Judith Butler’s Sophistry

Who’s Afraid of Gender?
by judith butler
farrar, straus and giroux, 320 pages, $30

Judith Butler’s status in the world of gender studies is nothing short of legendary. If philosophy can be considered a series of footnotes to Plato, gender studies is a series of footnotes to Butler. Her first book, Gender Trouble, hit the scene in 1990 and became a feminist classic, reshaping the conversation about gender in the academy and, arguably, the wider society. Though written in dense theoretical prose, Gender Trouble was nonetheless original, internally coherent, and interesting to read. Butler’s new missive Who’s Afraid of Gender? is, sadly, none of those things.

In this latest effort, Butler abdicates the role of theorist for that of armchair psychoanalyst. Much of the book is spent on a sweeping, straw-manned account of what she calls “the anti-gender movement”—in other words, the sundry voices who, for varying reasons, oppose the deconstruction of sex as a stable, objective reality. She condenses these diverse critics into one composite antagonist, a monstrous chimera rather like Dante’s three-faced Satan, but adorned instead with the visages of Pope Francis, Donald Trump, and J. K. Rowling.

Butler teases the prospect of actual argument—“We could, of course, provide arguments about why looking at gender this way is wrong”; “I could offer a single and persuasive account of gender”—but refrains, opting instead for amateur psychologizing. The anti-gender movement, she claims, is not motivated by reason, nor is it responding to an actual threat. Rather, it has created a sort of fantasy target, a site of collective fears and anxieties with little connection to reality.

Any reader with passing knowledge of the perspectives Butler disputes will recognize her accounts as caricatures. Admittedly, I am not the reader she has in mind. In fact, her book seems to preclude the possibility that someone like me could exist: a Catholic feminist well versed in gender and trans theory who has engaged thoughtfully with those ideas and has some good-faith objections. Her ideal reader is someone who is primed to accept her sweeping statements without checking the footnotes, whose anxieties will be stoked by her hyperbolic portrayal.

Those who do follow the footnotes will find a broad spectrum of scholarly blunders, including—as MIT philosopher Alex Byrne ­discovered—two sentences plagiarized from The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science. Butler’s lesser but more pervasive academic misdeed is a reliance on highly biased, non-scholarly ­sources. Her opening jab at Pope Francis, for example, cites not a magisterial text, or even one of his infamous airplane interviews, but a clickbait piece from The Daily Beast. Even when she engages with scholarly, peer-reviewed content, she retains a narrow field of vision. Her primary references exemplifying the Catholic perspective, for example, are articles with title phrases like “the Vatican’s anathematization of gender” and “the Vatican’s War on ‘gender ideology’”—fair-minded accounts of the Catholic viewpoint, I’m sure.

On one of the rare occasions when Butler cites a primary source from outside the echo chamber, she blatantly misrepresents what the source actually states. In the chapter “Vatican Views,” Butler asserts that “according to the Vatican, the sexual division of labor is to be found in the nature of sex: women are to do domestic work and men are to undertake action in paid employment and public life.” This pronouncement directly follows the citation of a letter from then-­Cardinal Ratzinger, which, while praising women’s influence in the domestic sphere, states clearly that “women should be present in the world of work” and “have access to positions of responsibility which allow them to inspire the policies of nations.” Did Butler even read the document she chose to cite? Or did she simply fail to understand it? Or did she read, understand, and then choose to misrepresent it?

In his dialogue The Sophist, Plato describes sophistry as the imitative art of reasoning, a performative mimicry of actual argumentation. Attempting to trace the argument of the sophist is like trying to grasp a fish with one’s hands; untethered to truth, the sophist’s argument wriggles away, darting among different currents, resisting a traceable, contestable arc.

Butler is unable to counter her opponents’ views effectively because she does not even try to represent them fairly. In the few moments when she descends from the shrink’s chair to perform the gestures of argumentation, she responds to arguments that no one is actually making. Most of the time, however, she is content to dismiss an opposing viewpoint as the manifestation of an irrational phobia.

Perhaps the most entertaining instance of this strategy is a bizarre, multipage polemic against the “phantasm of penis.” Butler, channeling her inner Men’s Rights Activist, dismisses concerns over women’s safety and single-sex ­spaces as “a full-blown panic, a phantasmatic reduction of men not only to their penises, but to attacking penises.”

Amid all the fearmongering and sleight of hand, it’s easy to miss the only interesting aspect of this slapdash book: Butler’s quiet disavowal of her influential early work. Gender, Butler claimed in Gender Trouble, is a socially compelled performance that creates the illusion of a gendered essence. There is no real, abiding, gendered self behind the performing self, no authentic inner truth being externalized. Gender is wholly constructed—not an expression of an internal truth, but an oppressive imposition of social norms. “Gender is not a fact,” she wrote then; there is no “‘essence’ that gender ­expresses or externalizes.” Rather, gender is “a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.” The gendered identities purportedly being expressed through performative acts “are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs” (emphasis Butler’s).

