by It is less concerned with itself within a – at this very – conversation on performativity and is more concerned with the ways in which logic and coherence may be eschewed in of political and Butler us to consider the ways in which we do with rational debate when we are and the people in a terrifying over Who’s Afraid of Gender? shows us how we come to the for the Although it may not be its this work may still performativity studies insofar as it us to consider how affect enables certain and how we might neutralize their Who’s Afraid of Gender? that we enter the of fantasy with our desires for the a queer and feminist scholar much of this process was in various states of and – at the one it is to be when think of the ways in which have be and made up into – Butler is one of them, but also thinking about a feminist and a who does reading with just to name those from of are people who are for to point the of oppression – for to work against the other it is also to read about how our lives are as as nuclear The are they often make to no sense, and we are to our and to and every It is work, and we are largely to people who not to us or who not engage in The of a book then, is that it offers another way to resist fascist In that we to we are being we are no simply to and increasing are not to – with its and are the we are our in the phantasmatic we are the of our collective