Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?

It is ironically regressive that Judith Butler, who, in writing Gender Trouble in 1990, has permanently changed the epistemological direction of western feminist and queer theories, would publish a book in 2024 titled Who's Afraid of Gender?If, by comparison, the new title sounds anachronistic, then that is the point Butler makes, rather passionately, often angrily, in their 1 new book: the world is sleepwalking to authoritarianism.Gender is the homogenous scapegoat, the political phantasm, deliberately instrumented to take the postmodern clock back to the time of a homogenous patriarchal order that never existed.Readers may pay particular attention to the dedication page and the note of acknowledgements before they delve into the book of 300-odd pages, divided into ten chapters plus an Introduction and a Conclusion.The dedication, "For the young people who still teach me", establishes the temporal tone of the book.68-year-old Judith Butler, whose esoteric and enigmatic writing style has given them the status of an impenetrable mystic, would now write for young people, the Generation Z and Alpha, who probably are more used to watching YouTube videos and listening to bitesize podcasts than to reading theoretical books.The Acknowledgement provides a loose context and the purpose of the book.Butler conceived the book's idea after an attack they encountered in So Paulo, Brazil, in 2017.Saved by two opposites in the scene, their partner, Wendy Brown, and a stranger young man, Butler became curious about questions of "spontaneous ethics" and "political solidarity" (289) and the book became forthcoming.