Verónica Gago

I read Who’s Afraid of Gender? with the urgency that one reads a text during an emergency, a catastrophe. I read this book like one reads an extremely topical philosophical text: simultaneously looking for a systematic analysis of what we are going through and for possible ways out, for sources of oxygen. I am reading it from Argentina, in the midst of announcements of authoritarian neoliberal shocks under the brand-new presidency of the self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist/paleo-libertarian” Javier Milei. Milei, who has been sponsored by the conservative Atlas Network, is part of the group of leaders campaigning against feminism that Butler analyzes in detail.

But I also read this book as an inverted map of the main question: why has “gender” (a term that is problematized in multiple ways throughout the book) become a phantasmal presence that is capable of bringing together the fears, anxieties, and distress generated by, as I have argued, the machine of insecurity that is neoliberalism? Even to the point of producing contemporary forms of fascism? I say “inverted” because looking at the “restorers” who weaponize gender illuminates the zones where feminist, antiextractivist, popular struggles have engaged in processes of liberation; these struggles have revealed interdependence, dispossession, passions, and the laborious conditions of personal and collective reproduction to the point of destabilizing current powers (those who are afraid of gender), even as they have also shown that liberating is not synonymous with deregulating or individualizing. Thus, this book is first an analysis of the other movement—the “anti-gender ideology” movement—that nonetheless allows for analyzing and taking the measure of our movements in their transformative capacity. “Gender,” in this sense, does not operate like a new empty or floating signifier but rather as a way of naming a set of diverse struggles that, in recent years, have given meaning and materiality to a revolutionary desire and an ongoing dispute over the very idea of freedom.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Why has “gender” ... become a phantasmal presence that is capable of bringing together the fears, anxieties, and distress generated by ... the machine of insecurity that is neoliberalism?' --Verónica Gago" quote="'Why has “gender” ... become a phantasmal presence that is capable of bringing together the fears, anxieties, and distress generated by ... the machine of insecurity that is neoliberalism?'" theme="style2"]

The book’s first mapping of a political battle can be found in the title (what we need to know), Who’s Afraid of Gender? The question is also a programmatic clue, which serves us here and now (and which is repeated, with differences, in their previous book on the pandemic, What World Is This?). Butler has already reflected on (in relation to Michel Foucault) the importance of constructing titles with questions as a way of putting critical philosophy into practice and, we could add, of doing political work. To ask this question is to understand the conditions of possibility for a term to become both movement and antimovement (that is, how and why it has leapt beyond the borders of academic or sectoral debate, its moments of emergence dictated by political circumstances). This question—who is afraid—allows us to constellate all the actors, procedures, and modalities through which “gender” has become both a scapegoat and favored phantasm, a key step in heading off a project of patriarchal, authoritarian, fundamentalist, colonial, capitalist “restoration” (which is not simply a backlash). For example, it allows us to understand why sexual education in schools is a primary obsession of this antimovement, going beyond the cruel literalness of the recent news about the Evangelical priest José Luis Linares Cerón, spokesperson of the “Don’t Mess with My Children” movement in Peru, whose daughter has accused him of committing sexual, psychological, and physical abuse over the course of ten years. But it also allows us to understand the Vatican’s maneuvers as it makes accusations about the “colonialism” of the term gender, as well as the tricks and turns of financial bodies as they attempt to reduce gender to quotas tied to imperialist policies.

Here we can see a second battle for which this text proves useful, right here and now. In Argentina, in the face of the ultra Right’s victory, progressive and leftist sectors continue dismissing gender issues as merely cultural concerns (another old polemic that remains relevant) or as a secondary or distracting issue. This coexists with a recognition of the importance of feminism by the ultra Right, as it situates us as the main enemy. But oddly, it is the political sectors closest to us who force us to become strategists of defeat and explain, accepting guilt, how we contribute to the triumph of the Right itself. It is a gesture that seems contradictory but is not: rather, it is a political paradox. On the one hand, the feminist movement is dismissed as disengaged from structural transformation (ultimately, it deals with “superficial” issues) and, on the other hand, it is blamed for the right-wing turn in society (we were too radical and too fast!). And this is done by our “allies.” At the same time, it is the ultra Right that takes feminism seriously and identifies us as a target of attack because it recognizes our capacity for transformation. Butler offers us clues for understanding this paradox through an analysis of how gender operates as a scapegoat in this double confrontation.

