Not their best ... If only Butler had said less about the piddling quibbles of their small opponents and more about the soaring possibilities of gender itself.
If you begin Who’s Afraid of Gender? hoping the gender-neutral mother of queer theory has written a rousing polemic that rescues gender and sexuality from the culture wars...you might be disappointed ... Who’s Afraid of Gender? is unexpectedly tepid, and — for a subject that is obviously quite personal for Butler, their fans, their foes, and really all of us — written at a strange remove from the ways both the left and the right think and talk about gender and queerness on an everyday basis, online and off ... Ultimately does little to either advance our understanding of what we’re up against or give us the tools to combat it ... Prime real estate in the book, and much of Butler’s indignation, is reserved instead for the war in Ukraine and police violence and economic precarity and neoliberalism and, and, and… well, pretty much every other leftist concern. Again and again, Butler avoids taking hard stances on the specifics, and instead broadens out into a parodic level of existential worrying.
An analysis of contemporary political and cultural battles over the very topics that Butler’s early work brought into wider public discussion ... Butler’s methodical examination of this group’s self-contradicting claims sheds welcome light on the way fantasy, paranoia, and scapegoating can supplant rational argument when it comes to the particular issue of trans rights ... Butler makes a concerted effort to keep Who’s Afraid of Gender? accessible and jargon-free. It is, without question, a demanding read, but not because the author is obfuscating or showing off. Rather, the difficulty derives from the rigor of the thought itself, and the work of accompanying the movement of that thought brings its own kind of pleasure.
