Who’s Afraid of Gender? Quotes

“Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is rather: How has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“This refusal of gender critics to read the texts they oppose—or to learn how best to read them—makes sense only if reading is taken to be an uncritical exercise. And if an uncritical reading or reception of the texts they deem authoritative is what they defend, they more purely illustrate what is properly called an ideological or dogmatic position, that is, one that refuses questions, challenges, and a spirit of open inquiry. This attitude is part of the broader anti-intellectual trend marked by its hostility to all forms of critical thought.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Informed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute. Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate grounded, focused, and productive.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury – but a precondition of democratic life.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“The gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never fully be closed, which is why even those who happily embrace their sex assigned at birth still have to do performative work to embody that assignment in social life. Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal. Have I finally achieved the gender I have been seeking to become, or is becoming the name of the game, the temporality of gender itself?”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“The weaponization of this fearsome phantasm of “gender” is authoritarian at its core. Rolling back progressive legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the reactive moment in this scene. The project of restoring the world to a time before “gender” promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never have existed but that occupies the place of “history” or “nature”—an order that only a strong state can restore.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Coalitions do not require mutual love; they require only a shared insight that oppressive forces can be defeated by acting together and moving forward with difficult differences without insisting on their ultimate resolution.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Critique engages with problems and texts that matter to us in order to understand how and why they work, to let them live in thought and practice in new constellations, to question what we have taken for granted as a fixed presupposition of reality in order to affirm dynamic and living sense of our world.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Those who claim to know what place women should occupy in social and political life are adhering to a very specific theory of gender.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do). Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones to which you have arrived? Their definition is a form of effacement, and their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are, how you live, and what language comes closest to representing who you are. Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that let many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“We posit that it is the links between ‘gender’ modernity, colonialism and the development industry, its academic, value-neutral quality and its status as an isolated technical term that allow ‘gender’ to become a proxy for a wide range of social dissatisfactions.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Taking a stand against the anti-gender movement is done in the name of breathing and living free from the fear of violence. It is the beginning of the ethical vision we now require.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Ideology provides the terms by which we come to understand ourselves, but it also brings us into beings as social subjects.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“As Freud taught us about dreams, whatever is happening in phantasms such as these involves the condensation of a number of elements, and a displacement from what remains unseen or unnamed.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“The targeting of sexual and gender minorities as dangers to society, as exemplifying the most destructive force in the world, in order to strip them of their fundamental rights, protections, and freedoms, implicates the anti–gender ideology in fascism. As panic builds, full license is given to the state to negate the lives of those who have come to represent, through the syntax of the phantasm, a threat to the nation.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Consider the allegation that “gender”—whatever it is—puts the lives of children at risk. This is a powerful accusation. For some, as soon as the accusation is spoken, it becomes true, and children are not threatened with harm, but are actively being harmed. When that swift conclusion is reached, there is only one option: Stop the harm! Stamp out gender! The fear of children being”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“En Francia, en los últimos setenta años, unos trescientos treinta mil menores sufrieron abusos sexuales por parte de sacerdotes. ¿Por qué estos datos no aparecen en ninguna parte cuando se dice que la ideología de género conduce a la pedofilia? ¿Es acaso porque esa acusación borra toda responsabilidad por el daño causado a los niños al proyectarlo hacia otro lugar? ¿Acaso las descabelladas afirmaciones contra el «género» pretenden desviar la atención de las acusaciones reales y ampliamente documentadas contra la Iglesia?”
― Judith Butler, ¿Quién teme al género?

“It is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti–gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,” resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“Consider, then, the irony that the women most feared for having a penis may be among those people most disinterested in having one.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“It seems we are not in a public debate at all, precisely because there is no text in the room, no agreement on terms, and fear and hatred have flooded the landscape where critical thought should be thriving.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?