There is a third battle for which this book is strategic: as evidence that transfeminisms pose a struggle at the level of knowledges, pedagogies, and sensibilities that challenges anti-intellectualism and demonstrates a desire for theory as part of the political battle. I am interested in the connection between that desire for theory and the ultra Right’s attempts to steal from us certain terms that we historically associate with critical and emancipatory projects: they speak of violence in terms of insecurity, they speak of ideology through the notion of “gender ideology,” and they speak of structural changes through the notion of “structural adjustment.” Violence, ideology, and structure are three terms that point to an important conceptual dispute underway; these are problematics that feminist struggles have used to take stock of the multidimensional crisis of financial-extraction capitalism that wages war against certain populations and certain territories. In this sense, by saying that gender continues to cause discomfort in other genealogies, from anticolonial to antiracist ones (from María Lugones to Hortense Spillers), Butler points to the ambivalence of discomfort. That discomfort expresses itself as the very practice of political translation. I would like to argue that translation is a way of thinking about the politics of alliance in a transnational register. Translation operates as a form of reappropriating violence, ideology, and structure as those zones problematized by feminist, antiextractivist, and popular struggles in such a way as to produce transnational alliances. But there is also a warning here about its reactionary inversion: the alliances that so-called “trans-exclusionary feminism” makes with the Right itself.  Thus, political translation implies a dispute, body-to-body, over vocabularies and forms of political composition. This book is, therefore, a treatise on the passions of that multitudinous and complaining body that has made gender into an uncomfortable, multilingual, and relational glimmer-name of the worlds that we want to build.

Clare Hemmings

In the 1990s, when I was a graduate student, I turned to Judith Butler and to gender studies, desperate for a political account of the world that did not rely on reductive categories of sex and its racist and classist binary histories. That field, with all its complexities and fissures, has remained an uncertain home for the nearly thirty years I have been working in a UK gender studies environment. I committed myself to a collaborative project that has insisted on that field as necessarily antiracist, trans-inclusive, queer, feminist, and decolonial (in intent if not always in achievement), one that has had uneven institutional recognition in the face of the neoliberal dismantling of higher education and political shifts to the Right. How I now long for the pleasures of that unevenness, faced with an unprecedented level of aggression against gender studies and critical race studies. As Butler elucidates, the UK is currently a site of virulent anti-trans, as well as racist antimigrant, feeling and policy making, and those of us working there to preserve a public space where critical accounts of sex, gender, and race can be expressed without lawsuits, defamation, and harassment are depressed and exhausted. Add to this the last ten years of a UK public context that has used accusations of anti-Semitism to silence the Left both within the Labour Party and more recently to demonize anyone daring to critique the Israeli state and its obliterative military machine. It is a state of hopelessness.

I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to turn again to Butler in 2024 for hope, if I’m honest, but reading Who’s Afraid of Gender? gave me space to breathe and left me with a sense of stable reality in the face of what they describe so well as “the hallucinatory dimension of moral sadism” at the heart of antigender attacks. The book overall develops a strong psychosocial account of antigender movements as trading in the fear that accompanies more widespread political dis-ease and precarity, in the face of climate change, war mongering, reduced welfare programs, increased state security, and decreased job security. For Butler, what they describe as the “phantasm of gender” works to displace those existing existential and social threats onto the scapegoats – trans people, queer and feminist people, migrants and displaced people, racialized people (and people who are all these). That these scapegoats remain in fact the most vulnerable only serves to underline the importance of the fantasy of gender as violent and violating, allowing both displacement and confirmation of a tenuous nostalgia for a time and place of patriarchal authority that never was.[1] Gender is effective as this phantasm, Butler reminds us, because it is at the level of embodiment that we experience our most profound desires and disappointments.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? interrogates those fantasies for us across different sites: the Vatican’s perverse characterization of “gender ideology” as a challenge to the authority of God, as the devil itself; antigender activists’ paranoia that traditional kinship is about to collapse, irrevocably penetrating national security; the fear that “sex” is about to be obliterated in the face of even the most reasonable challenges to its immutable character.[2] In my view, the most significant of these fantasies is that of gender as a foreign object or import, an argument antigender movements make to position queer, trans, and feminist people as colonial agents imposing their own understandings with impunity. Butler rightly dispenses with this argument as not only disingenuous – the fantasy displaces the binary imposition of gender as a settler/colonial project onto decolonial queer feminists – but as one powerful technique through which national borders are reaffirmed.[3] In the process, the histories and terrifying present of settler colonialism are denied, and the very people – queer, nonbinary, trans, of color, Black, all of the above – who fall afoul of colonialism’s sexed whiteness then and now are held responsible for its “shameless forms of racial hatred.”  As such, Butler insists that the psychic life of antigender mobilizations must be thought of as a racist, antimigrant project.[4]

