Symposium Editors’ Introduction Who’s Afraid of Gender? by ButlerJudith. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024. 320 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780374608224.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
anti-gender" discourse has been increasingly mobilized in recent years as a potent element in far-right biopolitics with a global reach (Holvikivi, Holzberg, and Ojeda 2024;Graff and Korolczuk 2022;Bassi and LaFleur 2022; Fábián, Johnson, and Lazda 2021;Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019; Kottig, Bitzan, and Pető 2017;Kováts and Põim 2015).It provides a common vocabulary to help express a shared apprehension of the world with practical implications not only for gender rights, but also for education, reproductive rights, immigration policies, and indeed democracy itself (Stein 2023; Norris 2023; Montegary 2022; Lovenduski 2022; Santos and Geva 2022; Kuhar and Zobec 2017).Judith Butler's latest book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, emerges as a crucial intervention into this vehemently debated topic by one of the most prominent public intellectuals, political philosophers, and gender theorists of our time.The book examines the development of an "antigender movement" that seeks to mobilize wider fears and anxieties, including those conditioned by socioeconomic, cultural, and ecological concerns, in support of deeply reactionary politics.By framing the phantasm of "gender" as a "psychosocial phenomenon . . .where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions" (p.9), Butler's analysis provides a way of conceiving the "anti-gender movement" as a complex political project with far-reaching consequences.Who's Afraid of Gender?marks a new synthesis between two trends (or "phases," as more commonly referred to in the literature) in Butler's body of work, namely, gender theory, most remarkably in Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), and Undoing Gender (2004b), and (ethico-)political philosophy, exemplified in Precarious Life (2004a), Frames of War (2016), and The Force of Nonviolence (2020) (Chambers and Carver 2008; Rushing 2010; Schippers 2014; and Zaharijevic 2023).As Zaharijevic argues (2023), these two trends can be
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.076 | 0.064 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".