Product Description

With intellectual reference points that include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray, this is one of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years and is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8766 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

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

From the Back Cover

Gender Trouble

Judith Butler

with an introduction by the author

"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

Thrilling and provocative, the book you hold in your hands is perhaps the essential work of contemporary feminist thought. Its intellectual reference points include Foucault and Freud, Wittig, Kristeva and Irigaray. Indeed, few other academic works have roused passions as much. 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.

Butler argues that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender. She starts by questioning the category 'woman': who does it include, and who decides who it includes? And she continues in this vein; ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’ are not biologically fixed but culturally presupposed. Best known however, yet also most often misinterpreted, is Butler’s concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.

Customer Reviews

Required Reading
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.

Powerful argument
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.

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 imagine it yourself. Imagine that you are looking through the window and all you see is trees, trees, snow, trees, snow, trees, a little house in the middle of nowhere, trees, trees.

Then you wander how many more miles you have left to cover and when someone asks you what the trip was like after the train stops you look at the person and say: Well, I've seen trees, trees, trees..

Reading this book has been a very similar experience - it's facts, facts, a question, facts, another question, facts, a lonely thought, facts, facts.. No conclusions whatsoever. After a while you begin to wander: What is the author trying to say? What is the purpose of this book?

It is possible that I simply have not been able to grasp the implicit purpose because I have not been thoroughly studying feminism. Though I still would love to know exactly what the author herself stands for and what she wants to achieve in her area of study.

Why doesn't she express any personal opinions? Why doesn't she tie all the facts together into conclusions? Why doesn't she say: "Here is what I think" and then tell us what she stands for. I think gender and homosexuality is indeed an area of debate and if the author is so reluctant to express her own opinions it leads me to believe that she spends most of her time digging facts instead of coming up with solutions and that she is doing it without truly putting her soul into it.

Then again, that's just my opinion..