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Who’s afraid of Judith Butler? This special edition of Rosa’s reading club is dedicated to the work of American philosopher Judith Butler and will take place at DE SINGEL, following their talk on 27 September. The reading club will be led by Sarah Bracke, professor of sociology of gender and sexuality at the University of Amsterdam, who will help us engage with Judith Butler’s ideas.

Butler is best known for their work on gender, which has fundamentally changed thinking about gender since the early 1990s. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler not only questioned the distinction between sex and gender, which was of great importance to the women’s movement, but also developed a theory about the performativity of gender. Butler has since written more than twenty books on a wide range of topics, such as precariousness, war, Zionism and non-violence.

Together, we reconstruct the driving force behind Butler’s thinking on the basis of their most recent book, Who's Afraid of Gender (2024), which brings together several themes, taking the contemporary backlash against gender as its starting point. We also look back at one of their first articles on gender, in which Butler clarifies the affinity of their thinking with Simone De Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe (1949).