Who's Afraid of Gender?

powerful and incisive critique of meta gender politics of the 21st century. i buy phantasm as a framework for understanding reactionary anti feminist positions, with two qualifications: (1) to me it's indicative of how all of us do our thinking more via images, metaphors, genres and thus phantasms, rather than words, sentences and syllogisms - so some analysis of our phantasms on the left would be nice, (2) it's true that the anti-feminists don't engage with the work of the left, but how much do we on the left, beyond our best representatives like butler, truly understand the discontent of our counterparts?

and what about everyone standing nervously in the middle? this book ends with a passionate call to action but it's preaching to the choir using its own songsheets. butler is right, we're not operating in a world of discrete propositions and fair discourse. maybe we must hence more explicitly commit to the politics of collaboration at a time when the left is yet again splintering through purity tests.