In late 2017, I read about an article about an academic with the startling headline, “Judith Butler discusses being burned in an effigy at Brazil protest”. It was my first introduction to the strength of feeling that the field of gender studies — and Butler — would soon come to evoke.
The 68-year-old American philosopher and academic (who prefers to use they/them pronouns) is best known for the idea that gender is performative — in other words, that it is not immutable, but something we are socialised into by a range of institutions and actions throughout our lives.
Depending on who you are speaking to, who Butler is can range from anywhere between a prophetic hero of progressivism to a satanic, woman-hating enabler of child abuse.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? is Butler’s first published work on the subject in more than a decade. In it they interrogate how we have arrived at today’s “gender wars” — a landscape in which gender is no longer a mundane box to be ticked on official forms, but has transformed into a “phantasm” onto which a multitude of modern panics are projected. Butler provides a host of troubling examples. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has labelled gender a “threat to national security” and refers to Europe as “Gayropa”. In 2015, Pope Francis compared gender theory to nuclear weapons, warning that it was an annihilating force contravening in contravention of the order of creation.
In many ways, the word no longer refers to anything we might meaningfully understand as gender. Recent US movements to keep “gender” out of the classroom treat the word as code for paedophilia, or a form of indoctrination that teaches young children to masturbate or become gay. Butler points out that this line of thinking, rife amongst US evangelical Christians, conveniently forgets about the long-standing and hideous history of sexual abuse within the Church.
Butler’s argument — that gender has been established by some as an existential threat, onto which fears about replacement, loss of patriarchal power, white supremacy and national purity are projected — is a compelling one for those already inclined towards those views.
But what of so-called “gender critical” feminists? Surely their fixation with gender cannot be born of a subconscious desire to reinstate an all-consuming patriarchy?
At times, Butler’s writing is frustratingly opaque
An entire chapter is dedicated to this paradox. Issue by issue, Butler picks apart what seems to be the stated aim of gender critical feminists — protecting the safety of biological women from men. If the question is about threat, Butler challenges gender critical feminists to question who is actually being harmed? And by whom? Taking the much-discussed issue of trans women in female prisons, they flip the question on its head. If securing women against rape is really the priority, would gender critical feminists not be campaigning for the removal of male prison guards, who are statistically far more likely to engage in sexual assault, than trans women?
I was hoping Butler might further interrogate the gender critical movement, as well as debunking its inconsistencies. Of course, it is true that for women whose lives have been shaped, stymied or destroyed by the very fact they are women (and I include myself in this category), there is an impulse to gatekeep the term.
But to me, it is obvious that this is a self-defeating exercise, which, if taken to its logical conclusion, results in a terrifyingly narrow definition of womanhood. There is not, and has never been, one version of womanhood. A woman cannot be defined by her reproductive capabilities – what of women who are infertile? – or her level of testosterone – what of women like Caster Semenya? – or whatever other biological goal post seems apt at the time. It is this same impulse that has historically excluded black women, or working class women, from stifling ideas of femininity.
At times, Butler’s writing is frustratingly opaque (the ink from my sociology degree is barely dry and I still had my dictionary tab open). So I do wonder at whom the book is aimed. But it is refreshing to see such a tribal issue interrogated with thoughtful research, as opposed to vicious fearmongering.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? is published by Allen Lane (£25)