Butler will have submitted this book before the sustained war on Palestine by the Israeli government, with its military aim of obliteration. But I think they would agree that the reversal of the conditions of vulnerability, the weaponization of trauma, and the appeal to a “modernity” based in a shameless framing of Palestinians as uniquely homophobic and misogynist follow some similar logics. And for those of us interested in thinking about how to make our work robust in the face of ongoing atrocity and racist violence in so many parts of the world, violence that is often financially underwritten by the same states and religious organizations that (again shamelessly) lament the loss of humanitarian care when the tide starts to change, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an urgent read. It lays out how sex and gender are weaponized in the service of forms of violence that reverse the terms of actual lived subjection to support campaigns of obliteration without accountability.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'It is precisely in the risks of (failed) translation across sites of difference that solidarity – based in the imagination of a new grammar – can be forged.' --Clare Hemmings" quote="It is precisely in the risks of (failed) translation across sites of difference that solidarity – based in the imagination of a new grammar – can be forged." theme="style2"]

Butler acknowledges that “no one is imagining the future very well” but offers us some tools for shoring up that robustness from the complex histories of queer, antiracist feminism we inherit. They rightly emphasize that anti-trans feminisms should thus not be thought of as feminisms at all, insofar as they write out of history the complex attention gender studies has paid to all aspects of social inequality.[5] Butler insists too that a relevant feminism for the present must always attend to the racism at the heart of antigender aggression, precisely because of its fantasy of rewriting of colonial histories of sex.[6] Butler’s work is generous as always here, insisting that trans-inclusive and antiracist queer feminisms cannot afford to trade in our own trauma-underwritten fantasies in turn, where the horror or violence that seeks to decimate as well as describe us is thrown back as an understandable act of self-defense. Neither should a queer, trans-inclusive feminism take up an arrogant position of knowing best, with its attendant inattentive eyerolling: “the alternative to defamation [cannot be] mastery,” they remind us. Instead, it is precisely in the risks of (failed) translation across sites of difference that solidarity – based in the imagination of a new grammar – can be forged. But perhaps my favorite closing reflection is Butler’s acknowledgement that “we can live through perilous and vicious times only if there are those who do not let us fall away.” From the deconstructive brilliance of Gender Trouble to the political care of Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I want to say thank you for the thirty-five years of refusing to let us fall away.

[1] Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat carefully document the predictable ways that violence and harassment circulate on social media in Social Media and Hate.

[2] Sonia Correa’s work over many decades traces the obstructive role of Vatican in the context of the UN’s attention to women’s rights, particularly reproductive and sexual rights.

[3] Rahul Rao makes this point in his close theorisation of the Ugandan context.

[4] See Jana Cattien’s work for the importance of thinking of ”gender” not as deflecting but as carrying ”race.”

[5] See also Karine Espineira and Sam Bourcier’s “Transfeminism: Something Else, Somewhere Else” and Alyosxa Tudor’s “The Anti-Feminism of Anti-Trans Feminism.”

[6] This echoes the argument of the introduction to the Signs special issue on transnational antigender mobilizations.

