Gender Trouble
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ISBN 0-415-38955-0 | | |
Preceded by | Subjects of Desire | |
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Followed by | Bodies That Matter |
Part of a series on |
Feminist philosophy |
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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity[1][2] is a book by the post-structuralist gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler in which the author argues that gender is performative, meaning that it is maintained, created or perpetuated by iterative repetitions when speaking and interacting with each other.
Summary
Butler criticizes one of the central assumptions of
Examining the work of the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Butler explores the relationship between power and categories of sex and gender. For de Beauvoir, women constitute a lack against which men establish their identity; for Irigaray, this dialectic belongs to a "signifying economy" that excludes the representation of women altogether because it employs phallocentric language. Both assume that there exists a female "self-identical being" in need of representation, and their arguments hide the impossibility of "being" a gender at all. Butler argues instead that gender is performative: no identity exists behind the acts that supposedly "express" gender, and these acts constitute, rather than express, the illusion of the stable gender identity. If the appearance of “being” a gender is thus an effect of culturally influenced acts, then there exists no solid, universal gender: constituted through the practice of performance, the gender "woman" (like the gender "man") remains contingent and open to interpretation and "resignification". In this way, Butler provides an opening for subversive action. They call for people to trouble the categories of gender through performance.
Discussing the patriarchy, Butler notes that feminists have frequently made recourse to the supposed pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which to base a new, non-oppressive society. For this reason, accounts of the original transformation of sex into gender by means of the incest taboo have proven particularly useful to feminists. Butler revisits three of the most popular: the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism, in which the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women; Joan Riviere's psychoanalytic description of "womanliness as a masquerade" that hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for another woman; and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia, in which loss prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one, in which cathexis becomes identification.
Butler extends these accounts of gender identification in order to emphasize the productive or performative aspects of gender. With Lévi-Strauss, they suggest that incest is "a pervasive cultural fantasy" and that the presence of the taboo generates these desires; with Riviere, they state that mimicry and masquerade form the "essence" of gender; with Freud, they assert that "gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition",[1]: 63 and therefore that "same-sexed gender identification" depends on an unresolved (but simultaneously forgotten) homosexual cathexis (with the father, not the mother, of the Oedipal myth). For Butler, "heterosexual melancholy is culturally instituted as the price of stable gender identities",[1]: 70 and for heterosexuality to remain stable, it demands the notion of homosexuality, which remains prohibited but necessarily within the bounds of culture. Finally, they point again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and regulates approved heterosexuality and subversive homosexuality, neither of which exists before the law.
In response to the work of the psychoanalyst
Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed suicide when she was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals, Foucault writes of Barbin's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity."[1]: 94 Butler accuses Foucault of romanticism, claiming that his proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early days not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. They suggest finally that Foucault's surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional moment", or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he permitted himself only once to be interviewed.
Butler traces the feminist theorist
Butler questions the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy", a usual given without explanation: "How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?."
Butler attempts to construct a feminism (via the politics of jurido-
Publication history
Routledge first published Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990; other Routledge publications occurred in 1999, 2006 (Routledge Classics) and 2007.[2]
Reception
Gender Trouble was reviewed by Shane Phelan in Women & Politics.[5] The work has enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring a fanzine, Judy!.[6][7] Butler, in a preface to the second edition of the book, writes that they were surprised by the size of the book's audience and its eventual status as a founding text of queer theory.[2] Anthony Elliott writes that with the publication of Gender Trouble, Butler established themself at the forefront of feminism, women's studies, lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory. According to Elliott, the core idea expounded in Gender Trouble, that "gender is a kind of improvised performance, a form of theatricality that constitutes a sense of identity", came to be seen as "foundational to the project of queer theory and the advancing of dissident sexual practices during the 1990s."[8]: 150
On November 23, 2018, the playwright Jordan Tannahill read the entirety of Gender Trouble outside the Hungarian Parliament Building in protest of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's decision to revoke accreditation and funding for gender studies programs in the country.[9][10]
See also
- Feminist philosophy
- Poststructuralism
- Third-wave feminism
- Undoing Gender
Further reading
- Judith Butler: Live Theory by Vicki Kirby
- Butler, Judith (1993). "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York. Routledge. ISBN 9780415610155
Notes
- ^ Butler said, "Many people who were assigned 'female' at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms. ... *Judith Butler goes by she or they."[3]
- ^ " ' Which pronoun do I prefer?' Butler laughs ... . 'It is they', Butler says ... . It is the year 2020, and Butler outs theirself as 'they' - a truly historic moment." („ ‚Welches Pronomen bevorzuge ich?‘ Butler lachte .. . ‚Es ist they‘, sagt Butler ... . Wir haben das Jahr 2020 und Butler outet sich als ‚they‘ - ein wahrhaft historischer Moment.“)[4]
- ^ Butler uses she/her and they/them pronouns.[a] However, Butler prefers they/them pronouns.[b] This article uses they/them pronouns for consistency.
Citations
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Butler 1990.
- ^ a b c Butler 2007.
- ^ Ferber 2020.
- ^ Fischer 2020.
- ^ Phelan 1992.
- ^ MacFarquhar 1993.
- ^ Butler 1993.
- ^ Elliott 2002.
- ^ Bence 2018.
- ^ Levente 2018.
References
- Bence, Horváth (2018). "On Friday, a Canadian author read one of the best-known books of gender studies in front of Parliament for seven hours (Pénteken hét órán át olvasta fel a gender studies egyik legismertebb könyvét egy kanadai író a Parlament előtt)". 444 (in Hungarian).
- Butler, Judith (1990). Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415900425..
- Butler, Judith (November–December 1993). "Putting the Camp Back into Campus". Lingua Franca.
- Butler, Judith (2007). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1st ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-38955-6.
- Elliott, Anthony (2002). Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. Palgrave. p. 150. ISBN 0-333-91912-2.
- Ferber, Alona (22 September 2020). "Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in "anti-intellectual times"". New Statesman. Retrieved 2020-09-27.
- Fischer, Kathryn (13 July 2020). "The Pronoun is free from the Body - but it is not free from Gender (Gender und Grammatik: Das Pronomen ist frei vom Körper - aber es ist nicht frei vom Geschlecht)". Der Tagesspiegel Online (in German). Retrieved 24 December 2021.
- Levente, Szadai (2018). "Problematic gender: a Canadian writer protested in front of the Parliament against the termination of the study of social gender Mèrce (Problémás nem: kanadai író tiltakozott a Parlament előtt a társadalmi nemek tanulmányának a megszüntetése ellen Mérce)". Mérce (in Hungarian).
- MacFarquhar, Larissa (September–October 1993). "Putting the Camp Back into Campus". Lingua Franca.
- Phelan, Shane (1992). "Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy/Gender Trouble: Feminism and she Subversion of Identity/The Social Construction of Lesbianism". Journal of Women, Politics & Policy. 12 (1): 73–78. doi:10.1080/1554477X.1992.9970633. – via EBSCO's Academic Search Complete (subscription required)