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Gender Trouble

Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

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Gender Trouble

By: Judith Butler
Narrated by: Emily Beresford
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One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past 50 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.

©2006 Routledge (P)2018 Tantor Gender Studies Philosophy Psychology & Mental Health Social Sciences
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I only read this book because I believe that he who knows only his own side knows little of that as well. So I didn't approach this work with the highest of expectations. Yet the vacuity of Butler's thought did surprise me. She basically just discusses what others have said about identity, sex, gender etc. and uses household names likes Lacan, Foucault, Adorno, Freud, Derrida, Kristeva, Beauvoir. Some of them she takes issues with, others she seem to align her with or she takes them as voices of authority. The entire discussion and her baroque panoply of concepts like the Law, , fallocentric, logocentric, incest prohibition, ontology etc. makes one think of scholastics who would discuss the trinity, the theodicy problem and many other unreal and non-existent entities and problems.
In the end I'm not convinced by this line of thinking, it's a quirkmire of bad, faulty, nebulous concepts that hinders one to see or understand what sex or gender might be.
I predict that in the future this line of thinking will be understood as an expression of academics with divergent, different or homosexual desires at the end of the 20. century who were in opposition to a bigoted culture, but I doubt that the conceptual framework will survive, For that it's too concocted, extravagant, unintelligible and unscientific. Yet in institutional frames it will probably be around for one or two generations more.

Conclusion: From politics to a parody of thinking

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