Julia Serano

As a longtime trans activist, I used to feel like I had heard every possible expression of anti-trans prejudice: every bad joke and stereotype, the recurring claims that we are “delusional” or “deceiving” other people, and so on. But nothing in my twenty-plus years of experience prepared me for the anti-trans moral panic that has coalesced here in the US and elsewhere over the last few years. Despite trans people comprising less than 1 percent of the population, we are now routinely portrayed as an all-powerful cabal that has institutionally captured the media, health care, science, and the education system. Yet we are also (paradoxically) depicted as incredibly weak: trans people have supposedly been brainwashed by gender ideology, rendering us insensible to logic and facts; like zombies, our only purpose is to recruit and infect other people. Much of this moral panic centers on fearmongering over “social contagion” and “grooming,” which are essentially the same charge: both paint trans people as contagious and capable of contaminating otherwise pure and vulnerable children (who are often coded as straight, white, and female). These same fears of corruption animate the specter of the transgender sexual predator who preys on women in restrooms and other sex-segregated spaces (despite all evidence to the contrary).

[click_to_tweet tweet="'This moral panic centers on fearmongering over “social contagion” & “grooming”...: both paint trans people as contagious & capable of contaminating otherwise pure & vulnerable children (who are often coded as straight, white, & female).' --Julia Serano" quote="Much of this moral panic centers on fearmongering over “social contagion” and “grooming” ... : both paint trans people as contagious and capable of contaminating otherwise pure and vulnerable children (who are often coded as straight, white, and female)." theme="style2"]

I mostly encounter people who believe such things on social media. Sometimes I will scroll through their posts, and they are usually filled with anti-trans propaganda and disinformation, as though we consume a good portion of their waking thoughts. Some are “transvestigators” who are convinced that many cisgender celebrities and politicians are secretly trans. While I can understand why some individuals might feel uneasy about trans people (as we challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and social norms), I’ve had a difficult time wrapping my brain around how anyone could become so obsessed and irrationally paranoid about our existence.

In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler offers a conceptual framing that helps to make sense of this and related moral panics. Butler chronicles how “gender” (sometimes labeled “gender ideology” or “gender theory”) has become a pervasive phantasm across the globe: “a psychosocial phenomenon . . . where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” Here, “gender” serves as a catch-all term that represents the progress made by feminists and LGBTQIA+ activists in recent decades regarding gender equity, reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and legal recognition of gender and sexual minorities. But this conceptualization of gender is also somewhat amorphous and readily shaped to serve varied political interests: “Gender represents capitalism and gender is nothing but Marxism; gender is a libertarian construct and gender signals the new wave of totalitarianism; gender will corrupt the nation, like unwanted migrants, but also like imperialist powers. . . . The contradictory character of the phantasm allows it to contain whatever anxiety or fear that the anti-gender ideology wishes to stoke for its own purposes, without having to make any of it cohere.”

Butler traces how this “idea of a dangerous gender ideology” originated in the Catholic Church in the 1990s and how it has subsequently spread, taking on somewhat different forms, across various countries, cultures, religions, and political regimes. A few of the chapters specifically deal with how this phantasm plays out in US Republican politics and UK “gender critical” activism. Along the way, Butler dismantles many antigender talking points, including the notion that gender denies or exists in opposition to “natural” sex. Butler also highlights the antigender movement’s ties to authoritarianism, colonialism, and racism. Two examples of the latter they discuss are the ways in which this opposition to “gender” often goes hand in hand with “replacement theory” and notions of racial and ethnic purity and the many connections between the Republican Party’s recent anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti–critical race theory crusades.

The book’s most important contribution is the detailed chronicling of these interconnected antigender movements and Butler’s analysis of what’s driving them. Many of the arguments Butler makes in later chapters—discussing the ways in which both sex and gender are constructed, challenging a strict nature-versus-culture dichotomy, and refuting gender-critical mischaracterizations of trans people—are well executed, although readers who are already immersed in gender studies or LGBTQIA+ activism may be familiar with the ground they cover. But this is fine, as the book is also accessible to more general audiences who may not have been exposed to these ideas before. And given the proliferation of anti-trans/gender books and articles in recent years, it will undoubtedly be useful to have a book full of counterarguments to these misconceptions.

