Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:
Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.
So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”
What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.
more here.