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Who’s Afraid of Gender? By Judith Butler. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 320 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25
There was a time when outlandish theories about gender were confined to the fringes of social-science faculties. Now such notions—and particularly the idea that sex is mutable—are debated everywhere, from kitchen tables and pubs to state legislatures, thanks to a few academics. Chief among them is Judith Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, known as “the godmother of queer theory”. As the revolution Butler helped start has recently met with more intellectual and political resistance, the author has written a new book in its defence.
Butler (who prefers to go by the pronoun “they”) shot to fame in academic circles with “Gender Trouble” (1990), a difficult book that some students read and others pretended they had. Drawing on ideas of feminist thinkers, Butler examined concepts of “sex” (the biological categories of male and female) and “gender” (the behaviours associated with those categories). Butler argued that gender is “performative” rather than defined by sex; terms such as “man” and “woman” were not helpful and should be reimagined. “Gender Trouble” has become part of the post-modern social-science canon.
Butler grew...