When the current anti-trans moral panic first began garnering momentum in the late 2010s, media and mainstream audiences tended to take claims about “social contagion” or that trans people represented a potential threat to cis women somewhat seriously. But now that the accusations have escalated to “grooming” and “sexualizing” children, accompanied by an onslaught of anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, censorship, and even terrorism, I get the sense that most people now see this phantasm for what it is. Hopefully, Who’s Afraid of Gender? will further this recognition and help readers connect the dots between these anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns, efforts to roll back gender equity and reproductive justice, and more general attacks against “wokeism,” diversity, and democracy.

Rafia Zakaria

In their remarkable new book, feminist theorist Judith Butler presents a sharp explication of how the “intensifying phantasmic force of gender” has become the target for all those who fear a world where constructed categories dissipate and expose their own unreality. For those in the antigender movement, even the thought of such a world, free as it would be from the dominance of colonial epistemology and compulsory heterosexuality, is unbearable and thus galvanizing.

Butler’s discussion of how Black women’s bodies made “women’s medicine” possible is particularly insightful because it reveals the connection between the trans-exclusionary and right-wing vitriol directed against the dissolution of gender categories and the upholding of the colonial epistemologies that undergird them.  In their chapter on the subject, Butler notes that it was the bodies of female Black slaves on which examinations were done. At the same time, Butler tells us that these women were “flesh, not women, since women were presumptively white, and they were not served by the medical treatments they made possible.” Gender, Butler explains, “arrives only with whiteness.” Black flesh exists only as an invisible, undifferentiated mass until reality and permissibility is bestowed upon it by white assessment and categorization.

This form of genital surveillance was also common in colonial India. One of the first laws that the British passed in the subcontinent was one that made all women subject to forced genital examinations. Those who did not submit faced imprisonment and criminal charges. Per Butler’s argument, this too can be seen as an expression of gender surveillance in which the truth of a woman being a woman had to be verified by colonial authorities. Also, as historian Durba Mitra points out in her book Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, body parts from Indian women were collected and stored for British doctors to study. Some parallels can be drawn between these acts of domination through the examination of genitalia then and legislation to allow genital examinations of minors in countries like Sweden now, under the purported umbrella of identifying cases of female genital cutting.

Butler’s genealogical examination of gender reaches into the past, but its probative value also lies in providing contemporary feminists tools to understand the present. The idea of “phantasmagoria” as a wildly obsessive force is an apt explication of the obsession with curbing reproductive choice. The pregnant person presents a riddle of liminality and a challenge to categorization in that it is impossible to delineate exactly where the person ends and the fetus begins. Saying life begins at conception is a literal effort to insist on the reality and naturalness of constructed categories by endowing them with artificial certainty that is then affirmed in law.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'Common cause is to be found in the brutality of imposed gender categories and ... such an imposition was (and is) an act of colonial dominance.' --Rafia Zakaria" quote="Common cause is to be found in the brutality of imposed gender categories and ... such an imposition was (and is) an act of colonial dominance." theme="style2"]

Finally, it is hopeful that Butler sees transnational feminism as a basis for solidarity against the antigender movement. Such solidarity depends on noting and affirming that “translation often alters the meaning of the term.” It also requires recognition that common cause is to be found in the brutality of imposed gender categories and that such an imposition was (and is) an act of colonial dominance. Butler’s work is an invaluable contribution to how the transnational, and particularly transnational feminism, can still exist without an imposed and requisite universal. It is also a valuable example of how the intersectionality of inequities faced by feminists is confronted by a mad mosaic of fear and desire for dominance that is the phantasmagoric antigender movement.

Judith Butler

I am grateful to Verónica Gago for laying out the strategic uses of Who’s Afraid of Gender? and in particular for showing us that the fears gathered by the term “gender” are generated in part by “the machine of insecurity that is neoliberalism.” She offers a useful way of reading by suggesting that if we map the targets of the antigender movement, we find a history of feminist struggles that are bringing about significant social transformation.  The feminism Gago has in mind, and the one she has helped to create, belongs to a transnational solidarity that is antiracist, anticolonial, and antiextractivist.  We agree that “these [are] struggles [that] have revealed interdependence” as both what is exploited and what we might affirm.  I also appreciate that Gago foregrounds the issue of translation, which is for her “the very practice of transnational alliance.”