Late-stage Butler recants this view. The “performative theory” of Gender Trouble, she writes, “seems questionable” in the face of “trans and materialist criticisms.” Butler now endorses a view described as “co-construction,” wherein the “material and social contributions are intertwined in the production of the gendered body.” This seems, at first glance, like a reasonable nature-and-nurture view, but for Butler the materiality of the body matters only in terms of the foods ingested, the quality of air breathed—not in its objective sexual structure. The digestive and respiratory systems are granted an intrinsic integrity that matters for human flourishing—but the ­reproductive system is not. Sex is a social “assignment,” imposed at birth; it is therefore mutable and can be self-reassigned. When it comes to sexual difference, then, Butler remains an extreme ­constructionist.

When it comes to the gendered self, however, Butler veers into a subjectivist essentialism in order to accommodate trans narratives. Trans identity is an “individual truth,” she writes, and when “one is called male when one is a woman,” the misnomer is an “effacement of what one is,” “a modification of ­reality.” In these moments, Butler defines gender not as a construct but as a self-perceived reality—a direct contradiction of what she claimed in Gender Trouble.

Elsewhere in the book, Butler reverts to her old habits, contending that gender “is a much larger term” that can’t be reduced to a “deeply held sense of self.” Gender is a “form of power,” she writes, that “saturates how we see, feel, and sense ourselves” and provides the “classificatory schemes from which we draw when seeking to understand gender identity.” This is her attempt to thread the needle, to endorse simultaneously gender as an external construct of social power and gender as an inner truth.

In the end, Butler’s work is marked by the same equivocation that permeates contemporary gender discourse. “Gender” has become a term with no clear referent, and not, as Butler tries to claim, because of her opponents’ phantasmic anxieties. Gender’s equivocality is embedded in Butler’s own account, which reproduces the linguistic confusions that prevail within gender scholarship and activism.

Butler ends the book by advocating for a kind of gender libertarianism. Some see gender as binary; some want to dismantle the binary; others simply want to live beyond it, finding “new lexicons”: All of these, Butler contends, are “legitimate positions” and should be endorsed “radically and without qualification.”

Butler says she does not want to “impose” a “norm” on gender: We should simply accept people’s experience at face value. Yet Butler also chides J. K. Rowling for appealing to her own experience of ­sexual assault to explain her concerns about women’s safety. Here Butler pivots, contending that Rowling’s lived experience cannot be accepted uncritically, lest “the subjective balloon into the universal without checking in with other perspectives or responding thoroughly to reasonable questions.” This is quite rich, one might say, coming from the pen of someone who would mandate the unquestioning validation of all subjective claims to sex and gender.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? attempts to redefine “gender” so that it excludes nothing. But a category that excludes nothing also names nothing; it is literally meaningless. This unnaming of sexual difference, in culture and in law, is precisely what has provoked the diverse and global pushback against gender­ ­ideology.

Thus Butler, who claims that her opponents are in the grip of an irrational fever dream, in fact vindicates them. In the first sentence of the book, she asks, with feigned naivete: “Why would anyone be afraid of gender?” Yet the book ends by warning her opponents that they should be alarmed: “Those who should be most enraged by my argument are those who believe that the gender binary is mandated by a version of natural law. . . . They have a great deal to lose, and they should start the process of mourning.” With this admonition, Butler guts the book’s central ­thesis that her opponents have conjured a “phantom that they take to be real even as it has emerged, we might say, from their own brains.” The anti-gender phantasm, it turns out, is not so phantasmic after all.

On the whole, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an unoriginal, disappointing read. Despite my philosophical disagreements with Butler, I have hitherto respected her as an intellectual and found, in her early writings, a useful sparring partner. But there is little of substance to grapple with here. Butler bemoans how American public discourse has become a “phantasmatic scene,” in which “fear and hatred have flooded the landscape where critical thought should be thriving.” I agree. But instead of resisting those corrosive dynamics, Butler has written a book that exemplifies them. Who’s Afraid of Gender? does not offer a meaningful contribution to cultural debates about gender, but rather demonstrates how polarized and feverish those debates have become, how thoroughly the arts of performative sophistry have supplanted actual argument.

If this book is not meant to propose a cohesive theory of gender, or to represent and refute her opponents, what is its true purpose? Perhaps, more than anything, it is a display of tribal allegiance amid a precarious scene in which one false step can turn the mob against you. Butler seems careful to avoid offering anything too novel here. Instead she hides behind the ideas of others, while reassuring her reader that she disdains all the right people, uses all the right terms, and has modulated her former theories to align with current dogmas. This means abandoning anything ­resembling a coherent account of gender. Perhaps, though, this failure will ensure the book’s success. As Butler herself notes: “The more contradictory the movement, the more influential its ­discourse.”

Abigail Favale is Professor of the Practice in Theology and Literature at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.

Image by Jreberlein licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.