From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Product Code: 9275
ISBN: 9780374608224
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Pages: 320
Published Date: 03/19/2024
Availability:In stock
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Price: $30.00

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by The Washington Post, Time, ELLE, Kirkus, Literary Hub, The Millions, Electric Literature, and them.

"A profoundly urgent intervention.” - Naomi Klein

"A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in re-imagining collective futurity.” - Claudia Rankine

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization - and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless - a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.


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"[A] trenchant polemic . . . Thoughtful and powerfully assured, this is an essential take on an ongoing political battle." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy. A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.” - Kirkus Reviews

“Only Judith Butler’s dazzling intellect and moral confidence could orient us inside the maze of projections, confessions, displacements, and co-optations that make up today’s wars over gender. It is the dream of a bygone, authoritarian masculinist power that unites the various fronts of this battle - and only solidarity between all who are in fascism’s crosshairs has a chance of saving us. A profoundly urgent intervention.” - Naomi Klein, author of Doppelgänger

“Judith Butler is the most important philosopher working in the United States today, and the one whose legacy is most likely to survive the test of time. Here, in clear, precise prose, and with devastatingly analytical precision, they dismantle the global attack on ‘Gender Ideology’, revealing it for what it is—an attack on democracy’s freedoms. ”—Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works

“Judith Butler has been brilliantly troubling the landscape of gender construction for over three decades. At a time when anti-Trans and anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric and ideology is creeping into every facet of our lives - from school boards and libraries to legislation and political campaigns - Who’s Afraid of Gender gives its reader a roadmap away from surprising oppositions within the progressive left. Their work calls for solidarity in the face of the weaponization of anti-gender ideology wielded by the political right. Butler makes us aware that there will be no freedom without gender freedom. A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in re-imagining collective futurity.” - Claudia Rankine, author of Just Us

“Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender is more than a corrective and antidote to this corrosive time and to the terrible conjoining of the far right, conservatives, and liberals over meaning and mattering made manifest in the phantasms of ‘gender.’ It is also - and urgently - a call and an invitation to ‘new coalitions and new imaginaries’ and ‘to help produce a world in which we can move and breathe and love without fear of violence.’ It is a call to reject ‘righteous sadism,’ to know the risk of making another world, and to act, anyway, collectively toward it.” - Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

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