Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Thinking Gender S.) - Softcover

Butler, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415900433 ISBN 13: 9780415900430

Publisher: Routledge, 1990

Synopsis

Ever since feminist theory introduced the distinction between sex and gender, the question of what it means to be a woman has preoccupied feminist thought. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler questions whether it is possible to "be" a woman at all or, for that matter, any gender.

About this title

Review

'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

Synopsis

In this book, Butler examines the 'trouble' with unproblematized appeals to sex/gender identities. She argues that the foundational categories of feminist and gender discourse are actually effects of unexamined relations of power. In their place she calls for a politics in which identity concepts are destabilized, proliferated, and radically reformulated. She challenges a variety of psychological assumptions about what it means to be a person or a gender, and offers rereadings of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Freud, Gail Rubin, and Kristeva, and through a consideration of Wittig's work she provides a feminist supplement to Foucault.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0415900433
• ISBN 13: 9780415900430
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192