Who's Afraid of Gender?

"One of our foremost thinkers returns with an essential polemic on gender, an urgent front line of the culture wars. . . . With masterful analysis of where we've been and an inspiring vision for where we must go next, this book resounds like an impassioned depth charge." --Esquire

"A cogent and deeply thoughtful case against the right's attempts to limit ideas of gender to male and female, offering philosophical and historical evidence to support a fluid system in which all people might present authentically." --The Los Angeles Times

"The most accessible of [Butler's] books so far, an intervention meant for a wide audience. . . . Because Butler is a human rights activist, as well as a theorist, the urgent point conveyed by this book is the same as it is in all their work: why are so many people seemingly happy to give away their power to increasingly authoritarian forces? And why are they so confident that this power will never be used against them?" --The Guardian

"[Who's Afraid of Gender?] offers thoughtful arguments placed within larger sociopolitical movements, showing why the modern conception of gender deserves . . . a rigorous examination." --The New York Times

"Urgent. . . . Butler's invitation . . . is to really think, deeply and perhaps differently, about gender . . . A timely, important book." --Winnipeg Free Press

"An analysis of . . . the right of women and all queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people to live freely and safely in the world. . . . Butler has gone from a star in the world of academia to that rare thing: a genuine public intellectual, one whose goal is not to restrict their ideas to an academic in-group, but to bring them to the world and, perhaps, to change it."--Slate

"Judith Butler is a much-needed balm to counter the right wing's ever-escalating wave trans panic . . . incisive and vital." --Harper's Bazaar

"In [Who's Afraid of Gender?], Butler argues for ambitious coalition building across the left, unifying opposition to unbridled capitalism with support for the kinds of freedoms human beings need to thrive: gender freedom, freedom from racism, freedom from colonial violence. . . . For a sense of how a new world might feel, what it can offer people in a dark and precarious time, we . . . turn to the longstanding work of Judith Butler." --The New Republic

"Groundbreaking. . . . Butler's latest work explores how fear and discomfort around [gender] is fueling a global rise in reactionary politics--and offers solutions to combat the growing intolerance of individual differences." --W Magazine
"[Butler] interrogates 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. . . . It is refreshing to see such a tribal issue interrogated with thoughtful research, as opposed to vicious fearmongering." --The Standard

"Vital. . . . An urgent counter to trans panic. . . . Butler's latest intervention . . . [draws] attention to the ways that the issue of gender can bring people together instead of driving them apart." --iNews

"Urgent . . . necessary. . . . Butler's thoughtful and compassionate work . . . is a welcome slave in the face of everything we're up against." --Autostraddle
"A clarifying exploration of how we got here and a clarion call for different, less fearful, less cramped ways of thinking about the world. With their signature critical focus on what we think of as 'natural' and 'artificial,' Butler pins down the history behind the contemporary cultural battle over gender, exploring how gender fear markets itself as protection, crusade, and panacea--and why it won't cure anything." --Dazed

"Butler demonstrates the ways 'gender ideology' critics invert, externalize, and project the very harms they claim "gender ideologists" pose. . . . What we should really be afraid of, Butler suggests, is a conservative social order that severely restricts the freedoms of those who are already its most vulnerable. . . . [Who's Afraid of Gender?] imagines a shared future [where] we can 'emerge into a world committed to cohabitation and equality across difference.'" --The Conversation

"The urgency of Butler's subject is evident at the level of tone and form. Largely free of specialized language or complicated syn­tax, it is the most accessible book they have published . . . Butler foregoes conventions of schol­arly engagement and avoids detours into specialized debates for the sake of a clear, consistent appeal: to create a world in which everyone can live, breathe, move, and love without fear of discrim­ination and violence." --The Yale Review

"An accessible and erudite study that aims to link the struggle for gender rights with the wider critique of neoliberal capitalism. . . . [Who's Afraid of Gender? is] an excellent clarion call for a fresh clear-sightedness where unfortunately, at the moment, division and confusion prevails." --Morning Star

"Essential. . . . Butler encourages collectivity, imagination, and bravery in the continued fight for equality and justice." --Ms. Magazine

"A fierce critique of the right and its systematic attacks on current notions of gender." --Sydney Morning Herald

"[Butler's] most accessible work to date. . . . The book is animated . . . by moral tenacity, what the AIDS historian Sarah Schulman has identified as the common denominator among changemakers: 'an inability to sit out a historical cataclysm.' --The Provincetown Independent

"A brilliant writer and thinker, Butler . . . offers a long-needed text clarifying confusion by design . . . Their newest offering is urgent, returning breathable air into a toxic cloud . . . The result is exhilarating and life-changing." --Booklist (starred review)

"[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's Who's Afraid of Gender? is more than a corrective and an 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 phantasm 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

"At a time when anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric and ideology are 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 road map away from surprising opposition within the progressive left. Judith Butler makes us aware that there will be no freedom without gender freedom. A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in reimagining collective futurity." --Claudia Rankine, author of Just Us

"Who's Afraid of Gender? combines authority and humility, humour and horror, psychosocial inquiry and active political commitment, while also serving as an accessible primer on key debates in queer theory and gender studies around 'nature/culture,' performativity, Blackness, and decolonial approaches. I am grateful and heartened that Judith Butler has so comprehensively assessed the scene and thrown down this antifascist gauntlet." --Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family

"Judith Butler's big brain and big heart have consistently made other people's lives more possible by grappling with and exposing how authoritarian ideas work. By answering the question 'Who is out to destroy whom?' Butler dissects the distorted claim that expanding gender systems 'hurts' people who identify with the status quo. Butler turns these manipulative arguments on their heads, revealing the trope of perpetrators claiming victimhood as central to anti-trans politics. A useful, helpful, and hopeful book." --Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

"The global war against so-called gender ideology is one of the most politcally consequential and psychically intriguing phenomena of our present moment. Underneath it, Judith Butler argues in this powerful new book, lies a yearning for the restoration of a mythic patriarchal order in the face of mounting existential despair. As ever, Butler offers us a compelling diagnosis of the anxieties, fears, and fantasties that structure our political present, pointing us toward both its darkest dimensions and its possible undoing." --Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

"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

"Explaining carefully and critically the ways in which the specter of 'gender' contains all sorts of reactionary fears, Judith Butler demonstrates how global the 'anti-gender' countermovement is, how it functions, and how resisting it involves a better future for us all." --Shon Faye, author of The Transgender Issue