Judith Butler’s concept of the “phantasm” of gender as a way to understand the outrage directed at the women competing in Olympic boxing

While I was in the United States last month, I picked up Judith Butler's "Who's Afraid of Gender?" (2024). By now, I have read fifty-plus pages of it. As I expected, Butler uses some psychonanalytic terminology (which I am very skeptical about). But their identification of the term "gender" as a "phantasm" that "has to gather up a wide range of fears and anxieties – no matter how they contradict one another – package them into a single bundle, and subsume them under a single name." This week, I have found the concept of the phantasm useful in understanding the incoherent outrage directed at Olympic boxers Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu-Ting (Taiwan). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 August 2024)