The gender phantasm
Judith Butler seeks to understand how and why the word gender has taken on such apocalyptic proportions, including among Christians.
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
On April 8, the Vatican released the declaration Dignitas Infinita. The statement outlines “grave violations of human dignity” in the world today: poverty, war, human trafficking, violence against women. It then lists, as violations on the same level, “gender theory” and “sex change.” The “ideology” of gender, the Vatican warns, is “extremely dangerous,” a “concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God.” Ye shall be as gods: the serpent’s whisper, coiled around the heart of humanity, font of sin and death.
It’s not just the Vatican that’s haunted by the specter of gender. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has described the war in Ukraine as a “screen in front of our eyes” distracting us from “the issue of gender and migration.” Italian prime minister Giorgio Meloni has characterized “gender ideology” as “an abyss of death” threatening to swallow up “our civilization.” Donald Trump has warned that “the cult of gender ideology” is “tearing down America.”
Who’s Afraid of Gender?—the newest book by Judith Butler—seeks to understand how and why the word gender came to mean so much more than just gender and how it took on such apocalyptic proportions. “Gender,” Butler says, functions as a “phantasm.” This means it does a kind of psychic and communal work. It gathers together a host of incoherent desires and anxieties, wishes and fears, attractions and revulsions, and organizes them into a single structure that is experienced as coherent and manageable.
