RaveSlateAn 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.
Alan Cumming
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt’s easy to see why he’s so popular: Cumming is delightful company, urbane, self-deprecating and mischievously funny, not above a dishy anecdote or a throwaway dirty pun ... With winning resilience and buoyancy, Cumming revisits a stretch of his young adult life book-ended by two marriages ... It’s a common phenomenon in show-business memoirs that after a performer finds fame, he suddenly has less to write about, splitting the book in half between a hardscrabble Horatio Alger tale and a contented catalog of successive triumphs. By telling his story in two separate volumes, Cumming has made that tonal shift feel less awkward. But the suspense that drove the narrative of Not My Father’s Son is mostly absent from Baggage. This book is less structured, an episodic and sometimes rambling collection of reflections on fame and self-discovery, with a modicum of gossip thrown in for good measure ... Cumming’s second marriage, to the American illustrator Grant Shaffer, is narrated only very briefly in the book’s final pages. Though Cumming has been a prominent figure in L.G.B.T.Q. activism since he came out as bisexual in 1998, the book de-emphasizes this angle, eliding that much-publicized revelation altogether. As a reader, I would have liked a more extended reflection on what it has meant to Cumming to see himself become a queer icon as the world changed around him ... Still, as he takes his leave of us in the epilogue, the 56-year-old Cumming remains the irresistible \'cheeky chappie\' who has survived horrific trauma to become a beloved show-business institution, and a perhaps unlikely fount of wisdom.
David Thomson
MixedThe Atlantic\"Thomson is at his best when he’s mining these hidden veins of [desire], noticing a detail in a familiar film that helps you see the movie in a new way ... It’s the rare straight man well past middle age who tries to radically change how he thinks about a subject so fundamental. There’s a nobility in that quest, even when, still a novice at queer theory, Thomson sometimes fumbles the lingo, appearing to conflate the trans experience, bisexuality, and even vaguely kinky straight behavior under the generously spreading umbrella of \'gay\' ... When he writes about the onscreen representation of female sexuality, Thomson seems less at ease and, tellingly, has less to say ... Still, many of his insights about the movies themselves shine ... But when it comes to the subject of offscreen, three-dimensional women and their exploitation by the Hollywood machine, Thomson’s evident good faith can’t save him from moments of tone-deafness painful enough to stir qualms ... Thomson’s struggle to fully grasp the first principle of the #MeToo movement—that women’s accounts of their experiences deserve, at long last, not to be drowned out by men’s voices—goes from awkward to enraging in a chapter near the end ... What this seductive yet at times repellent book never fully grapples with is the privilege required to grant yourself that innocence.\
