Who's Afraid of Gender?

Join us at Dia Chelsea for the official New York launch of Judith Butler’s much-anticipated new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

In the 1990s, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble revolutionized how we understand sexuality, gender, and the performative natures of identity. Across the decades since, Butler has become one of our most trenchant and iconic public intellectuals—a thinker who has made countless timely and urgent interventions on questions of violence and peace, language and war, precarity and difference. Now, in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler returns to the topic that made their name, to illuminate how anxiety over gender—and “anti-gender ideology movements”—animates reactionary politics and rising fascism worldwide.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, trans-exclusionary feminists, and others. In Butler’s vital new book, they explore the concrete ways that the anti-gender movement, operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

This special launch event is co-presented by Pioneer Works and Dia Art Foundation and will feature a conversation between Butler and Jack Halberstam.

Books will also be for sale at the event, which will feature a book signing with Butler.

Judith Butler’s many books include Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, Excitable Speech, and The Force of Non-Violence. The recipient of numerous academic honors, Butler has also published editorials and reviews in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Nation, Time Magazine, the London Review of Books, and in a wide range of journals, newspapers, radio and podcast programs around the world. They live in Berkeley. Who’s Afraid of Gender? is out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jack Halberstam is a professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University, and the author of books including include Female Masculinity, In A Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure, and, most recently, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness called Unworlding: Trans and Queer Anarchitectures and a Theory of Nothing.

This program is part of PW Broadcast's Author Talks, a series highlighting authors and thinkers across disciplines.

Pioneer Works Broadcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.