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'Rereading this book, as well as reading it for the first time, reshapes the categories through which we experience and perform our lives and bodies. To be troubled in this way is an intellectual pleasure and a political necessity.' - Donna Haraway
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One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial.
Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
71 of 81 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a densely written but repeatedly rewarding study of the constructions of gender and sex as they relate to women, lesbians and gay men, and, to follow the logic of Butler's argument, all of us. This work shows not only the relativity of our cultural understanding of femininity but also the limits of our scientific understanding of female-ness. For feminists, Butler's book offers a much-needed examination of what exactly the female subject is and how woman is defined in (or by) our particular culture. Butler goes far beyond Foucault in examining sexuality as socially contructed and, in the process, offers valuable insights to (and critiques of) the writing and thinking of Beauvoir, Kristeva, Lacan, and Wittig. The book's one flaw is a turgid, sometimes redundant prose (i.e. phrases like "judical law" and "'he' [sic]") all too common in technical and philosophical writing, especially, alas, of the postmodernist variety. But once the reader survives the first quarter of the book, he [sic] will find Butler's observations not only accessible but fascinating and, for whatever it's worth, socially important.
52 of 61 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is a powerful argument that overthrows essentialist discourse in favour of gender as a performative entity. Whilst a seminal work, and in my opinion, a very important viewpoint capable of pushing the feminist movement on by lightyears, I feel that Butler's writing style does not suit the message she puts forward. For someone who's aim is to spread a message to the masses, she writes in an overly academic style. Although I appreciate that she may have needed to do this so that bodies under the influence of a partriachy may take her more seriously, it leaves this book only accesible to the highest academics. I am currently referencing this book in an argument put forward in my thesis for my masters degree and i am having great trouble understanding the language she uses. This is a brilliant book, but I can't help but feel that her language could be made a lot simpler.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Taking her lead from Lacan's famous "there is no such thing as woman" thought, in Gender Trouble Judith Butler goes a whole lot further; there's no such thing as gender at all. In prose that is unnecessarily convoluted, Butler claims that all of what we think are characteristics of gender are in fact performed social constructs, masks if you will, which must be destroyed through the deliberate performing of "subversive" roles. Butler thinks that performing such subversive roles will demonstrate that all roles are social performances.
To understand this suggestion properly, it is necessary to see it in its context within leftist intellectual history. The development and interbreeding of Cultural Marxism (particularly as developed in the Frankfurt School) and feminism as social critiques, saw a move away from essentialism towards the idea of human personality, especially that of woman, being merely a construct of male, capitalist forces. This allowed feminist separatists to advocate an historical conspiracy against woman and Marxists to propose a negative egalitarianism based on the human being's, presumed, tabula rasa state. The natural progression of these theories reaches its fulfilment in Gender Trouble and in that sense it is truly a seminal book.
The major problem is that none of it is objectively true. Butler's theory, and the politically motivated ideologies which preceded it, willfully ignores established scientific truths on the measureable, biological, relationship between sex-specific hormones and the personality, as well as psychological case studies which have indicated that gender-characteristics are hard-wired at an early stage.
What you find in these supposedly "feminist" pages then is not a text which honours woman but one which refuses to accept her existence. To do so may necessitate a change in politics which for Butler, as for many of her followers, is simply unthinkable. Tellingly, the book's driving force, the assertion that performing subversive roles in society is essential in bringing down patriarchy, seems more often driven by a hatred for Western concepts of social order than by a genuine attempt to understand the nature of woman.
My advice; read this if you want to analyse how absurd ideas become when false principles are taken to their fullest extent. Otherwise give Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson a read. It's nearly three times as long but much more fruitful work.
To understand this suggestion properly, it is necessary to see it in its context within leftist intellectual history. The development and interbreeding of Cultural Marxism (particularly as developed in the Frankfurt School) and feminism as social critiques, saw a move away from essentialism towards the idea of human personality, especially that of woman, being merely a construct of male, capitalist forces. This allowed feminist separatists to advocate an historical conspiracy against woman and Marxists to propose a negative egalitarianism based on the human being's, presumed, tabula rasa state. The natural progression of these theories reaches its fulfilment in Gender Trouble and in that sense it is truly a seminal book.
The major problem is that none of it is objectively true. Butler's theory, and the politically motivated ideologies which preceded it, willfully ignores established scientific truths on the measureable, biological, relationship between sex-specific hormones and the personality, as well as psychological case studies which have indicated that gender-characteristics are hard-wired at an early stage.
What you find in these supposedly "feminist" pages then is not a text which honours woman but one which refuses to accept her existence. To do so may necessitate a change in politics which for Butler, as for many of her followers, is simply unthinkable. Tellingly, the book's driving force, the assertion that performing subversive roles in society is essential in bringing down patriarchy, seems more often driven by a hatred for Western concepts of social order than by a genuine attempt to understand the nature of woman.
My advice; read this if you want to analyse how absurd ideas become when false principles are taken to their fullest extent. Otherwise give Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson a read. It's nearly three times as long but much more fruitful work.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
My Head Hurts
I read an excerpt from this and thought I'd find it useful and insightful. When it arrived I opened it up to find the text pretty impenetrable. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Ms. P. Stevens-Hoare
Judith The Obscure
If Occam's Razor were to be applied to Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble" her attempt "to facilitate a political convergence of feminism, gay and lesbian perspectives on gender and... Read more
Published on 24 Jan 2010 by Neutral
If you want a bag of facts, then you've come to the right place
Reading this book was like riding a train through Siberia. Now, I have never traveled transsiberian railway, but I can imagine what it looks like and I think you can just as easily... Read more
Published on 10 Jan 2009 by Martin Schröder
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