Clare Hemmings reminds us that as much as the anti–gender ideology movement is global in reach, it affects different regions and countries in specific ways. In the UK, it is linked with antimigrant discourse and feeling. Hemmings draws attention to the phantasmatic dimension of antigender movements and rightly reminds us that “a relevant feminism for the present must always attend to the racism at the heart of antigender aggression, precisely because of its fantasy of rewriting of colonial histories of sex.” Anti-trans feminism betrays the multidimensional commitments of feminist theory and practice, including its vital solidarities.   As Hemmings points out, Who’s Afraid of Gender? was written before the genocidal attacks on Gaza began.  Hemmings’s remark is hopeful, however, as she sees in this book a resource “for those of us interested in thinking about how to make our work robust in the face of ongoing atrocity and racist violence in so many parts of the world, violence that is often financially underwritten by the same states and religious organizations that (again shamelessly) lament the loss of humanitarian care when the tide starts to change.”

Julia Serano’s intervention highlights the anti-trans moral panic that has consolidated in the United States, one that recruits followers by creating phantasms of trans people as impossibly powerful and dangerous.  It seems clear from Serano’s descriptions that anti-trans groups are themselves circulating propaganda and baseless dogma even as they misdescribe gender advocates as doing what they are actually doing. It is true that the antigender movement can be understood as a “moral panic,” but that suggests it is an episode rather than a restoration project.  I appreciate that Serano found useful the descriptions of how the antigender movement operates in various parts of the world. My aim was to make the book accessible, which means that those who are looking for detailed academic arguments or new theory may be disappointed. I seek not only to expose the basic claims of the antigender ideology movement as wrong and to suggest how to build a new counterimaginary. I also provide arguments against the notion that gender denies nature, sex, or the materiality of the body, or that it is antiscience.  A great deal of science, especially interactive models, confirm that the dualism between culture and biology is being rethought.

Rafia Zakaria’s intervention is most helpful, redirecting our attention to colonial India’s practices of forced genital examinations and thus linking that history of medical violence to the history of surgical violence against Black women in the US offered by C. Riley Snorton.  Several more histories of this kind continue to be told, showing again how the genealogy of gender cannot be told apart from the colonial and racist histories in which it is embedded.  The problem is not just that gender is imposed upon bodies but that gender is forcibly created through anti-Black and colonial practices that seek to control or destroy reproductive freedoms. Gender’s whiteness is produced through violent means.  Zakaria refers to “a mad mosaic of fear and desire for dominance”—a phrase I shall cite! I only wonder whether the eliminationist rhetoric directed against trans people and migrants in US politics also draws upon and reactivates colonial and racist histories as well.  If so, is domination the only form of power at issue? It is one thing to dominate a group and quite another to get rid of it.

Each of the interventions picks up on translation as necessary for transnational alliance. By “translation” is meant not just multilingualism but the difficult encounter with epistemic limits that also mean that “gender” can suppress other vocabularies.  The difference between gender produced by colonial powers and decolonial approaches to gender is important to underscore.

[click_to_tweet tweet="'The task is finally to produce a more powerful imagining of life, embodiment, and cohabitation, one that reformulates freedom, equality, and justice in ways that are—or should be—too desirable to refuse.' --Judith Butler" quote="The task is finally to produce a more powerful imagining of life, embodiment, and cohabitation, one that reformulates freedom, equality, and justice in ways that are—or should be—too desirable to refuse.  " theme="style2"]

The phantasms addressed by this book have besieged trans life, especially Black trans life, and are circulated by opponents who refuse argument, critical thought, and open inquiry. The task is finally to produce a more powerful imagining of life, embodiment, and cohabitation, one that reformulates freedom, equality, and justice in ways that are—or should be—too desirable to refuse.