Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Honestly, I hate postmodernist academic language. Its completely uneccessary, elitist, and designed to enrage and obfuscate. Its edgelord stuff for the educated. It covers up lack up knowledge or meaning with difficult language, meaning that most of us have to read and reread each sentence, trying to tease out meaning and understand what the writer is saying. If you don't understand it, you assume that you aren't clever enough. But there is no need to write like this, its just showing off. Very few concepts require impenetrable language, and the struggle with most of those concepts is making it accessible. Only a handful of humanities subjects aim for inaccessibility and they all have one thing in common - the requirement that the show more subject is not studied too closely. I spent two nights reading this book, got most of the way through chapter one, and then tossed it away. The problems are twofold. Firstly, content. Big claims require big evidence, and Butler makes lots of big claims but provides no evidence whatsoever (unless this is done later on). Whats more, the claims are made in a way that enables the author to deny that they are claims, rather they could be rhetorical statements, philosopher's questions. But claims they are, and there were three main claims I disagreed with: that gender is completely disconnected from biological sex and always has been; that feminist philosophy is actually anti-feminist because it doesn't realise this and in fact is evil and stupid because by insisting that gender is a cultural construction applied to people perceived to be of one or other sex it actually creates an oppressive gender role for women; and that there is actually no such thing as biological sex. The third of these is particularly interesting because I had a conversation with a friend a while back where I said that those of our comrades who kept saying things like biological sex isn't real were a great recruiting ground for the far right, and was told that no-one said biological sex wasn't real and that this was a terf meme that told lies about us. But here we are. So, because of the second bit problem with this book, I tossed it aside. The second big problem is that it is unreadably difficult unless you're a big brain. If it had been easier to read I would have carried on reading it to learn if any of these claims are taken back, amended, or evidence provided. Perhaps anyone reading this review could let me know if they care enough. Life is too short to read difficult nonsense. Perhaps I need a beginner's guide! show less

'Gender Trouble' is an extremely thought-provoking, dense, and erudite book. In it, Butler expounds the idea of gender as something performed, rather than an innate and unchangeable quality. She also emphasises that the often-assumed differentiation of gender as social construction and sex as biological is both deeply problematic and vastly oversimplified. The exploration and critique of compulsory heterosexuality is likewise excellent.

That said, 'Gender Trouble' is a challenging book to read. The central eighty or so pages took me a disproportionate amount of time to get through, as they deal with complicated and seemingly esoteric psychoanalytic theory. If I hadn't read [b:Introducing Lacan|75488|Introducing Lacan (Introducing)|Darian show more Leader|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390363963s/75488.jpg|73024], I wouldn't have understood any of it as a lot of Lacanian terms are used, such as the Phallus, signifiers, paternal law, and jouissance. As it is, please don't ask me for a precise point-by-point summary. From what I understand, Freud, Lacan, and other theorists presuppose a gender binary, based on taboos against homosexuality and incest. Quite apart from the seeming absurdity of such theory ever being universally applicable, this approach invites much criticism on feminist grounds. For example, characterising lesbianism as psychosis and maternity as a product of repressed homosexual desire just seems absurd, not to mention offensive. (Personally, the more I read of psychoanalytic theory the more strongly it seems to take on the quality of fiction. Moreover, I refuse to believe that sexual desire is the catalyst for so much of the personality.)

The commentary on intersectional feminism toward the end of the book was, I think, the most practical part. This I definitely found helpful as context for debates I've come across. It is impressive, actually, how Butler segues smoothly from the most arcane of theoretical analyses to pragmatic political commentary. Even if psychoanalytic theory leaves you cold, this book is still well worth reading for its dissection of how we think about gender, sex, and sexuality. It is dense with ideas, which Butler articulates effectively. You're unlikely to find a more thorough deconstruction of the gender binary anywhere. As with any book that discusses sexuality, I wish that it mentioned asexuality, but never mind. show less

El género en disputa, obra fundadora de la llamada teoría queer y a la vez emblemática de los estudios de género Cómo se conocen hoy en día, es un volumen indispensable para comprender la teoría feminista actual: constituye una lúcida crítica la idea esencialista dejé las identidades de género son inmutables encuentran su arraigo en la naturaleza, en el cuerpo o en una heterosexualidad normativa y obligatoria. Libro interdisciplinario que se inscribe simultáneamente en la filosofía, la antropología, la teoría literaria y el psicoanálisis, este texto es deudor de un prolongado acercamiento del autor al feminismo teórico, a los debates sobre el carácter socialmente construido del género, al psicoanálisis, a los show more estudios Pioneros sobre el travestismo, y también a su activa participación en movimientos Defensores de la diversidad sexual. así, con un pie en la academia y otro en la militancia, apoyada de la lectura de autores como Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Simone de beauvoir, Claude Levi-Strauss, Luce Irigaray, Julia kristeva, Monique Wittiig, y Michael Foucault, Butler ofrece aquí una teoría original, polémica y desde luego subversiva, responsable ella misma de más de una disputa. show less

Ha! I feel like I've been reluctantly dragging my feet towards this book for years. I approached it with a heavy heart and a sense of duty. Having gotten the impression that it had destroyed everything I loved (or tried), I thought I had an obligation to hold my nose and research the enemy. I thought it would be pedantic, humorless and polemical. I never thought it would be so much fun! The night I started it I was up until three in the morning reading it, then started again as soon as I woke up and was late to work. Turns out she has a sense of humor AND a sense of style. I felt like I had been living in the joke for years and now here was the punchline. But, sadly, for all the fun, I still didn't leave the book fully convinced.

