The Phantasm of Gender - Judith Butler, Who’s afraid of gender? (London, Penguin, 2024, 307 p.)

I suspect that Judith Butler had Edward Albee’s play in mind when they chose the title of their latest book, Who’s afraid of gender? Albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? was probably named after the popular song, Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?, which the three little pigs sing in Walt Disney’s 1933 famous cartoon.“ The song,” writes Alison Hopwood, “is equivalent to whistling to keep your courage up, defying what you fear” [Hopwood 1978: 101].1 Substituting the big bad wolf with the feminist writer Virginia Woolf, Albee made the latter a representative of a“big bad (female) wolf,” namely an independent woman who wants to emasculate men and complicate the binary world of patriarchy, where things are xed and simple—good vs evil, order vs chaos, ruling males vs subaltern females. Like the big bad wolf and Virginia Wolf, gender too—in Butler’s story —is the personifcation of all that is unsettling and scary in today’s world. Gender has in fact become a phantasm, a ghost.