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Who's Afraid of Gender? Audiobook
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This program is read by the author.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Time, Elle, Kirkus, Literary Hub, The Millions, Electric Literature, and them.
"A profoundly urgent intervention.” —Naomi Klein
"A timely must-read for anyone actively invested in re-imagining collective futurity.” —Claudia Rankine
From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.
Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today. Global networks have formed “anti-gender ideology movements” that are dedicated to circulating a fantasy that gender is a dangerous, perhaps diabolical, threat to families, local cultures, civilization—and even “man” himself. Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, this movement has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their rights to pursue a life without fear of violence.
The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new audiobook, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.
An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless—an audiobook whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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“Taking you by the hand and leading you through the phantasms, projections, inversions, and fascist passions of a world in economic and political turmoil, this book is remarkably empathetic towards those whose gruesome rights-stripping endeavors and moral panics it exhibits. Who’s Afraid of Gender? combines authority and humility, humor 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, for example. Bravo. I am grateful and heartened that Judith Butler has so comprehensively assessed the scene and thrown down this antifascist gauntlet. Few could approach the task of an agnotology of present-day anti-genderism with such patient grace.
— Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family
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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 -
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. Here they show how anti-trans and anti-queer rhetoric are on rapid rise from global and domestic Nationalists, the Catholic Church and TERFS. And that these divergent groups all root their attacks in false accusations of harm, when they are the ones holding the power. 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
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About Judith Butler
Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Trouble, The Psychic Life of Power, Excitable Speech, Bodies That Matter, and Frames of War.