For show more one thing, it is so funny to start here, without having read, oh, basically any Derrida, Lacan or Foucault, for starters, and only the littlest bit of Freud. Now that I've gotten a glimpse of all the fun they've been having I'm inclined to check them out as well, and when I do, it will already be through Gender Trouble. So, bam, point for Judith Butler! Way to turn the discourse in your favor. Oh, but that was also part of what raised my suspicion, because I got the impression that she was playing pretty fast and loose, and while running a whirl of words displacing received ideas of meaning and authority, she was also consolidating her own authoritative power! Apparently in spite of herself, but how could that be read other than a little disingenuously? At one of my favorite points, referring to an argument that she made she starts "I have argued" and then tries to excuse this seeming exertion of the subjective self with the following parenthetical: "('I' deploy the grammar that governs the genre of the philosophical conclusion, but note that it is the grammar itself that deploys and enables this 'I,' even as the 'I' that insists itself here repeats, redeploys, and-as the critics will determine-contests the philosophical grammar by which it is both enabled and restricted.)..." Come on, really? Really?? To me this gives a wonderful sort of characterization, like something someone would say in a novel. I love the absurdity and how, it is in trying to disavow her own self-hood that she gives such a human sense of it in the anxiety and frustration of the tone!

So here is the other thing: I am so all for her project to the extent that her project is to expand "the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality." Subversive bodliy acts sure are fun, aren't they? But in order to do that is it really necessary to dismiss any notion of interiority or a pre-discursive or non-discursive self? I hope not, because I'm fond of it. Here is a quote from a poem I just read by Suzanne Gardinier: "If not this what are you touching then/Inside me all night If not my soul."

Particularly when she goes to Nietzsche, I'm troubled: "The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche's claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that 'there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming;
"the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything.' In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results." If one is really to take as an assumption that there is no being, the corollary here seems entirely superfluous. Of course that being has no gender if it doesn't exist! It is like the house has already been knocked down and we are swinging at the empty air. Rather than getting more radical, this seems to be working backwards.

There is something suspect about the way in which she is seeming to reject the notion of authenticity, but at the same time seems to be operating under the assumption that a more liberated (and therefore more authentic!) form of gender understanding would be possible. She surely succumbs to her own romanticisms, and I'm glad she does, but I just wish she would be more out with it. I found something sweet in this: "Genders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of those attributes, however, gender can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible."

I'm glad this book exists. Reading it I really was struck by how much it's shaped the discourse I've been raised in, and to my advantage. I was glad that it played more than I expected, but I wish it had played more than it did because what else is the point of living in a phantasm? show less

In my teenage years, I reared myself on a vulgarised sort of Butlerian philosophy (through the mediums of Tumblr, the DFTBA-sphere, and /b/ "trap threads"), specifically the untwining of sex, gender, behavior, and sexuality. It's nice to come full circle in a way.
By the table of contents, I was expecting a sort of rote laundry list of french writers, but a few things allow me to love this more than if it were just a glorified bibliography. For one, Butler's powers of synthesis are very much to be respected, allowing her to weave a very nice abstraft narrative through various theories of gender. She also has a great sense of purple theorizing, and it's easy to get caught up in her strings of words. Last, I feel a fondness for the show more experience described and suggested in this book, having lived through a lot of it in some way or other. show less

Okay so! Some critiques of this book are valid--Butler's engagement with people of color, for example, is extremely minimal, something she acknowledges in the preface to the edition I read. And sure, sometimes it took me a long time to get through certain parts of the text, primarily because I'm not as well-read in psychoanalysis as I might otherwise be when approaching Butler's arguments. But I really thought this was an intense and frankly valuable engagement in the question of gender and the problem it poses feminism. I think there are things to be hashed out, for sure, but the fact that I'm left chewing on her ideas about repetition and the possibilities for agency connected to stepping out of that repetition means frankly the book show more did what it was supposed to.

So I definitely recommend this if this question is something you're interested in thinking about, and if you are okay with engaging with Butler on this level. Otherwise I guess you can read Susan Stryker's introduction to the Transgender Studies Reader, because she does a pretty good job of summarizing the performativity argument in an accessible way. show less

This book, which I unfortunately had to read twice, says that gender doesn't really exist; it is merely a social construction. If you don't know that already, you might give this book a skim, though it is really poorly written and often self-contradictory. However, if you understand that, and want to to move on in some direction, there's nothing here to grab onto. Just as an example of the the kind of morass this book leads you into: If there is no gender, than there is no such thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality, since those labels are applied to people based on the gender of their love object. On one level, I can go along with that. But here's the problem: I am attracted to humans with facial hair and penises and so are my gay show more male friends. But I'm perceived by the world as a heterosexual woman and can pursue my interests without societal approbation or interference. My gay friends can not. In Butler's world this has no meaning (except for an appreciation of the different gender performances each of us puts on). The book makes no acknowledgment of this oppression, nor does it provide a theoretical base to work from if you're going to do anything about it. show less